Art Across the Curriculum

The arts at Wesleyan are not confined to the stage or the gallery. They serve as a central, transformative lens through which students and faculty engage the most complex questions shaping our world and our curriculum. 

How do we know what we know? How is knowledge produced, reproduced, and transmitted? And how does art create new pathways to sense, understand, and imagine possible worlds? 

The Creative Campus Initiative—the flagship initiative of the Center for the Arts—supports cross-disciplinary collaborations that elevate the arts as a mode of teaching, learning, and knowing across Wesleyan’s curriculum. For more than two decades, the initiative has invited art and artists into academic inquiry, encouraging faculty to take risks and experiment at the limits of their disciplines. 

The results are significant: the initiative has supported more than 20 new courses and 60 course modules co-taught by artists. It has commissioned new works, organized interdisciplinary performances and installations, sustained extended artist residencies, and integrated civic engagement and community partnerships into coursework. 

Wesleyan launched the initiative in 2004 as a pilot program, emerging from a national conversation about integrating the performing arts into campus life. The University’s ambitious multi-year project Feet to the Fire: Exploring Global Climate Change through Science and Art embodied a central question that continues to animate the Creative Campus Initiative: might an interdisciplinary, arts-based inquiry take us to an understanding we could not reach any other way? 

In the first fully co-taught course, “The Art and Science of Climate Change,” Robert Schumann Professor of Environmental Studies, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Biology, and Director of the Bailey College of the Environment Barry Chernoff, and choreographer Ann Carlson combined scientific measurement of methane with movement and artistic tools to explore the history of the Middletown landfill. Their course helped establish the Creative Campus Initiative’s core mission: reciprocal illumination—where artistic inquiry and subject matter challenge and inform each other, making complex ideas accessible and alive. 

The initiative fosters deep, long-term change. Collaboration is never a shortcut; partnerships deepen at the speed of trust, and their outcomes depend on the openness participants bring to the work. By asking faculty and students to step outside their comfort zones, these projects transform how learning happens. 

A decade-long collaboration between Visiting Artist in Residence in Dance Eiko Otake and John E. Andrus Professor of History Emeritus William Johnston offers a clear example. The pair co-taught courses on difficult topics—including “Japan and the Atomic Bomb”—modeling shared vulnerability and intellectual risk. 

Their work proved transformative. “This course exploded the way I think about learning,” an alumnus of their course says. “I realize that there is a depth of knowledge to be accessed through the body. There are boundaries to be played with, to be discovered, and to be dissolved. This has been my most transformative course at Wesleyan.” 

The initiative continues to support faculty across disciplines who want to dive into big questions alongside artists. Among its current projects is “Acting and Citizenship,” in which Professor of Government Sonali Chakravarti and Obie Award–winning director Awoye Timpo explore how the practice of acting can deepen students’ understanding of contemporary political life by offering access to the experiences of other citizens. 

The initiative’s reach is expansive: from Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Studies Paula Matthusen’s year-long Moon Bounce exploration of sound waves and outer space—which included a 24-hour performance and an attempt to bounce sound off the moon in honor of composer and John Spencer Camp Professor of Music Emeritus Alvin Lucier—to an interdisciplinary project studying and archiving a decommissioned power plant. Led by Courtney Fullilove, Associate Professor of History, Environmental Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Design and Engineering Studies, this project brings artistic, historical, and scientific perspectives together. 

Across these efforts, the Creative Campus Initiative ensures that the study and practice of art remains a vital part of a liberal arts education—one that helps us imagine a world different from the present.