The University of Michigan announced on Jan. 25 that $20 million would be allocated to the U-M Arts Initiative over the next five years. The initiative was established in 2019 by former University President Mark Schlissel and aims to promote creativity on campus and encourage public engagement with the arts.
Christopher Audain, managing director of the Arts Initiative, wrote in an email to The Michigan Daily that the allocated funds will be used to support student organizations centered around the arts along with student art research and other independent creative endeavors. Collaborative faculty projects in the art field may all receive some of the funding.
“It is imperative that the funds directly benefit students in and outside of the classroom,” Audain said. “Broadly, we hope to develop better access for non-arts majors to take arts classes … and deepen partnerships with the community and the public, making U-M an even more open and welcoming place for the general public.”
In a press release on Jan. 25, University President Santa Ono wrote that the initiative signifies the University’s commitment to the arts and explores how art intersects with other disciplines on campus including sustainability studies and the natural sciences.
“We can be sure that through this Initiative, we will be increasing imagination, which is fundamental to learning and discovery,” Ono wrote. “Creativity and openness of the arts, coupled with the rigor of the sciences, can provide the inspiration and insights needed to find solutions for the world’s greatest challenges.”
During its three year start-up phase starting in January 2020, the Arts Initiative executive committee conducted an arts asset mapping project, which created a catalog of the University’s arts landscape by gathering data about the arts organizations, performances and research on campus. The Committee was co-chaired by Jonathan Massey, dean of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and Christina Olsen, director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Massey told The Daily the mapping project established that the University currently offers a wide variety of visiting artist programs and opportunities, but found the University needs to do a better job of drawing awareness to these opportunities within the U-M community and broader public.
“There’s very little collective knowledge about this big landscape of activities and people and possibilities,” Massey said. “We realized that the Arts Initiative can gather information and share it so that people can … connect with the visiting artists and connect visitors to our creative community.”
Audain said the project revealed the University’s lack of collaborative art spaces for students.
“Some main takeaways from the start-up phase is that students need more space for engaging in the arts,” Audain said. “There is strong demand across campus for more collaborative arts making space. Also, there are a number of barriers for non-arts majors to take classes outside of the major.”
The Arts Initiative also launched the Culture Corps during their start-up phase, a cohort of undergraduate students who take a two credit mini-course together during the winter semester and then are placed in various summer paid internships at arts and culture organizations throughout Southeast Michigan.
Engineering junior Caitlin Henning was a part of the inaugural class of the Culture Corps in 2022 and she worked as a summer intern at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History located in Detroit.
“I study computer science, but I’ve always wanted to work with the arts,” Henning said. “My favorite part about working with the museum as a technical intern was that it wasn’t just doing the technical job. They would bring me in to just talk about the exhibits at the museum or the design of the mailing letters that they were sending out, stuff that I didn’t really have experience in, but they taught me and involved me (in).”
The Arts Initiative also launched Creators on Campus, a collection of projects that aimed to make the University a major destination for emerging and established artists. The Creators on Campus projects included A Travel Guide for Talking Hearts which was a summer-long collaboration between regional artists, U-M students and internationally-acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 2021.
Overall, Massey said the Creators on Campus initiative aimed to promote collaborative efforts between U-M artists and visiting artists.
“We have a big vibrant community of creators here at University of Michigan across our three campuses,” Massey said. “Creators on Campus is a way of describing a kind of bundle of supports and programs that we aim to develop that will support that lively ecosystem, enabling more University of Michigan artists and creators to engage with the most dynamic people in the field, and ideally, to co-create with them.”
The Arts Initiative and the University of Michigan Museum of Art are planning an LSA theme semester — a semester-long, multi-disciplinary immersion program combining coursework with off-campus exhibits and performances — titled ‘Arts and Resistance’ for Fall 2023.
With the Arts Initiative’s support, indigenous artist Cannupa Hanska Luger will create a site-specific installation at the UMMA, Olsen said, and Luger will be working with students and indigenous communities to create an exhibit that examines the UMMA’s history through the lenses of sovereignty, colonialism and institutions. The installation is set to open in Fall 2023.
“It’s a very public facing project that will be one of the centerpieces of Arts and Resistance,” Olsen said. “A lot of the project that he is doing here at UMMA is all about … the theft of the original ‘gift’ of land to the University and what that has meant to Michigan indigenous communities, so being honest about that and reckoning with that, and figuring out how we make amends.”
According to Audain, the Arts Initiative is committed to looking for ways to advance racial justice through creative endeavors by bringing in artists to campus whose work addresses those issues.
“This is done by supporting artists and scholars of all backgrounds and creating opportunities for support that reflect the diversity of the region and community,” Audain said. “We have an opportunity to learn from artists and their creative vision, so bringing in artists whose work addresses the historic and contemporary social justice issue will help us learn how to improve over our current (inequities).”
Audain said participating in the arts can be just as valuable for students who are not pursuing a career in the field and the Arts Initiative will use their recent grant to try to provide more opportunities for that to happen.
“The arts are imperative to a well-rounded education, but even more so for a meaningful life,” Audain said. “Too often, only those who come from wealthy families are able to pursue a career as an artist … Students who choose to major in economics, biology, mathematics or sociology deserve to participate in the arts and explore artmaking.”
Olsen expressed similar sentiments and said the initiative makes it clear that the University values the arts just as much as other disciplines.
“I think that we confuse the fact that … you can’t make as good a living in the arts as you can in medicine and engineering, and that’s because of our culture right now,” Olsen said. “But it’s important not to confuse that with the arts’ value, because they have tremendous value. There’s a huge, huge number of people who feel like the arts are why they wake up in the morning, and I think that’s vitally important.”
Daily Staff Reporter Astrid Code can be reached at astridc@umich.edu.