Dean’s Insider: Gatherings to talk about our past, present and future impact
Dear Friends,
As our galleries and performance spaces have opened in full again, we’ve also begun to gather larger groups in-person this fall. In the College of Fine Arts, we had three significant gatherings last month that invited stakeholders together to think about our past, present and future. After two years of hybrid and virtual meetings, it was a joy to host a large group each week this past month.
Our Fine Arts Advisory Council arrived for our fall meeting in October, and we used it as an opportunity to engage our stakeholders on our college’s upcoming strategic planning process. We asked our members about what brought them to our college, what’s kept them engaged with the council through the years and what they dream about for the future of the practice, education and research in the arts.
The Performance as Public Practice program in the Department of Theatre and Dance marked its 20th anniversary this fall by inviting former faculty members and alumni who remain engaged and connected to the College of Fine Arts, even as their careers have taken them elsewhere. As the first Ph.D. recipient in the program myself, I was honored to be part of these festivities and to honor the achievements of this program with my colleagues and fellow alumni. Alongside our current faculty and students, we celebrated the incredible impact the program has advanced to this field.
We held our first Latinx Arts Summit in the college, as we convened UT faculty and alumni alongside distinguished stakeholders from across the country who are doing impactful work around Latinx arts locally, nationally and internationally. We had important conversations about the ways in which our college and UT have been so central to the advancement of Latinx arts and what we can to do to continue advancing such an impact, especially with UT’s status as a Hispanic-Serving Institution.
I’m so invigorated by these conversations. Each of these three gatherings included story sharing as participants assessed what we’ve achieved already and what we can do moving forward. One of the key attributes of the arts is capacity for convocation—creating common spaces for engagement and respectful debate. I look forward to continuing these important conversations as we launch our strategic planning process for the college and prepare to translate our shared values and aspirations for the transformational work of the arts into an actionable set of guiding principles for our collective work ahead.
Sincerely,
Ramón H. Rivera-Servera Dean, College of Fine Arts
