Today’s students are incredibly skilled, passionate, curious, and realistic, but they confront global challenges we’re just beginning to understand. The College is committed to preparing students for a lifetime of sustained art-making and creative thought. Though the forms of art-making and design practice will change over time and according to new contexts, the core belief in the power of the arts to enhance people’s lives forms the bedrock of the CoA+A.
Mission
The College of Arts + Architecture promotes the arts and design as engines of civic imagination and social equity through distinction in creative teaching and research, artistic performance, and community-driven work.
Vision
Through investigations in the performing and visual arts, design and affiliated pursuits, we provoke thought, cultivate aesthetic sensibilities, make space for memory and reflection, instigate creative action, help build communities, and promote justice, equity, and inclusion.
The College’s vision is shaped by five challenges to contemporary arts and architecture and in response to our unique location and institutional context:
- The need to catalyze the institution’s mission as an urban research university through creative work, research, student empowerment, and partnerships in the Charlotte region and beyond
- The need to reposition curricula and embrace through our teaching and learning diverse and global perspectives, anti-racism, social equity, and environmental justice
- The need to interrogate current modes of valuation and to advance more inclusive practices, processes, and policies
- The need for collaboration across disciplines and domains so as to be able to ask bolder and more relevant questions and expand students’ understandings of their roles and opportunities for achievement
- The need to embrace a rapidly changing arts and design, technology, demographic, economic, higher education, and post-pandemic landscape.
Strategic Plan
Through an inclusive process involving students and alumni, faculty and staff, and community partners, the College completed the 2021-26 CoA+A Strategic Plan in Spring 2021.