"Transferring to MCLA was one of the greatest decisions I ever made. Being able to learn from and connect with the faculty and staff equipped me with greater networking capabilities/skills and the opportunity to use them outside of the institution, preparing me for the road ahead. Taking part and engaging in different clubs and organizations on campus helped to shape and guide me for countless opportunities."
Brandon Pender ’07 Research Analyst, Office of State Rep. Daniel E. Bosley ’76
Creative Arts
FOUNDATIONS IN THE CREATIVE ARTS
Courses in the Creative Arts aim to foster our understanding of questions common to all the arts. Students will construct a basis on which to explore further both the broad purposes of all the arts as well as unique achievements of particular art forms.
Courses in Tier II concentrate on a small cluster of basic principles shared by all the arts, and students will work on understanding how each of the different arts make use of those fundamental ideas. The themes that structure the course are:
"representation"
-- how the arts symbolize something, whether that something is an object, an idea, a mood, or an event;
"evocation"
-- how the arts evoke responses in an audience, moving it to have an emotional response, adopt a new idea, make a change of heart or mind, to embrace a point of view it did not have prior to witnessing the work, to alter its identity;
"context"
-- how the arts imply a context, a world in which the audience (viewer, auditor, reader, etc.) will act. Every work of art always has at least two contexts: the context where it came into being and the context in which the audience "reads" it.
Each course will use its own examples from the various arts for each of those three rubrics. For example, a course might scrutinize a particular artistic movement that advances a specific theory of representation, like "modernism" or "impressionism," or it might examine the way that particular art (such as dance or film) shapes the identity of its audience by explicating an abstract ideas or reflecting social reality.
All courses in the Creative Arts share a common set of goals:
Study classic works of the human imagination.
Critically analyze creative works from the viewpoints of form, style, and meaning.
Understand how and by whom aesthetic value judgements have been made historically.
Examine the nature of imaginative and initiative thinking.
Consider the relationship between problem solving and creativity
Explore the interaction of art and society.
Develop creative and expressive abilities in order to understand the qualities that shape an artist's work.
