New program for Bay St. George campus
5/5/2003 11:31:17 AM
May 5, 2003 – College of the North Atlantic’s Bay St. George campus will introduce a new program into its curriculum for the fall semester. Cyril Organ, Associate District Administrator at the Bay St. George campus, says the addition of the Cultural Management program is a natural progression.
“For some time now, we’ve envisioned a Creative Arts Centre for our campus, housing our art programs such as Digital Animation/Multimedia, Journalism, Recording Arts, and Music Industry and Performance, all in one building working cohesively,” says Organ.
“We’d like for all Applied Arts programs to have the synergy we envision. A synergy that will work to the advantage of all.”
Lorne King is administrator at the LA Bown building of the campus, which currently houses two Applied Arts programs: Music Industry and Performance and Recording Arts. He says that in recent years, once the number of arts programs began to grow at the college, it became obvious that something was missing from the larger picture.
“We’ve discovered that there is a need in the province for people trained in management for the arts,” says King.
“What we typically see is the practitioners – the artists – running their own businesses, such as visual artists running galleries, or musicians booking performance dates and doing promotion. There is a lack of managers trained for the art industry.”
King says the college worked closely with the Association of Cultural Industries (ACI) to determine the most effective criteria for developing the Cultural Management program.
“The program will be mainly business-based, but with art-associated programming,” he says.
“Though it is a business program, we are not simply making it an extension of our existing business programming – this will be its own entity.”
King says the two-year program will consist of marketing and management for the cultural sector specifically. He envisions guest artists playing a part in the program as well.
“We hope once this program is developed, that we can have artistic practitioners deliver seminars on practical aspects of the industry.”
The launch of the program, along with a re-vamping of the popular Community Studies program, is scheduled to take place for the September 2003 school semester.
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For more information contact:
Stephen Lee
Communications Manager
(709) 643-7929
or
Tanya Alexander
Public Information Officer
(709) 643-7928