Brown launches two-day arts initiative

BROWN UNIVERSITY will launch its Brown Arts Initiative beginning with a two-day symposium this weekend.
BROWN UNIVERSITY will launch its Brown Arts Initiative beginning with a two-day symposium this weekend.

PROVIDENCE – In a move to further integrate the arts into its curriculum, Brown University will launch its Brown Arts Initiative beginning with a two-day symposium March 3 and 4 centered on arts and the environment.

The re|ACT symposium will bring together musicians, photographers, designers and writers with scholars, researchers, engineers, architects and activists both of whose work focuses on the multiplicity of inhabited environments, including nature as well as data mediascapes and sonic ecologies.

Lectures as part of the two-day event include:

  • re|IMAGINE: How Artists Interpret the World: Visual artists and curators who respond to the world around them, whether they view environments as politicized, natural or social
  • re|BUILD: Water and Constructed Space: Architects and artists who have used water in their designs in environmentally responsive ways
  • re|SOURCE: Mediascapes: Sonic, visual and performing artists who use environmental data as a structural element of their work via sonification and visualization
  • re|SOUND: Sonic Ecologies: Sound artists, composers and sound ecologists who respond to and reveal the natural world through soundscape compositions and other sonic interventions
  • re|NEW: The Plastic Ocean: Visual artists, writers and researchers whose work calls attention to and addresses the accumulation of plastic in our oceans

In addition, Natalie Jeremijenko, an artist who redesigned energy, food and transportation projects, and Mierle Ladermen Ukeles, the unsalaried Artist in Residence of the New York City Department of Sanitation, will serve as keynote speakers.

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What the university hopes will be generated from the gathering is a “commitment to experimental, collaborative and engaged work” – the ethos of the Brown Arts Initiative.

For the next three years, arts and environment will serve as the Brown Arts Initiative’s organizing theme. Then, through a collaborative decision-making process, faculty and student leadership will determine the next theme of the program’s curriculum.

The Brown Arts Initiative is made up of six art departments, as well as two performing, visual and literary programs, which have partnered to offer an interdisciplinary environment where participants, faculty, students, artists and scholars learn from one another.

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