Many artists and performers visit Stanford each year. The Arts Initiative better integrates these visitors into the life of the university, bringing them to students’ residences for meals, public conversations, and coaching with student artists. Residential programs draw from the Stanford Lively Arts performance series, the Cantor Arts Center, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and other campus arts organizations. New partnerships with off-campus arts organizations, such as the Public Theater of New York and SF Opera, provide unique opportunities for students to come into direct contact with professional artists in residency and workshop settings.

The Arts Initiative is bringing the arts more into the freshman and sophomore experience by expanding the number of arts-related sections in the Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) courses required of all freshmen. In cooperation with the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE), we are creating a new series of arts-focused sophomore seminars that will allow students to work intensively on individual arts projects. The initiative is also focusing on “mainstreaming” the arts, bringing them into undergraduate and graduate courses and fields not normally associated with the arts. One example is a course on Music and the Brain, co-taught by faculty from music and neuroscience and open to graduate students across the campus.

From major cultural institutions to the sights and sounds of the street, block by block, New York City provides a cultural and sensorial experience like nowhere else in America, and this trip will place Stanford students in the center of it all. While in New York students will be asked to shape and document their experiences by creating an interactive electronic map, using software developed by students in a fall course specifically for this trip.