SUPPORTING CREATIVITY AT GEORGETOWN STARTS WITH

BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD

At an institution generally regarded as preprofessional, it’s easy to forget about student art. You and a friend might go out every once in a while to see a student-run play or enjoy an on-campus concert, but unless you’re deeply involved in such artistic endeavors, attention to student art at Georgetown is probably relegated to one-off exhibitions and chance encounters.

This should not be the case. What if the arts at Georgetown were no longer consigned to separate spheres, but intentionally integrated into our student lives? What if, even for just a week, the arts took center stage? If this sounds new to you, you have probably never heard of Arts Week.

The GUSA Senate Subcommittee on Creative Expression organized the first Arts Week in Spring 2014 in response to a lack of visibility and funding for many arts groups on campus. After more than half a decade of creative celebration, the pandemic abruptly ended the annual tradition.

During that week, students tabled in Red Square displaying community art projects, performancebased clubs put on shows and workshops, and the university hosted open discussions with professional artists. The 2019 Arts Week saw events like Georgetown University Collective of Creative Individuals (GUCCI) open mics, student concerts, and comedy shows. That year’s event also boasted a discussion with Boots Riley, acclaimed director of Sorry to Bother You (2018).

Arts Week curated five days of collective creative joy at Georgetown. It was a week in which enjoying lor taking part in the arts was no harder than stepping outside your dorm. In 2017, thenlead coordinator and artistic director Katherine Rosengarten described Arts Week to the Voice as “a smorgasbord of events and projects that both represented the existing arts community and invited people who maybe don’t consider themselves ‘artistic’ to take up a paintbrush or a microphone and give it a shot.”

The last Arts Week was in 2019, and the event has been lost almost entirely to a vanishing institutional memory. A concerted effort between the administration, creative student organizations, and the Georgetown Program Board (GPB), however, could bring it back.

What would a modern Arts Week look like at Georgetown? Previous years featured a State of the Arts Town Hall where students could sit down with performing arts groups and student publications to discuss their joys and concerns surrounding creative expression on campus, all in a centralized forum with no current equivalent. Spaces like the De La Cruz and Spagnuolo Galleries in Walsh could showcase art from all types of community members—not only students but also faculty and staff. Art isn’t just about showcasing community work; witnessing and consuming art is in and of itself an act of communitybuilding. Getting the entire campus at least thinking about art, even if only for a week, could highlight the art that so many in our community create, but few ever get the chance to see. voices and talents, the potential revival of Arts Week presents a greater opportunity for Georgetown to rejuvenate its approach toward community wellbeing in the wake of the ongoing pandemic. By bringing back celebratory events like Arts Week, Georgetown can call attention to the artistic accomplishments occurring on campus, bringing creative expression and representation out of the periphery and into the spotlight. a week of giving artists the oxygen they need will not spark many long-term changes if the rest of the time they are left to find that support for themselves. The university has a responsibility to provide more institutional support for arts programs. That means better funding the creative spaces we already have, like the Maker Hub, as well as prominently promoting events such as limited-run performances, showcases, and workshops. It also means increasing access to existing creative outlets, like art classes, by no longer placing additional burdens on students who wish to enroll. arts means more than simply affording more resources to individual artistic activities; it also means reimagining the way Georgetown approaches art. In professionally focused institutions like Georgetown, art is often viewed only in terms of how it can be manipulated for practical—or profitable—purposes. But art is more than just marketing graphics or shaking up in-class presentations; Georgetown ought to treat it as such. By placing more value on artistic paths, the university can make them more accessible.

Art classes, for example, are generally valued at fewer credits per hour than other Georgetown classes, placing an academic incentive on deprioritizing the arts. Most classes listed under ARTS, like Oil Painting or Graphic Design, require two two-and-a-half-hour classes per week, while some non-art classes meet for only two and a half hours a week total. And, like other classes, art classes often involve hours of additional out-of-class work each week—all for a standard three credits.

If Georgetown academically values an hour of artistic creation less than it values an hour of political debate or mathematical reasoning, its students are likely to do the same. This makes art less accessible. Students who have less free time—perhaps because of a job or other nonacademic concerns—face more difficulty fitting arts classes into their course load. This intensive time commitment makes the arts especially inaccessible to students already working paid jobs with long hours, who are disproportionately low-income students.

In refocusing Georgetown’s culture on the arts, institutional support should be extended to all expressions of creative ideas, including theater, music, poetry, and creative writing. Further devotion to the arts would only deepen students’ capacities in other areas—including their preprofessional endeavors. Art is a vehicle for self-improvement, both emotionally and professionally. Practicing art is a valuable way for students to express themselves, share powerful political and social messages, and improve their mental health and wellness. Cultural identity and expression are also inherently interwoven in art—Diamante, Rangila, and Art Celebrating Disability Culture (ACDC). All offer students more varied and thorough perspectives of the world to work into their passions.

Arts Week should return, but more than that, we need an arts reform. Let’s bring Arts Week back, but not for its own sake. Let’s bring it back to start painting a bigger picture of art at Georgetown. G

Upon deciding to attend Georgetown, I began the tenuous and vulnerable process of gauging my future home’s level of acceptance towards LGBTQ+ people. Each new cultural marker felt auspicious: the “Homo Saxa” Patio (boo GroupMe), Ben Telerski (CAS ’23) remarking on TikTok, “I go to a very gay Catholic university,” and the appearance of the “Lavender Haze” on the Corp’s menu.

But actually entering Georgetown’s queer community revealed a landscape of identity and experience far more diverse and complex than one affinity group chat for queer people or just a “very gay” university. After interviewing 11 LGBTQ+ identifying students, I’ve excavated a complicated and beautiful picture of what it means to be a queer student at Georgetown. It’s an individual understanding: a lived reality filtered by race, gender identity, class, and other aspects of identity. Viewing this complex picture in all of its nuance and diversity matters because queerness is too often flattened into one experience, when it’s multiple and individually defined.

Queer people have arguably become more visible on campus over recent years. The 2022 Marriage Pact Survey and the Voice’s sex survey show that more than 35 percent of Georgetown’s undergraduate population identifies as nonheterosexual.

For me, coming to Georgetown from a Catholic high school, where I could count the number of openly queer people on one hand, was liberating. I entered a space where I could both celebrate my queerness and let it exist as one facet of my identity amid many. For one of the first times, it was not hard for me to find other queer people—a principal source of anxiety for me. I did not have to worry as much about my queer identity when I entered a class, made friends, or started dating.

“One of things I was worried about specifically after committing to Georgetown was, ‘Am I going to be the only trans person here? Am I going to be the only non-binary person here?’ ” Marre Gaffigan (CAS ’26) said. “Upon coming to campus, I realized such a huge percentage of this population is queer in some way.”

Some of this visibility on campus stems from queer students’ heavy involvement in campus clubs and affinity spaces. “Every queer person who is out loud is often doing a lot of work on campus,” Ollie Henry (CAS ’24), a student activist who’s very present in affinity spaces on campus, observed, discussing how many of the queer students they know sit on multiple club boards.

This sense of visibility also extends to broader queer social life. Olivia Yamamoto (SFS ’24), director of this year’s Rocky Horror Picture Show—a musical comedy horror film that has become a queer staple due to its themes of sexual liberation and self-discovery—recounted an unofficial GU Pride party at an upperclassman’s sweaty Henle in their freshman year as liberating compared to more repressive high school environments: “This is how it’s supposed to feel like at a party where you belong,” they said. “Where you could make out with someone on the dance floor if you wanted to. To feel that same messiness that every first-year college student should have.” certain students. Harapanahalli, who left the GU Pride board in fall 2021, described how they felt that as a person of color, a lot of the labor of making GU Pride more inclusive fell to them without much support from the rest of the board.

Historically, spaces like GU Pride, the LGBTQ Resource Center, Haus of Hoya, queer retreats like Journeys (which haven’t run since the pandemic began), and traditions like Gender Funk parties, the “i am.” shirts, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show have been staples in cultivating queer life at Georgetown. On more individual levels, queer students have also built vibrant informal spaces: charcuteries on the lawn, music-sharing, or queercentered friend groups. Remaking institutions that might not be explicitly queer—like theater— into especially queer-positive environments has been, for some, uniquely validating.

“Theater at Georgetown has provided me not only with lifelong friendships but probably the most validation that I’ve ever received in my life as a trans person and as a queer person,” Gaffigan said.

Queer people haven’t always been visible on campus. Shiva Subbaraman, a faculty member in the Department of Performing Arts and former director of the LGBTQ Center, spoke to a significant cultural shift in LGBTQ+ visibility. “I started the center in 2008 when most of the queer community was very small because there was so much homophobia on campus. Very, very few students felt empowered or safe to be out on campus,” Subbaraman said.

The very work of making queer life possible is difficult. “You have to go against the grains of hustle culture, of ascribing yourself to a thousand and one clubs, to build community. You have to go against Georgetown’s culture to build community.” Henry noted Georgetown’s preprofessional culture encourages students to value career building over community building.

The racialized dynamics of the university’s queer communities also seep into the dating scene. As Yamamoto mentioned, “It is kind of hard to navigate dating because just because someone is queer doesn’t necessarily mean that they are A, not racist, and B, willing to connect with you and understand your experience as a queer person of color.”

Sometimes this means students of color date off campus in order to find people who can understand or share their experiences and perspectives beyond simply being queer.

“On Tinder, when I set my location, I have to set it, not just five miles, I’m setting it 10, 15, 20 miles. I need to make sure Howard’s included,” Henry said. “I think queer dating is really difficult at a predominantly white institution (PWI) because there aren’t supports for navigating all those different forms of internalized oppression that shows up interpersonally.”