The creative arts celebrate the human capacity to imagine, to create, and to transform ideas into expressive forms such as paintings, poems, and symphonies. The arts provide us with a rich record of human cultures and values throughout time. They enable us to understand and enjoy the experiences of our senses and to sharpen our aesthetic sense-that human quality through which we comprehend beauty. To appreciate the relationship between form and meaning is to realize that the creative arts, regardless of their medium of expression, share important principles.
Courses in this Foundational Area have varied emphases: the process of creativity, the analysis of the artistic imagination, or the relationship between artists, their works, and the societies in which their works are produced. Students may choose a “hands-on” experience and paint, draw, design, or write a poem. Alternatively, they may study both classic and recent works of literature, art, music, dance, or theatre. All courses in this area challenge the student to understand creativity and the distinctive intellectual process of the human imagination.
