Fine Arts Experience (FAE)

The Fine Arts Experience will expose students to a wide variety of artistic expression through attending fine Arts presentations on the UMHB campus and reflection upon those experiences. Students will learn appropriate audience decorum for fine arts events and have opportunities to demonstrate this behavior. Students will better understand and appreciate the visual and performing arts as an expression of the human condition.

• The purpose of education is not only to inform but to enrich and enlighten. Learning about the visual and performing arts gives students a window onto the rich and interesting world around them. Through the fine arts, students learn about their own history and culture, as well as the history and culture of others. The fine arts are the concrete images and sounds of the past and present. What we know about past cultures, we know chiefly from the arts that they left behind. Through the arts, the history of particular people springs to life. We are surrounded by the arts. Almost nothing is created or communicated without the influence of music art, drama, and architecture. Familiarity with and understanding of the arts and how they relate to past and present culture completes a student’s education.
• “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” is a famous Albert Einstein quote with which almost everyone is familiar. Imagination is the tool that allows us to think divergently. Creativity allows us to apply our hard earned knowledge. Without both imagination and creativity, there would be no progress. Historian Eugene Ferguson said it this way: “Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometric theories of structures, or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture-literally a vision- in the minds of those who built them.”
• Music speaks to our hearts. Art awakens our emotions. Unlike any other academic pursuit, the arts are an avenue to the soul. Understanding and appreciating the arts awakens student’s emotion and passion, two essential ingredients in presenting the Gospel to the world.

Students will need to attend one event designated as a Fine Arts Experience each semester they are enrolled.