Innovative Arts Workshop Promotes Interdisciplinary Collaboration

For students interested in producing art, the Collaborative Art-Making Intensive, being offered August 16-18 at the Urban Arts Space, is a new workshop designed to expose undergraduates to interdisciplinary art-making early in their education. Twenty students, majoring in the visual and performing arts, will work in teams mentored by graduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences to complete a series of creative challenges that experiment with concepts such as language and text, space and place, and time and movement. The three-day intensive will culminate with an exhibition at the Urban Arts Space featuring the students’ final projects.

The program is offered through the Arts Initiative, in collaboration with the Arts Scholars Program, and lead by Kate Collins, PhD student in Arts Administration, Education and Policy and Tim Smith, graduating MFA Art student. “I know from my own experience that some of my most exciting and challenging art-making opportunities when I was an undergrad were when my friends and I instigated our own work and came together with other students across artistic disciplines,” said Collins. “It was really inspiring and I think these experiences really helped to expand my thinking about what it means to be an artist.”

The Collaborative Art-Making Intensive will allow students from different programs such as dance, music, theatre, design, and art the opportunity to connect and collaborate.

Collins, who believes the program will give budding artists a chance to expand their artist “toolkit”, is excited to help prepare students for the ever expanding and shifting arts world. “We really think it can be valuable to introduce this kind of work to undergraduate artists, so this is our pilot endeavor to see what we can make happen. It's really a bit of an experiment, an arts incubator.”

Marissa Pacheco