By Vic Cox

UCSB has been selected as the new home of the UC Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), formerly known as the Intercampus Arts Program, campus and UC officials have announced.

With an expected start date of July 1, the arts support program will be based at UCSB for at least five years and will be headquartered in the campus’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC). UCSB co-directors of UCIRA are Kim Yasuda, professor and former chair of art, and Dick Hebdige, professor of art and film studies and current IHC director.

“I am delighted that UC Santa Barbara has won the competition to be the host campus for the UCIRA,” said Chancellor Henry T. Yang, “I congratulate and thank all our colleagues on this exciting achievement and am especially grateful for the leadership of Dean David Marshall and our co-directors, professors Kim Yasuda and Richard Hebdige.

“The visionary and collaborative nature of this institute is a perfect fit with the spirit of cross-disciplinary research, bold intellectual inquiry, and artistic creativity that thrives here at UCSB.”

The multicampus program, which began as a way for the Office of the President to bring outside artists in to tour campuses, has been at UC Irvine in recent years where it focused on funding innovative art and artists within the UC system.

A shift in emphasis in the 56-year-old program is expected when Santa Barbara takes the helm. “We would like to make UCIRA an advocate for the arts and help make the case to policy makers and legislators that the arts make a crucial contribution to California culture and economy,” said David Marshall, dean of humanities and fine arts, who worked with Yasuda and Hebdige to craft the winning proposal.

“Indeed, we believe that the arts can help the University of California as a whole make the case to the public that the University enriches the culture of the state, not only for its students but for all of its citizens,” he added.

As the only statewide organization representing the arts on UC’s nine general campuses, UCIRA could do much to foster university-based arts education and research, according to UCSB’s proposal: “We hope to be an advocate for new paradigms of artistic collaboration, expanded partnerships among UC faculty and students and museums and other arts institutions, community arts projects, and visiting artists programs.”

Those kinds of goals were welcomed by Dante Noto, UC director of arts, humanities, and social science research, whose office oversees UCIRA. Noto said UCSB won the systemwide competition due to its “compelling vision for an expanded institute and an ambitious range of programs and activities that will support the work of UC artists, encourage new forms of collaboration across campuses, and raise the profile of the arts in the UC system and the state as a whole.”

Hebdige sees exciting research possibilities in expanding UCIRA’s traditional approach. In addition to funding art projects, the agency could foster research that might illuminate the creative processes. “We’re interested in tapping into that combination of critical energy and creative imagination that goes into the making of art,” he said.

Arts education, too, has entrepreneurial aspects. For example, an arts education can encourage different ways of thinking outside the norm. “Artists are remarkably adept at taking risks, at negotiating the terrain of uncertainty,” said Yasuda. “Qualities of resourcefulness and fluidity are necessary to remain an innovator in today’s cultural climate.”