June 2008 Archives

Friday I travelled with a group from the Historic Hattiesburg Downtown Association to tour and speak with administrators at The RiverPark campus of Columbus State University.  At CSU, all students majoring in Art, Music, and Theater now take most of their classes at the downtown campus development, which began several years ago when the city and the university partnered to create the River Center for the Performing Arts.  Students in these programs live in downtown housing. Most of this is renovated downtown buildings owned by the university's building foundation and leased to local businesses with student loft apartments above.  

Yesterday morning I visited our Archaeological Field School site in Biloxi.  There, faculty and students are excavating a site that dates to the 1720s. It was pretty impressive to see the care and attention students paid to the remains they were addressing while I was there. They clearly understood how special and rare the opportunity they were experiencing was, even if was a bit less exciting than the popular movie version of archaeological exploration!  Photos and more details are available from the press release.

I'm back in Hattiesburg, following a very productive visit to Savannah.  One thing I took away from this trip is the need to pay close attention to details when we think about how to transform "old" places or concepts and make them "new".  The photo below is one I took inside of the student center at Savannah College of Art and Design. The building was formerly a Temple, and SCAD was scrupulous about preserving both the historic character and the fine architectural detail of the facility. Yet college officials knew that modern amenities and a relevant and updated "feel" for the space were critical to its success.

I've just completed an exhilarating two days with folks from Savannah College of Art and Design. While much of what I have seen and heard is not applicable to our university setting, there are so many ideas I feel I can bring back to Hattiesburg and discuss with our faculty.  Some ideas, such as a venue for bringing student art to the marketplace, are things we had already explored previously in our planning for the Old Hattiesburg High School restoration project.   Poetter Hall, shown below, is home to SCAD's version of a student arts incubation venue. It is named for one of the founders, and a continuing trustee of Savannah College of Art and Design, Southern Miss alum, May L. Poetter.

I'm off this morning with friends Betsy Rowell and Anita Blount to see Savannah College of Art and Design. We are on a fact-finding trip to learn more about how colleges and universities are using arts and arts education to build strong relationships between campuses and downtown areas.  I'll update you while we are on the trip, and hopefully I can share some photos as well!

It has been a very good year for the college faculty in terms of externally-funded grants. Our faculty have applied for about $6.5 million in grants, and have received about $1.3 million funding thus far.

Many of the things we are working on this summer involve future efforts to connect our arts programs to the downtown communities in the cities where our campuses are located.  Previously on this blog, I shared information about an ongoing process to increase the presence of arts and entertainment programming at the university's Gulf Park campus in Long Beach. We have begun longer-term planning for those programs that seeks to involve both the Long Beach community and area visitors in festivals, workshops, and other hands-on experiences.

This morning I attended another meeting at our Gulfport campus to talk about short and longer-term needs for recovery and growth at our Coast operations.  The college currently offers nine undergraduate and six graduate programs on the Coast, plus a wide array of academic minors and many courses comprising the General Education core curriculum.  Our newest offerings there are the BA in Film and a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies (BIS) degree.