Hi all! Welcome to my choose your own adventure blog post, where I decided to go down the department interview route and talk to some of St Olaf’s fine arts majors! Before interviewing these students, I had heard both positive and negative comments about St Olaf’s fine arts department, particularly the music department. While some of St Olaf’s choirs are well-known throughout the country, the Olaf studio art department has made some progress towards helping Minnesota’s efforts to stop Line 3, and the Chapel Choir concert that centered black music/composers, there have still been a number of injustices/lack of community engagement work within some of the fine arts department that will be explained in further detail within this presentation I put together.
The questions I used for the interviews were provided by Professor Epstein:
- How do you feel your (fine arts) department contributes meaningfully to the world?
- How do you think your department can attend to the world in a better, more intentional, more ethical way? What would need to change? What would have to go away? What new paths would need to be created?
- Identify a community you belong to (identity or place-based). How have you contributed or do you currently give back to your community? How have you known your contributions are needed and that they are creating positive change [and social impact]?
- Thinking of that same community from the previous question, how could your department as a whole engage meaningfully with your community?
- Music is a micro-community within the greater community of St. Olaf, and one that is sometimes perceived as particularly exclusive and exclusionary. How can we break down the walls around Music within our campus?
My interviewees, in order of appearance in this slideshow, are as follows:
- Morgan Ward (Biology & Studio Art major)
- Megan Hanson (Environmental Studies & Studio Art major)
- Alissa Bidwell (Religion & Theater major)
- Abigail Davis (Music Education major)
- Alexandra Young (Music & Race/Ethnic Studies major)
Click here for my Google Slides presentation of the interviews!