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Section 801
In this course, we explore the role of the arts, the artist, and arts organizations in engaging communities to maximize impact, inclusion and reach. Most often we look at the arts as delivering an experience to an audience. In this course, instead of asking how we bring more audiences to the arts, we ask how can the arts best serve communities? To answer this question, we will explore how to identify and authentically engage with communities, investigate a variety of engagement methods, and explore dynamic community-focused art practices and how to plan them. This course is taught fully online and asynchronous.
Section 701
Join us this spring for a special "hybrid" edition of LEAP 660, Community Engagement and the Arts, a course focused on building and delivering powerful community-focused programs and projects. For this semester, the course will include a community arts-making "pop-ups" project in partnership with the City of Fort Collins. Those events will include performance as well as hands-on visual art-making in selected locations around the city. The project will be managed and completed by the students. Through March, non-residential students will attend the scheduled class sessions via zoom. During April (final dates TBD), there will be a two-week window in which the non-residential students will join us in Fort Collins for the live event delivery.
This course will focus on how to work with community partners in designing, and delivering powerful and transformative arts programming and initiatives. The "pop-ups" project will be a real-life experience around how to successfully manage and deliver large-scale arts programming that can shape a community. As a real-life exploration around partnership development, this course is being offered in collaboration with a number of other university partners.
Regular attendance during weekly class meetings will be required for content and assignment discussion. There will also be outside requirements as the class manages the development and delivery of this highly visible and dynamic community project.
Restrictions: (GR) OR Professional (PR)
David's 35-year career in the arts and business has been fueled by his education in music, painting, and chemistry. He's managed consumer brands in the artist's products category, serving as Director of Marketing for Winsor+Newton and then Brand Director for Liquitex. In 2000, his book, What Every Artist Needs to Know About Paints and Colors, was published by Krause. He served as a founding board member for Colorado Bach Ensemble. Over the last 15 years, he’s served as Publisher for the largest media brands in the fine art-making and crafting categories, most recently as Senior Vice President/Group Publisher with F+W Media managing The Artist’s Magazine, American Artist, Watercolor Artist, Interweave Knits, Love of Quilting and, online, ArtistsNework.com, ArtistsNetwork.TV, QuiltingDaily.com and Interweave.com and more. Through it all he's continued to paint and he just finished a project with the Central City Opera as "Painter in Residence,” producing a series of watercolors for their 2021 season. In 2020, he left the corporate media world and launched a number of art-making initiatives, a new marketing services group called Pyle Creative Studio, and a series of educational resources for the art and science community.