The Creative Arts
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 curricular 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. You may choose a hands-on experience and paint, draw, design, or write. Alternatively, you may study both classic and recent works of literature, art, music, dance, or theatre. All courses in this area challenge you to understand creativity and the distinctive intellectual process of the human imagination.
Learning Objectives
- examine the nature of creativity, especially imaginative and intuitive thinking
- situate creative works, and judgments about those creative works, in their appropriate social and historical context
- develop your own creative and expressive abilities, so that you can better understand the qualities that shape an artist’s work
