Inauguration Address

Inaugural Address of Sean T. Buffington
Third President of the University of the Arts
April 18, 2008
Merriam Theater

Mayor Nutter, Provost Hyman, Dr. Gillman, distinguished delegates, Dr. Clarke, Chairman Naples and members of the Board of Trustees, members of the faculty, students and alumni, staff members, family and friends:
Welcome and thank you.

Before I begin, I’d like to ask you to join me in thanking Matt Gallagher and the UArts Big Band, Ron Kerber and the Transfusion Ensemble, and Jeffrey Kern and the University Chorus.

I would also like to thank the extraordinary group of scholars, artists, designers, writers and others who participated in “Improvise/Commit,” a week of symposia, exhibitions, lectures, and performances, during which we sought as a community to explore the creative process from a variety of perspectives.

It is humbling for me to stand here today. I am humbled because what brought you—and me—here has very little to do with me and very much to do with this institution, with what it has been and done and what it might yet do and become.

The University of the Arts is an institution whose tradition stretches back more than 130 years. It is an institution that has given artistic birth to generations of makers and creative leaders.

It is the institution that trained Charles Sheeler and Wharton Esherick,

Judith Jamison and Marc Blitzstein,

Osceola Davis and Vincent Persichetti,

Neil Welliver and Irving Penn, Arnold Roth and Olaf Skoogfors,

the Quay Brothers and, of course, Stanley Clarke.

As these names suggest, it is an institution that has had a profound impact on the arts in this country and beyond its borders. And the institution continues that tradition of excellence today.

But it is not only this remarkable history of artistic achievement and innovation that is daunting. In accepting the Presidency of this institution, I am at the same time stepping into the midst of a flowing stream of tradition and argument about what it means to make and create, and to educate those who make and create.

In 1878, at the first commencement exercises of one of our predecessor institutions, the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, President Coleman Sellers explained the institution’s reason for being: “Citizens of Pennsylvania,” he said, “we need your aid and countenance in this attempt to advance the industries of our people. American goods and American inventive skill are even now finding a market across the water… But our works of art industry, our patterns and designs are not ready for that market… By aiding in conducting the Schools, you are adding to the material welfare of our people.”

Twenty years ago, almost a century after President Sellers called for design education in order to strengthen American competitiveness, President Peter Solmssen, together with several of the trustees in this room today, advanced a new argument about arts education when they created the first university devoted to the arts in the United States. They imagined an institution unlike any other: not a conservatory encompassing several disciplines, not a loose affiliation of colleges or institutes, but rather a university founded on and devoted to the principles of artistic creativity. A university dedicated to the conviction that the arts are not simply expressive modes but indeed ways of knowing.

1878 and 1987: these two moments from the University’s history represent those generations’ contributions to that flowing stream of argument.

As a new leader of this storied institution, I ask myself, What will our role in that discussion—at this moment in the institution’s history—what will our role be? What positions will we take, what questions will we ask? And, perhaps most critically, what challenge will we as a community issue and take up?

Ned Rorem, the composer and sometime Pennsylvanian, wrote in his Later Diaries, “Unlike ethics, art doesn’t seek to change so much as confirm: art renders us more so.”

“Art renders us more so.” I take this to mean that art—and design and performance—enable us to make ourselves. Through art, or creative practice, through the struggle to conceive and make, to interpret and understand, we become more ourselves. This is not to say we find our true selves through art but rather that through art we forge the sense of self that comes to be, for the artist, true and real.

I would further suggest that, in making herself through art, the artist also invents her relationships to the world. By rendering or representing that world, by making objects or performances that will occupy a place in it, by collaborating with others to realize a project, the artist makes a place for herself in a community.

We all have stories, I think, about coming to understand what art could mean for us and what it could accomplish within us. I remember when I was a boy in rural Maryland going one year to the county fair. In a small booth alongside one of the whitewashed cinderblock exhibition halls—where plants and livestock and baked goods were displayed—was a Chinese calligrapher. How she came to be there I had—and still have—no idea; I don’t remember ever having seen her at the fair before. But she would write something for you in Chinese characters. I asked her to write my name, and the date. What she made—which of course I couldn’t read and which could, in fact, have meant anything—what she made came in some strange and profound way to mean me for me. It wasn’t me in the same way that my own name in Roman script represented me. No, this was an object, a made thing, a strange, unintelligible thing that somehow enabled me to find myself in it.

This idea that we can make ourselves—and our relationship to the world—through art can help guide our thinking about the challenges and obligations of an institution like this one. It can help us decide how we as a community should conceive ourselves and our role in the culture.

I believe that it is our responsibility as a university, as an arts university, to enable students to make themselves and to make a place in the world for themselves by making art. I hope that they will make great art and beautiful art; I hope they will shift paradigmatic thinking in their fields. But I hope more that they will make themselves into human beings with a profound understanding of what it means to make something.

I believe, in other words, that an arts university has the responsibility and the capacity to teach young people, through the discipline of art making, not only a set of technical or professional skills but also what we might think of as fundamental capacities, capacities that are critical to artmaking but also to citizenship, to leadership, and to humanity.

We do this now, of course, but I believe that we have an opportunity—unlike that of any other arts institution—to do so differently. This is because we are a different kind of institution. What truly sets us apart is that we are, as an institution, comprehensive in scope: our expertise, our programs range from digital and broadcast media to fine arts and craft; from dramatic, musical, and choreographic performance to design and applied arts.

At this moment in the history of the arts—not the first, to be sure—this distinctive, this defining characteristic is a particular strength; indeed, it may prove critical. Today, artists and makers of all kinds are profoundly interested in crossing disciplinary boundaries; new technologies have begun to enable new kinds of work that defy traditional categorization; cross-field and cross-national collaboration have become de rigueur; art and design and the principles of art and design have become pervasive; and, the stuff of artmaking—sounds, images, material objects—and the act of representation itself are no longer the province of artists and designers and craftspeople but have become ubiquitous and ubiquitously practiced, deployed, and employed.

But this distinction is a strength not only because it enables us to prepare students for success in an artistic environment that is hybrid, heterodox, unstable. What I’ve cursorily described above as our current environment has its roots, at least in part, in a deeper recognition on the part of artists, designers, and performers. They recognize that the world they seek to understand and to engage through representation has become almost incomprehensibly complex. Making something and making something meaningful has become profoundly difficult. Artists need the help of other kinds of artists and designers; they need access to new, different, and unfamiliar tools; they need to understand other kinds of aesthetic approaches.

In short, this institution has a unique ability and opportunity to prepare students to grapple with the complexities of the world we all inhabit and seek to understand and to change. And that distinctive character creates for us an opportunity to make a new kind of arts institution, to recommit ourselves to, and in the process re-define the idea—and the practice—of a university of the arts.

This new University of the Arts—our University of Arts—will in many ways resemble today’s University. It will draw upon and perpetuate the University’s long tradition of excellence, of commitment to craft, of serious engagement with materials and materiality as well as ideas.

But our new University of the Arts will carry on this tradition in different ways and invent new strands of tradition.

Our University will be one in which students will face the challenge of making something together. They will, of course, as they do now, make things together with fellow artists working in the same field. But they will also be challenged to work together with students from other fields, on projects and problems that no single student or group from a single discipline could tackle alone.

Our students will work together from the moment of defining, as a group of collaborators, a creative problem to the point of developing and implementing a solution. But the true outcome will be the experience of practical collaboration, the learning that happens through making something as a group rather than a lone artist or performer.

While the students of our University will—must—continue to master a specific set of creative tools, they will also be introduced to a range of unfamiliar tools with which they can play and experiment. For tools not only provide or facilitate novel solutions to known problems; but they also enable artists to identify—or invent—new problems which traditional tools might never have permitted them to see. The graduates of our University—equipped with a range of traditional and non-traditional tools as well as with the license and understanding to use them—will redefine the contours of their disciplinary landscapes.

Our University will also become a site for the development of new work in many and diverse fields. A university must be a place where new ideas and approaches are developed, not only taught. In an arts university, artists of all kinds must make new work that the university itself supports and presents. But at our university, we will not seek only to provide space and time for these artists to make their work. We do not want simply to launch another commissioning program; we want to create a new model of engagement: co-creation, in which artists work here, in and with this community, to make something new.

And our University will not only bring artists here who will make a new thing—a performance, an installation, a text; we will also invite creative entrepreneurs who will make new enterprises here. These innovators may be product designers or developers of new software or independent curators. Like visiting artists, they will be in residence in our community; but instead of writing a score or building an installation, they will launch their businesses or initiatives within our University, drawing on our creative resources and engaging our students and faculty in their work. Our students will learn from these experiences—but also through an expanded curriculum in entrepreneurship—what it means to make and sustain an enterprise or a career.

Our University, however, cannot be a vital place for the making of new work and new enterprises unless it is also a center for reflection on these. Our University must demonstrate its commitment to the contention that art making—of all kinds—is intellectual work, that ideas are embedded in and expressed by objects and performance, and indeed in and by the very act and process of making. Therefore, our faculty and our students will explore and develop these ideas, not only in the classroom, but publicly. Our University will become a center for serious discussion about the arts, design and communication. This will be a discussion among scholars, critics, artists, and entrepreneurs—about craft, about history, about the intersection of theory and practice, about the next wave in various art forms and what it may mean to us and about us.

And, of course, our University, as a consequence, will continue to nurture and honor and grow the liberal arts. But we will recognize the liberal arts as more than simply the foundation on which an arts education is built. They represent the critical, historical and theoretical interlocutors that makers must engage in discussion and study. Therefore, they must be intimately engaged in all aspects of the educational mission of our University, not only that of the liberal arts division but also that of the colleges.

Finally, our University will become an institutional citizen that is integral to this great city. We will commit ourselves to preparing for a university education the next generation of artists and innovators here in Philadelphia. I do not mean only that we will help this generation improve their artistic skills but that we will prepare those with artistic promise for the academic challenges they will face in a college or university. For we want for our neighbors’ children the same thing that we wish for our present students: that they become creative, capable, confident, educated adults, whether they ultimately pursue an art form professionally or not.

This is a vision for the future of this University. It is a vision that is founded on a belief in the responsibility of this institution to educate a generation of makers: artists, yes, but also citizens and human beings who have been imbued with the ethos of making and equipped with the intellectual, aesthetic and technical tools to engage the world in its full complexity.

But it is a vision that is, I hope, not a finished thing but something that we as a community will wrangle over, add to, and enhance—not just now at the outset of my Presidency but throughout my time here and beyond.

Moreover, in naming something a vision, one implicitly invites a community to participate in developing it, in defining and refining it. Perhaps it is better to call this vision a challenge, a challenge I hope this generation of institutional leaders—faculty members, deans, students, alumni—will take up.

I look forward to working together with all of you to respond to this challenge.