Email this page
Print this page
del.icio.us
diggASU dean seeks to benefit community through integration of arts
Finding the cultural heartbeat of the Phoenix metro area can be a daunting task, but if it is your job to connect with the community, the effort can be even tougher.
Still, Kwang-Wu Kim, the new Dean of the ASU Herberger College of Arts, is determined to meet the cultural community head on.
"I've been out meeting a lot of people," he says during a recent interview. "I want to understand who's who, what's important to people, what are ways in which the activities of this college could be more valuable in the larger world around us. I'm doing a lot of listening right now."
He recently was guest of honor at a dinner hosted by the Asian Chamber of Commerce. In his remarks, he echoed a similar lament often heard in Latino American conversations: that others see minorities (in this case, Asian Americans) as all the same, even though they come from different origins and backgrounds. It is an attitude he would like to see change.
As the dean of a college of fine arts, Kim oversees curriculum and performance activities involving everything from film, theater and music to dance, art and the AME (integrated arts, media and engineering). With these responsibilities, Kim says he is looking for a balance "to provide quality, broad-based education for undergraduates, as well as specific education for those working on graduate degrees."
Prior to joining ASU, Kim served as the president of the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Maine, where he also taught. Longy students are required to spend time using their talent and skills to benefit the community, a concept that integrates their education with real-world practice.
He also held teaching positions with the University of Texas at El Paso, the Peabody Institute of John Hopkins University and Dickinson College in Carlisle, Penn. He sometimes performs as orchestra soloist, recitalist and chamber musician.
Kim has also been known to visit El Paso elementary schools, where he commandeered languishing pianos to introduce children to the classics.
In his short time in the Valley (he arrived last June), he has observed:
• The word "Latino" is used in Arizona more than "Hispanic," which is favored in El Paso.
• ASU is not quite as "brown" as Kim expected it to be: "What I'm sensing is a disconnect between a leading institution and reality."
• There is a thriving cultural community, but its energy is dispersed widely throughout the Valley.
It is this last item that Kim believes the Herberger College has an opportunity to remedy.
"One of the very unusual things about Phoenix as a metropolitan area is there are so many separate cities that want separate cultural institutions, separate performing arts centers, separate symphonies," Kim says. "That's a difficult model. I'm not really sure over time that it is truly sustainable because great cities develop with a nucleus that's very concentrated. (It) almost serves like an incubator for artistic experience or community building. I think there's already a lot of support and there's a lot of potential support."
Creating a center for the community to access the arts also has a lot to do with financial, as well as technical, support.
"There's a great deal of wealth in the Valley, a lot of which is not being tapped. There's a lot of increasing expertise …. because this is a place that people are moving to. I think what's missing right now is a really strong argument for why it should be centralized more. That's one of the basic challenges of this region. The population base keeps spreading out; there's no physical barrier."
For local ethnic communities, access to the arts can still be difficult, due to a perception that minorities are not interested in the arts. However, mounting population numbers for a group such as Latinos can push institutions to pay attention to their cultural demands and needs.
"What we're talking about is also a shift in political awareness and political powerbase. When we're living in a place where, historically, certain populations have been excluded, then the cultural institutions tend to not see that because they (minorities) haven't been part of the mainstream," Kim theorizes.
And that shift, which is starting to happen, portends well for Latinos and other minority populations as audiences, Kim believes.
"As the mainstream changes, cultural institutions and education institutions have to revise what they see because suddenly the world is different in terms of potential supporters, audience members, students. So there's a challenge involved for these institutions to adapt themselves to a new reality."
For more information on the Herberger College of Arts, visit http://herbergercollege.asu.edu/.
