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Changes proposed for support of arts
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
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Significant changes in the way UB funds and supports historical and emerging strengths in the creative and performing arts are proposed by a white paper prepared by faculty and staff for the UB 2020 strategic strength "Artistic Expression and Performing Arts."
The highly detailed paper calls for the university to create new opportunities for the making of art and for its presentation on campus and in the region, according to David Felder, Birge-Cary Chair in Composition in the Department of Music and chair of the group that wrote the white paper.
The white paper was presented in November to the deans and the UB 2020 Academic Planning Committee. More recently, a resource-and-hiring plan based on the white paper was submitted to the UB 2020 Coordinating Committee and is being forwarded to Satish K. Tripathi, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.
The paper's recommendations include an annual investment through 2009 to support a variety of arts initiatives described in the paper, which also details their likely benefits to UB and the community.
Among the committee's recommendations are establishment of two "signature centers" and a funding infrastructure to support, extend and enhance specific artistic fields, particularly those for which UB is known, as well as for emerging strengths.
The centers called for are the Center for Excellence in Visual and Literary Arts through Digital Technology, and the Center for 21st Century Music. Both are grounded in traditional areas of significant accomplishment at UB.
The authors call for a multi-pronged approach that includes greater support for "neglected" departments; new faculty and initiatives in important disciplinary areas like the moving image, film studies, and film and performance; and funding for faculty research and creative activity within and across all of the disciplines discussed in the report.
For example, they request support for new research in robotics, virtual reality and artificial intelligence technologies now employed in several departments.
Attention also is paid to improved accommodations for the Special Collections of the UB Libraries, and the application of new technologies in that area, which will, the authors say, make some of the university's most precious holdings visible and useful to scholars around the world, again enhancing UB's reputation.
"The UB Poetry Collection has already undertaken a series of successful projects that have demonstrated the enormous potential that can result from the digitization and online access of our collections," says Michael Basinski, curator of the UB Libraries' Poetry Collection and a member of the committee.
The paper proposes strengthening support to encourage new initiatives in the literary and performing arts, and for visual artists working in the fields of art and architecture.
"A great public research university must support artistic expression... Like sciences and professions, arts speak in a specialized language...to the deepest human realities and the most complex human emotions—issues of death, love, pain and paradox—in a way that is primarily expressive, rather than critical," the white paper declares.
"...(Art) is an exploration of life and culture, a marker and record of artistic understanding," it adds. "Fragile and enduring, it speaks of human desire and despair as no other knowledge does."
In the past, the white paper says, "arts development at UB has been deterred by inadequate university funding and grants for artistic research, intermittent and uncoordinated hiring within and across disciplines, little attention to the active creative aspects of practicing artists' work, poor communication across disciplines, and aging and inadequate facilities for the UB Libraries' valuable and famous special collections." It adds that the "sheer size of the College of Arts and Sciences has marginalized the expressive arts across the board."
"We propose the establishment of new university grants with which to commission projects by faculty artists and the development of the infrastructure—faculty, technical equipment and staff—needed to support new work that emerges from the realization of proposals cited in the paper," Felder says.
"We also propose new arts residencies to bring the best artists in our established and emerging arts fields to campus where they can teach, present or perform their work," Felder says, adding that such residencies are among the things that made UB's international reputation in the arts in the first place.
The paper also calls for a "re-shaping" of the UB physical plant by using many different facilities for the creation, presentation and performance of work in visual arts, architecture, film, virtual reality, music, theater and dance.
The authors describe an investment plan to develop a central subvention fund for the arts and a strategic UB/Arts development plan, and ask that in the future, faculty artists and architects have serious input into university-wide planning for refurbishment, landscape design and new construction design on campus.
"If our recommendations are accepted," Felder says, "I think we can expect new disciplinary strengths to emerge at the forefront of several artistic fields and for cross-disciplinary strengths to become increasingly evident.
"This greatly increased activity and excellence in the arts will benefit the university, the artists and students, and audiences throughout the region."
Various UB departments, schools and divisions were represented on the planning committee. The University Libraries were represented by Basinski; Carol Ann Fabian, director, Educational Technology Center; and Austin Booth, director of collections, Arts and Sciences Libraries. The School of Architecture and Planning was represented by Frank Fantauzzi, associate professor, Department of Architecture.
The College of Arts and Sciences was represented by Felder; Stephen Manes, Ziegele Professor in Piano Performance and chair, Department of Music; Robert Knopf, professor and chair, Department of Theatre and Dance; Elliott Caplan, professor and director of the Center for the Moving Image, Department of Media Study; and Diane Christian, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor, Department of English.