Creative Placemaking
Good morning. While we’re all wondering where summer went, I’m thrilled it’s officially fall and the start of my junior year as Chancellor. Our students and faculty are back in full swing for another exciting year of learning, training, rehearsals, productions, concerts and screenings, and I can’t wait to see all that they achieve.
Today, there are actually more students on campus than ever before in our history! I’m proud to announce we’ve hit a record enrollment of 1305 students! We began the year with two new MFA programs in Film, 19 new faculty members and a new dean of the School of Music, the very talented Brian Cole. Even in this kinetic environment, there’s a palpable sense of fresh energy, and I thrive on it.
We have many recent accomplishments to celebrate. Most recently, Paul Tazewell, the prodigiously talented costume designer who graduated from Design and Production’s undergraduate program, picked up an Emmy Award for NBC’s “The Wiz Live.” That statue went on the shelf next to the Tony Award he picked up in June for a little show you may have heard of called Hamilton.
And speaking of the industry’s most prestigious awards, alumni Gillian Murphy and Camille Brown are nominated for Bessie Awards, the equivalent of a Tony, for professional dancers. We have our fingers crossed until the results are announced on October 18.
Summer is the season for rankings, and among many magazines, websites and blogs that have included UNCSA, we were ranked by two significant publications. In July, Money Magazine ranked UNCSA number 60 on its list of 100 best colleges in the country, and selected us as one of four schools to feature in video profiles produced and distributed by Time Inc. We were the highest ranked art school and one of only five North Carolina institutions to make the top 100. Our Schools of Drama and Filmmaking placed in The Hollywood Reporter’s respective top undergraduate rankings, School of Drama securing the 18th spot for Best Drama Programs in the world, and Filmmaking taking the 14th spot for the list of 25 Best Film Schools in the country.
We continue to receive accolades for our new website, which won a silver award in the institutional website category from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. Of 77 entries, there were two gold awards and two additional silver awards. Quite a nice recognition for our windows to the world.
And just last week, our friends at the Kenan Institute hosted the Cross-Currents conference, which brought national leaders in the visual and performing arts, philanthropy, education, and civic planning together to our campus for cross-disciplinary seminars, workshops, and informal brainstorms to share effective artistic strategies for community growth. I was asked to give the closing keynote address, and for my topic, I chose a subject that has been a passion of mine since I arrived here: creative placemaking and how it will help this school more fully realize its mission to serve and enrich the cultural and economic prosperity of North Carolina. I passionately believe that we must begin now, here in Winston-Salem, and in our own neighborhood. I’d like to share with all of you parts of that address, which I began by referencing one of the original creative placemakers, Frederick Law Olmsted.
In his day, Olmsted was a farmer, a reporter, a government administrator, and a conservationist. He wrote groundbreaking journalism that illuminated the misery of slavery; he oversaw a massive humanitarian effort during the Civil War; and he galvanized public opinion in support of wilderness protection, helping preserve vast tracts of public land for future generations.
Yet, for all of that, he’s best remembered today for a radical act of imagination: Central Park, and the birth of landscape architecture as a true art form. In helping create dozens of public parks from Buffalo, New York, to San Francisco, California, Olmsted defined many of the civic ideals we take for granted today — public space as vital for wellbeing; access to green space as a basic measure of urban health; and the very idea that artistry and design should be applied to human landscapes.
Olmsted wrote near the end of his career: “I have raised my calling from the rank of a trade, even a handicraft, to that of a liberal profession — an art, an art of design.”
He was right. Placemaking, in its highest forms, is absolutely the work of artists.
It is the discipline of seeing our cities and our neighborhoods as a canvas, and viewing them as a medium that can be transformed through effort and intention. Space, like art, informs behavior — it can encourage or warn us away, inspire or dispirit us, enrich or drain us. It all depends on our collective imagination and our will to carry it out.
Political scientists call this efficacy, and it’s an excellent measure of civic and social health. When we believe in our own capacity to influence events, with faith that our voices will be heard, we show up. We invest. We act as devoted citizens.
I’m here today to argue for the devoted citizenship of this institution, to reimagine the role of the School of the Arts in this community and in North Carolina.
I trained as an architect, a discipline that leans heavily on imagination. It marries creativity with hard skills and physical science to decide what’s possible in a given space with a particular set of materials, and how best to achieve a specific function. Over time, architecture becomes a way of seeing the world — of looking at a forsaken lot and seeing the range of possibilities unfold almost subconsciously. Yet, one of the greatest challenges for both artists and policymakers is communicating that sense of possibility to others.
In my role as the editor in chief of several national lifestyle magazines, including Southern Living, my success depended on projecting possibility outward to millions of consumers—to help them imagine how places and spaces could be transformed. It was, quite literally, helping make dreams come true. If that sounds like a grand mission for a lifestyle magazine — it is!
But there’s a natural hunger for that kind of transformational thinking. It’s what keeps so many design and fashion magazines afloat, and what drives the entire programming of HGTV. We all have dreams for the spaces around us, and we’re working to find the right language to articulate and realize them.
What I love so much about serving as Chancellor at the School of the Arts is the opportunity — the urgency — of scaling those dreams to a much broader audience. I’m not designing something for a single client, or hoping to inspire an individual reader’s decisions about how to live. My job as Chancellor is to embolden my campus, my city, and my state with a real sense of imagination about the world and the way we shape it. This is the biggest canvas I’ve ever faced, and it’s thrilling.
A public arts conservatory is a fascinating and contradictory thing. The whole point of a conservatory, of course, is to provide a space apart, with the freedom to concentrate and achieve mastery. In a contemporary culture so heavily weighted toward distraction and ephemera, we work hard to give students the chance to deeply immerse in their work.
At the same time, a public institution has to face outward. We have a moral and civic imperative to engage fully in the life of the state, and it must begin with the community around us. As UNC President Bill Friday used to regularly remind us, millions of North Carolinians give their hard-earned money to support our work. They have a profound claim upon our time and our care.
We do a fantastic job of recruiting promising artists and training them, developing a pool of talent that is the envy of any state. But in order to fulfill our mission, we have to remember the creative energy — not to mention the greater joy — that comes from embracing our part in building North Carolina’s culture and economy.
We’re long past the point of seeing art and culture as a feel-good supplement to the “real” economy, or thinking of it as mere decoration for the urban landscape. Artistic and cultural goods and services contribute more than $700 billion each year to the American economy, which is more than the construction industry. The value of our urban spaces — not just in in dollars, but in civic identity and quality of life — is intimately linked to art.
Anyone who doubts the impact of placemaking should try booking a hotel room in Austin during South by Southwest, take a stroll through Asheville’s River Arts District, or look to the once-sleepy city of Savannah, where the Savannah College of Art and Design worked diligently with residents and community boards to renovate and repurpose neglected properties.
The School of the Arts needs to be a voice for that kind of artistic transformation and civic vision. To claim leadership for North Carolina’s creative economy, we must first be leaders in our local economy. To proclaim the value of artistic uplift to the whole state, we must demonstrate its application toward the streets and neighborhoods around our own campus. To celebrate art and creativity as engines of civic well-being, we have to make it work for our own neighbors.
For much too long, our inward focus has isolated us. We’ve assumed our students are too busy to venture off-campus, so it didn’t matter if there were shops and restaurants and parks and cafes within walking distance. UNCSA worked just fine as self-contained utopia, the thinking went, so the texture of the streets around us was irrelevant.
Over time, that attitude led to understandable but short-sighted decisions, like having the School acquire run-down properties on our bordering streets as a safety measure, without a plan or the resources to make use of them. For quite some time, we’ve owned a handful of dilapidated old houses that stand dormant and lifeless, creating an absurd façade for a school that is defined by motion and reinvention. Unwittingly, we created an ideological and physical barrier that blocks us from becoming a real part of our own neighborhood, and in turn, held the neighborhood back.
All of that stands in perfect opposition to what we preach for our students. As young artists, they’re told to look outward, to seek inspiration everywhere. It’s not good for them to learn in a public institution that looks and feels like a castle keep. It’s not good for recruitment and growth, nor for neighbors or our city.
Across the country, universities are embracing the role of civic incubators and change agents. The image of the isolated ivory tower is giving way to a much more porous, much more vibrant model of academic and cultural life. The School of the Arts can put a unique spin on that kind of engagement, creating a model that works for our rather singular kind of institution.
Art is supposed to push against boundaries. It is supposed to bridge what is divided, communicate across the void, close the distance between people and cultures.
And the School of the Arts can do that in Winston-Salem. I want our campus to be joyfully open to the neighborhoods around us, and for our students to engage in the life of their city as well as their campus. The neighborhood around us is changing in fascinating ways, with a generational, cultural, racial, and economic mix that offers a real chance for vibrant rebirth. A history of exclusion and redlining, of industrial decline and urban neglect, has given way to a real sense of possibility.
We can seize this moment. The School of the Arts should emerge as the leading force for an artistic corridor that runs from the southern part of Winston-Salem all the way into downtown. The Stevens Center has already become an anchor for artistic community and helped lead the transformation of downtown during the urban revitalization of the 1980s. But so much untapped potential remains. We can be the catalyst that connects the creative and cultural hubs already emerging in our city, reinforcing Winston-Salem’s claim and official tagline as The City of Arts and Innovation.
The work that Wake Forest has done in building the Innovation Quarter is an inspiration, an example of how a public-minded institution can rally the energy of an entire community. That’s what we have to do in our own backyard, in concert with the people who live alongside us.
We could also look to the efforts Duke University has led in Durham. There, the university recognized the innate value of industrial spaces long forgotten, seeing historic buildings as an inspiring space for the creative economy rather than an obstacle to cheaper development. Instead of bulldozing their civic heritage, Duke and its partners were able to re-energize those storied spaces with new purpose. That took imagination, far-sighted investment, and close collaboration with residents. It also blurred the boundaries between campus and the broader community, which is exactly what we hope to accomplish here.
One of the core principles of Placemaking Chicago, a group that organizes community revitalization efforts in the Windy City, is to “start with the petunias.” It’s their way of recognizing that small steps matter when you’re talking about changing the perception of a place, and I wholeheartedly agree.
The School of the Arts is not a big university. We’re not sitting on a huge endowment, not flush with tuition revenue, nor expecting a sudden expansion of state funding. We are a public conservatory, fighting doggedly to keep a world-class arts education within reach for all of our students.
But we are energetic and creative people. And we can start with the petunias. That could mean designing and building a series of gardens and orchards around the edges of campus, where students and the broader community can work alongside one another. We could make pop-up galleries and miniature libraries. We could add sculpture and color in a way that reminds residents and visitors of the creative energy centered in this part of town.
We could lease space to community arts organizations, and reach out to our civic-minded alumni to turn some of our neighborhood properties into guest housing for artists-in-residence. In both cases, we’d be taking dormant space and giving it to people with the mandate for connecting the campus to the community.
At the same time, we can forge partnerships to help renew focus on the Gateway, just to the north of the University. We can work alongside entrepreneurs seeking to expand their footprint in this neighborhood with innovative projects that reanimate existing spaces. I think there’s a great deal more we can do — alongside the city, county, and with community partners — to make this area a true hub of Winston-Salem’s creative economy.
The Gateway should become our link to the burgeoning downtown district, a bridge that draws people, commerce and civic energy into the south of Winston-Salem, into the neighborhoods around campus. As an architect, I am energized by the potential along South Main Street, where we have the chance to reclaim and revitalize light industrial buildings with soul and character that have sat underused for far too long.
Our students should have a reason to walk beyond the front gate of our campus, to have places to eat, study, shop and relax alongside the people who share their neighborhood. The fantastic heritage of the campus’ community should be captured in the warehouses and storefronts, preserved in the wooden beams and the casement windows — all imbued with new life.
We should make our outreach programs more fully a part of the fabric of this city, enabling our Community Dance and Music Schools to be more accessible, offering new space to expand summer programs, and bringing student performances directly to our neighbors. Our work will be more visible, better known to the people around us, and more inviting to those who might never have considered a visit to campus.
I believe our community is ready for that kind of vision, and UNCSA can lead the way. We can bring the energy and clarity, seeking partners who have shown a commitment to this kind of work. We are looking for organizations that take an expansive view of civic health — places like the Ford Foundation, Art Place, and the Kresge Foundation —to help make Winston-Salem a showcase for the arts as a unifying force in public life.
This moment of opportunity might never have come without the diligent work of the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts. The Institute’s powerful mission to “Build Creative Community” has taken root in initiatives like the Community Innovation Lab, which calls on artists to develop novel, creative way to address major social challenges. Artist Corps sends young creative minds into high-need schools to show how music, movement, acting, sculpting and all manner of artistic work can deepen learning and expand a sense of community. Our partnerships with the Institute also brings a much-needed flexibility — the capacity to take an idea and run with it, which can be a challenge for big, public institutions. My first neighborhood walk-around at UNCSA became known in my mind as a grim march of ‘no’, a tour of all the legal and logistical obstacles we’d face in trying to make good on the institution’s promise of engagement with the local community. What the Kenan Institute offers is a sunny stroll of ‘yes,’ a way of marrying UNCSA’s public spirit with the freedom and independence of a nonprofit agency.
Olmsted’s beloved Central Park, still very much a public space and governed by a public agency, relies on the energy and resources of private partners. Foundations can act as venture capitalists, think tanks, and ambassadors for public institutions, filling in the gaps between the public and private sectors. With focused attention and the capacity for a little risk-taking, the Kenan Institute has already been an invaluable partner in helping us think big about the School of the Arts’ role in this city.
And big thinking is exactly what we need. If imagination is a moral act, then all of us have a duty to think more like artists. We are called to envision the world as it could be, as we would hope it to be, and to make that vision real. I’m proud to devote the School of the Arts to that calling, as well. Winston-Salem has always been our city; I’m excited to make it more fully our home.
UNCSA Board of Trustees address
September 23, 2016