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Section 701
Join us this spring for a special "hybrid" edition of LEAP 660, Community Engagement and the Arts, a course focused on building and delivering powerful community-focused programs and projects. For this semester, the course will include a community arts-making "pop-ups" project in partnership with the City of Fort Collins. Those events will include performance as well as hands-on visual art-making in selected locations around the city. The project will be managed and completed by the students. Through March, non-residential students will attend a weekly class session via zoom. During April, there will be a two-week window in which the non-residential students will join us in Fort Collins for the live event delivery (tentative dates: April 16-26).
This course will focus on how to work with community partners in designing, and delivering powerful and transformative arts programming and initiatives. The "pop-ups" project will be a real-life experience around managing and delivering large-scale arts programming that can shape a community. With a strong focus partnership development, this course is being offered in collaboration with a number of community members as well as other university partners from the School of Music Theater and Dance.
During the first weeks of the semester, attendance during a weekly class meeting will be required for content and assignment discussion. There will be outside requirements as the class develops and manages the logistics, partnerships, promotion, and materials required for a successful of this highly visible and dynamic community project.
Section 801
In this course, we explore the role of the arts, the artist, and arts organizations in engaging communities to maximize impact, inclusion and reach. Most often we look at the arts as delivering an experience to an audience. In this course, instead of asking how we bring more audiences to the arts, we ask how can the arts best serve communities? To answer this question, we will explore how to identify and authentically engage with communities, investigate a variety of engagement methods, and explore dynamic community-focused art practices and how to plan them. This course is taught fully online and asynchronous.
Restrictions: (GR) OR Professional (PR)
David's 35-year career in the arts and business has been fueled by his education in music, painting, and chemistry. He's managed consumer brands in the artist's products category, serving as Director of Marketing for Winsor+Newton and then Brand Director for Liquitex. In 2000, his book, What Every Artist Needs to Know About Paints and Colors, was published by Krause. He served as a founding board member for Colorado Bach Ensemble. Over the last 15 years, he’s served as Publisher for the largest media brands in the fine art-making and crafting categories, most recently as Senior Vice President/Group Publisher with F+W Media managing The Artist’s Magazine, American Artist, Watercolor Artist, Interweave Knits, Love of Quilting and, online, ArtistsNework.com, ArtistsNetwork.TV, QuiltingDaily.com and Interweave.com and more. Through it all he's continued to paint and he just finished a project with the Central City Opera as "Painter in Residence,” producing a series of watercolors for their 2021 season. In 2020, he left the corporate media world and launched a number of art-making initiatives, a new marketing services group called Pyle Creative Studio, and a series of educational resources for the art and science community.
Jill Stilwell brings 25 years of public sector arts and culture experience to LEAP. During her tenure as the cultural services director for the City of Fort Collins, Jill oversaw the Lincoln Center for the Performing and Visual Arts, the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, the Art in Public Places program, the Gardens on Spring Creek, the Creative Center, and administered an arts-granting program. Jill spent 10 years as a museum director and curator and continues to teach museum studies courses. Jill has real-world experience and expertise in managing and operating cultural facilities and programs, cultural planning, arts policy, public art, cultural capital projects, fundraising and grant writing, community engagement, and nonprofit arts management.
Jill was instrumental in Fort Collins receiving the 2011 Governor’s Arts Award and most recently led the effort for State certification of the Downtown Fort Collins Creative District in 2016. Jill has a bachelor’s degree in fine art from Colorado State University and a master’s degree in art history and museum studies from the University of Denver.