BEACON 2030 Your guide to supporting CFA
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CONTENTS 4
A BEACON FOR THE ARTS
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A VIBRANT ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE
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RESEARCH THAT MATTERS
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DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION
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COMMUNITY: BIG YET SMALL
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GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT
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BEACON 2030
Lighting the way to a creative future
Inspired teaching, inspiring learning
Incubating the art of tomorrow
Ensuring the arts are open to all
Building bridges across BU, Boston, and beyond
Connecting with the wider world
A BEACON FOR THE ARTS Lighting the way to a creative future
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With your help, we will position CFA as a recognized national leader in the fine and performing arts, center it on the BU campus as a hub of arts and research activity, and engage our alumni with lively regional networks. We can’t wait to create this future.” Harvey Young Dean Boston University College of Fine Arts
At Boston University College of Fine Arts (CFA), we prepare artists to embrace the rewards and challenges of the creative life.
responsive to the world—exactly what today’s society requires. This is a grand vision, but it is one we know we can realize with your help.
Guided by BU 2030, Boston University’s strategic plan for the next decade, we have built our college’s own plan around five pillars:
Our three schools—Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts—share one artistic home, all embedded at the heart of a great private research university. That unique combination equips our graduates to lead the way as 21st-century creators, equipped with the practical skills and imaginative moxie to build a better world.
To that end, we are pleased to share with you this outline of the bold initiatives that will bring CFA’s future into focus. Our plans will help us prepare all of our students for a richly creative life, whether they pursue a career in the fine arts or apply the skills they learn here to a different field. No matter what paths our graduates choose, they benefit from the perspectives and skills that an education in the arts provides.
• A vibrant academic
Artistic thinking is multidimensional, grounded in both experience and imagination, and
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experience Research that matters Diversity, equity, and inclusion Community: big yet small Global engagement
We hope you will join us on this inspiring journey, and we invite you to read on to learn how you can help create the future. Thank you for your support of CFA.
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A VIBRANT ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE Inspired teaching, inspiring learning
As you know, the arts ceaselessly evolve and change—sometimes at a dizzying pace. At CFA, we know that too. That’s why we constantly seek to infuse our teaching and learning with new ideas, new resources, and new ways of experiencing the arts and the world. Our initiatives in this area are threefold. First, we are already moving to build the 21st-century curriculum by updating the canon with an eye toward diversity and inclusion, creating learning studios with cutting-edge technology, and developing new graduate and undergraduate degree programs. These include an MFA in Visual Narrative, as well as others now in development. We also want to recruit and retain outstanding faculty with endowed professorships,
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a mentoring program for junior faculty, increased support for arts research, and awards to recognize outstanding teaching. Finally, we seek to reinvent the student experience—both while students are with us and when they graduate—by strengthening the sense of community, with a dedicated gathering space; bringing visiting artists to campus, to help students see the many ways of living in the arts; and providing more resources for their professional development, with dedicated professional advising and an arts-focused career development center that will bolster the more general support from BU’s central career offices. To accomplish these ambitious goals, we welcome your support.
The levels for some giving opportunities are set by the University, while others depend on the size and scope of the work you choose to support.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Create a new endowed professorship ($5 million) or endow an existing one ($3 million)
• Endow a career development professorship for junior faculty ($2 million)
• Support new degree programs • Name a CFA lecture series • Endow an award for outstanding teaching
• Sponsor a lecture series or an artist in residence
• Support technology upgrades— recording equipment, cameras, and the like—or instrument maintenance and replacement, particularly for pianos
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WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Sponsor Arts|Lab@Med Campus or another collaborative research project • Choose a research center to support
• Sponsor a research seminar or symposium • Support the creation of new works
• Fund a faculty member’s research project • Support WFT, BUTI, STI, or VASI
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You already know that CFA lives at the heart of a great research institution: Boston University. But you may not be aware of all the research that occurs in the college itself—and all the new artsrelated research we hope to support in the coming years. CFA is BU’s hub of arts research and innovation. We plan to build meaningful partnerships with colleagues across the University, sparking creativity and serious inquiry within CFA, but also anywhere from the College of Engineering to the Questrom School of Business to the new Center for Computing & Data Sciences. One such partnership, with the BU School of Medicine, already brings music to surgical units, art supplies to the pediatric ward, poetry to chemo sessions, and more, all under the aegis of Arts|Lab @Med Campus.
We know we can do much more. Within CFA itself, multiple specialized research centers carry out essential work in their fields. The Center for Beethoven Research, to name one, is the only center of its kind on the East Coast. With concerts, symposiums, and distinguished lectures by visiting experts, the center advances Beethoven scholarship in the United States while also collaborating with related centers around the world. Of course, research in the arts can look different from that in more quantitative fields. Often, it comes in the form of new works: innovations that drive a medium or genre forward, opening new avenues to explore. For that reason, investing in and commissioning new works is an important part of our research strategy.
So too is the expansion of the “learning labs” we already provide in youth arts education: Wheelock Family Theatre (WFT) and Summer Theatre Institute (STI), the Boston University Tanglewood Institute (BUTI), and the Visual Arts Summer Institute (VASI). These programs not only benefit the students who participate, but also offer rich opportunities for developing new pedagogical strategies in their respective disciplines. For this reason, we consider them part of our research initiatives; they also help open doors for students from underrepresented groups.
RESEARCH THAT MATTERS Incubating the art of tomorrow
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DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION Ensuring the arts are open to all
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Like you, we set high standards for creative work—but we never want to set barriers for our students. We open our doors to all, and we are deeply committed to making CFA a welcoming artistic home for all who enter. To achieve this goal, we know we have work to do. A key priority in our diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives is to review our programs and build inclusive curricula for the 21st century. Whether in music, in theatre, or in visual arts, today’s students need to explore the artistic achievements and practices of the whole world, not just the Western artists and works on which many traditional courses of study are based. Broadening our curricula will also broaden students’ perspectives and creative approaches, making them better prepared for an increasingly global culture. Similarly, we must bring more diverse artists and programming to CFA. We plan to bring artists-inresidence to campus, with a particular focus on those from BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities. We are also committed to increasing the diversity of the programming we offer, from plays to concerts to exhibitions—
WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Support an artist residency program
• Invest in new works and visiting productions by artists from underrepresented groups
• Endow an undergraduate scholarship; for funds of $100,000 or more, BU’s Century Challenge program will match the income for 100 years • Support a graduate stipend or a scholarship for BUTI or WFT • Establish a DEI Access Fund
• Fund recruitment efforts, including travel and school partnerships, for WFT and BUTI
both by inviting visiting artists to stage productions and by encouraging student productions to move more frequently beyond the traditional canon. Economic diversity is also important in order to create a truly inclusive CFA. For this reason, we seek to create many more endowed scholarships and graduate stipends for our students. In addition, we seek to establish a DEI Access Fund to cover some of the many expenses that traditional financial aid does not meet. And because both the BU Tanglewood Institute and Wheelock Family Theatre are helping to build the pipeline for new generations of diverse artists, we want to create more scholarships for our youth programs and increase outreach and recruitment in underrepresented communities. In all of these initiatives, we seek your ideas, your recommendations, and your support. We know that creating true diversity at CFA will require us to stretch beyond our familiar strategies, networks, and ways of thinking, and we also know that our alumni and friends can serve as a rich source of new information and connections.
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Wherever life has taken you, we know you understand that arts education is not just for artists. The perspectives and knowledge our students gain will equip them for creative lives in every sector of society. What’s more, we want our students to recognize their interconnectedness with the people around them: their fellow students at BU, yes, but also the larger communities of artists and citizens in Boston and beyond. Our focus on community, therefore, is twofold. Within BU, we plan to create new opportunities to explore the arts for all students, regardless of whether they intend to pursue an artistic career. Some will be aligned with the BU Hub, a general education program that now exposes undergraduates across the University to a wide range of disciplines outside their major fields of study. Through curricular and extracurricular offerings, we will both encourage non-CFA students to learn creative ways of thinking and encourage CFA students to apply their skills to work beyond the fine arts. The result? A stronger community of citizen-artists within CFA, and of artistic citizens across campus.
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As further support for community building within the college itself, we plan to provide more opportunities within our walls for our students to come together, in part through the creation of a dedicated Student Lounge. The second aspect of our communitybuilding endeavors moves beyond the BU campus to encompass Boston and the surrounding region. To connect our students with all that the area has to offer, we seek to strengthen our partnerships with prominent institutions such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Huntington Theatre Company, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. And to serve the greater community with our youth programs, the BU Tanglewood Institute and Wheelock Family Theatre, we seek to build partnerships with local and regional schools. For BUTI, we also wish to make needed campus improvements to give students the high-quality surroundings they deserve; for WFT, we want to bolster our school tours to reach as many local schools and students as possible.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Support WFT school tours and educational partnerships
• Fund arts opportunities for all BU students • Name the CFA Student Lounge
• Support partnerships and programs with prominent local arts institutions, including CFA @ Symphony Hall • Invest in BUTI’s regional partnerships and campus improvements
COMMUNITY: BIG YET SMALL Building bridges across BU, Boston, and beyond
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GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT Connecting with the wider world
For all of us, the world grows more interconnected every year. Ideas and influences, in the arts as in every other field, now seamlessly cross national and cultural boundaries in a complex and compelling web. We want CFA, and CFA students, to make deep connections with this interweaving of cultures around the globe. One key way to do this is with study abroad programs. Visual Arts students have the option to spend a semester or summer studying in Venice; for Music students, we offer a semester with London’s Royal College of Music. And the School of Theatre requires students in many of its majors to spend a semester abroad, whether at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, in Arezzo with the Accademia dell’Arte, or in other BU programs abroad. Both to enrich our students’ education and to raise CFA’s profile in the global
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artistic community, we also seek to establish a solid tradition of consistent participation in several recurring international programs. These will include, at a minimum, the Venice Biennale, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the Prague Quadrennial. Even as we send our students into the world, we also want to bring more of the world to them. The award-winning annual BU Global Music Festival is one such initiative, and we plan to explore and develop many more. As with all of
our ambitious plans, we welcome your support in these international efforts. We also invite you to help us build more connections for CFA around the world. Wherever you are, we want you to know that you will always be a part of CFA, and we hope you will join us in building our network of alumni and friends that spans the globe, spreading the word about our exciting plans as we look toward a bright future.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
• Support student travel and study abroad
• Underwrite student participation in recurring international arts programs • Sponsor the Global Music Festival at BU
• Help us strengthen the CFA alumni network in artistic communities from New York and Los Angeles to London, Seoul, and beyond
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As the College of Fine Arts prepares for its next decade of innovation, expansion, and creative growth, we are deeply grateful for your support. With your help, the CFA of 2030 will truly light the way to a creative future—one where everyone in our community knows the value of art for life. Thank you. Harvey Young Dean
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For more information, please contact: Janna Schwartz Assistant Dean Development & Alumni Relations jannas@bu.edu 617-353-8995 Boston University College of Fine Arts 855 Commonwealth Ave. Boston, MA 02215