Author: Quinn, Molly
In the March 24 issue of The Occidental Weekly, sophomore Mitch Cde Baca wrote an article entitled “Lacking ‘Art’ in Our Liberal Arts Education,” which detailed his personal frustrations with the lack of photography opportunities on campus. Art history and the visual arts (AHVA) professors Mary Beth Heffernan and Amy Lyford responded in a letter to the editor the following week. The lack of support in studio arts, dance, theater, music, film and creative writing on the larger campus is something I find deplorable. As Heffernan and Lyford’s letter clearly indicated, many of the obstacles in flushing out these areas of interest are financial.
Despite these barriers, I have personally discovered an extraordinarily large number of non-financial roadblocks in developing, supporting and organizing arts programming. Most of these issues in programming opportunities come from the Office of Student Life (OSL) and Programming Board (PB). When there is just not room in the endowment to make large scale academic changes in the arts, planning and scheduling issues directly disable the arts.
Anyone at Oxy who has helped organize a club or extra-curricular event on campus can appreciate the level of chaos that goes into this process. It seems that every other year, the Master Calendar process is completely overhauled. Each year there is some new protocol and some new criteria for pinning down the bare minimum resources.
There is absolutely no streamlined process for scheduling events. This simple fact, I believe, accounts for nearly half of the issues that many, if not all, students have voiced about programming on campus and the lack of interesting things to do. As we all know, the actual curricular opportunities for the arts are lacking, and when the only venue for students interested in the arts is via club programming, the injustice is heightened.
Last weekend, OSL hosted a screening of “The Blind Side” in Johnson 200 at the exact same time as Film Comps. Why is it that, so many nights of the year, students complain about having nothing to do, and yet two separate nights could not be found to schedule these events? The arts solicit and require an audience, particularly film. The disorganization, mismanagement and ignorance that is programming at our school is a kick in the teeth for creative and socially conscious student artists. For a school planted in the midst of a city more alive with the arts than most of this country, this situation is truly humiliating.
In the Feb. 7 issue of this paper, in the article “Painting the Music,” Riley Hooper (senior) drew attention to the ASOC’s new Campus Arts Endowment Grant and Meilani Bowman-Kamah’o’s (senior) mural in Newcomb Hall. The grant allocates specific ASOC funds to students to develop public art works. But this fund has hardly been touched. I know from first-hand experience that there are artists hungry and looking for opportunities, but that grant is just sitting there.
As editor-in-chief of Feast Arts and Literary Magazine, the campus’ only annual full color magazine that features creative writing and printable studio artworks, I’ve worked alongside faculty members, students and staff to promote student involvement in the arts. This school year, the magazine tripled in staff size, doubled in length and features 40 student artists.
I expected that it would be difficult to gather interest in staff and submissions, but it has been the opposite. There has been no actual increase in the number or in the talent of art students between 2008 and now. The thing that has changed is the organization and programming intuition of my staff and those involved in the process of the magazine.
This year I found myself turning away wonderful pieces of writing and art, as well as energetic and willing staff members, because of the page-limit mandated by our costs. At a school where the curriculum in both creative writing and the studio arts is very limited, I was forced to turn away these students, knowing they had no where else to go. Beyond my magazine, there is no other opportunity for a student not in an art class to share their work.
I am writing this article as a call to action on two fronts. First, to students: Organize and educate yourselves about how to start and develop programming that interests you. Pay attention to where club funding goes and speak up for yourselves. To OSL and Programming Board: Please fix the managerial and administrative mess that is holding so many of us back right now, because while Greek Life and other areas have support elsewhere, the arts has a lack of money, a lack of courses and a lack of faculty available. The only thing we have is club programs – and fixing this process costs nothing.
Molly Quinn is a senior ECLS major. She can be reached at mquinn@oxy.edu.
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