Save UWS Fine Arts
Professor Janice Reid, UWS Vice Chancellor
Would you be interested in helping out with a SAVE UWS FINE ARTS campaign?
We are planning a demonstration to protest the cutting of the University of Western Sydney Arts programs (Fine Arts, Electronic Arts and Performance). We are angry that Professor Janice Reid, the UWS Vice Chancellor, actively maintains presence in the arts: she is on the board of trustees of AGNSW, her term expiring December 2006; Patron for the Kedumba Drawing Prize; and past Trustee for Queensland Art Museum.
This protest questions why Professor Reid, as a Trustee and Patron of the arts, is not supporting the arts at her own tertiary institution. This protest questions her role on the board of NSW's major art institution, when art education in her own institution is cut. If Prof Reid is not supporting art education in western Sydney, hierarchical stereotypes that art is elite, better located in the centre, and housed in officially sanctioned contexts (like the AGNSW) are simply being reinforced.
Such attitudes demonstrate no commitment to fostering culture and the arts in the western suburbs when much cultural infrastructure is in place to facilitate a meaningful dialogue with a Fine Arts tertiary program in western Sydney (regional galleries, artist studios, artist networks, etc).
posted by UWS Arts at 9:07 PM
4 Comments:
anymore info on the protest? tim hilton x
I'd go easy on the anger and look at negotiation, if I was you. You might appeal to the Vice Chancellor to remove Fine Arts , Electronic Arts and Performance from the umbrella of the "Communications Arts" School and place them more appropriately with Cultural Studies, if there is support there. Clearly, the Dean has failed to support these subjects, and for whatever reason, the mix is not working. This is no reason to abandon these subjects!
One might appeal to other members of the AGNSW Board of trustees,eg the Artists Immants Tillers and Lindy Lee, to suggest this to the Vice Chancellor. There may be others at the AGNSW willing to speak with her. the heaad of MOCA and the other Cultural Studies scholars inthe research group might also support such a move. After all , one has to have some culture to study!
THere could be an advantage in now joining the study of Art history and theory with the Practical Art training. This is especially relevant if the THeoretical subjects are to be used to train teachers and educators. THis will continue to make the humanities options more attractive as employment training.
Agree entirely - some of her fellow trustees at the AGNSW are entirely sympathetic - she has no idea that she has something fantastic in her university that has been there for a bloody long time...its never been represented to her in those terms either I would guess. The only conclusion is that management at UWS is a failure
Art History used to be part of the Faculty of Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) years ago, and it jumped ship to the Humanities school (which then was called 'Cultural histories and futures'). The art history program has suffered considerably because it too has suffered a stripping down of subjects and all its founding staff are gone, operating today on very few staff.
Maybe fine arts could logically reside in humanities, but it could just end up being as neglected as art history has been. As there currently is no practice based research in the school, fine arts would probably just end up being an institutional anomoly.
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