When the Hopkins Center opened 50 years ago, it was at the cutting edge of the American conversation about art. Instead of making space for a single discipline say, visual arts or music architect Walter Harrison designed the Hopkins Center to be a collaborative working space where various art forms would coexist and where students from all corners of campus would come through the building to check their mailboxes.
This mixed-use programming and decades of performances and exhibitions helped Dartmouth establish itself as a regional artistic hub. With the opening of the new Black Family Visual Arts Center and the announcement of the much-celebrated "Year of the Arts," Dartmouth is once again at a critical juncture in terms of its artistic future and impact.
Although I laud the College for its public commitment to celebrating and supporting the arts through the ongoing Year of the Arts program, I am a bit wary of this endeavor. Firstly, the Year of the Arts is, in my mind, a superior marketing effort to unite a series of programs, talks and guests who already come to Dartmouth most years. While the College should not be criticized for improving its promotion of these programs in a unified way, it also should not be lauded for finally giving the arts the institutional attention it deserves.
Furthermore, the premise of a "year of art" establishes a finite time limit on programming that should be continued beyond this year. Instead of confining this year's visitors and programs to a single Year of the Arts, the College should use this year to set a precedent for the way the arts are approached at Dartmouth.
Ultimately, the most important change that the Year of the Arts can bring to this community has nothing to do with a single performer, a beautiful building or an inspiring exhibit. For the Year of the Arts to have the impact the Hopkins Center did when it was first built, we need to broaden our lens from a year of celebrating art to a year of integrating art into the larger curriculum at the institution. In her message to students this summer, Interim College President Carol Folt wrote that the Year of the Arts would not be limited to the traditional arts disciplines of art history, studio art, film and media studies, music and theater. Instead, she announced that "more than a dozen new interdisciplinary courses" would allow "the arts [to] be integrated into the course curriculum this year to a record degree."
This interdisciplinary integration of the arts is the only way that the Year of the Arts will be able to address the enduring marginalization of the arts at Dartmouth. Right now, the arts community at Dartmouth is small and isolated; the same students and faculty attend the same series of lectures, exhibits and talks each year. Professors and students in other disciplines malign the arts as more frivolous and less rigorous than other more scientific or quantitative disciplines.
Art schools like the Rhode Island School of Design are demanding a national change in our approach to arts education. While President Barack Obama called for more funding for science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses, leaders at RISD and other arts organizations stepped up do demand the addition of art to this list, which would change the acronym from STEM to STEAM. With the belief that the arts and sciences are a natural pairing, these schools are challenging us to rethink how the arts can inform and augment other disciplines.
The iterative processes and non-linear thinking demanded by the arts encourage a type of creativity that regimented problem sets and multiple-choice tests cannot cultivate. The environment of the studio enables students to make mistakes, physically immerse themselves in their work and prototype through ideas. Although these are skills that are particularly useful in studio practice, they are applicable to any area centered on innovation and thinking about old problems in new ways.
Dartmouth is well-intentioned with its current plans for the Year of the Arts, but the school is not breaking new ground by creating a year of programming for a small subset of the community. If Dartmouth can advocate for the arts as a complement, rather than a threat or alternative, to more traditional science and social science disciplines, the school can place itself at the forefront of the national conversation on 21st-century arts education, just as the Hopkins Center established Dartmouth's art program in the 20th century.