A life changed through the arts

Jasa McKenzie ’14 didn’t know much about art when she arrived in Minneapolis from rural South Dakota for college in 2010. For that matter, she hadn’t known much about Augsburg University before crossing Riverside Avenue on a whim after a University of Minnesota campus visit. A generous scholarship offer led her to enroll at Augsburg.

The art program convinced her to stay.

“When I came to school, even though I didn’t know anything about art, I figured that people don’t know how to be a doctor, and they go to school for that. I don’t know how to be an artist, so I’ll go to school for that,” she said. “The Augsburg art program scooped me up and set me off in the art direction.”

After pursuing curatorial opportunities in New York, Southern California, and Germany, McKenzie is back in Minneapolis, where she now works as the producer of The Great Northern festival. She regularly crosses paths with former professors and colleagues from Augsburg in the vibrant Twin Cities arts scene. When Associate Professor Chris Houltberg shared the news about a gift to establish a named art school at Augsburg, she was thrilled.

“Any success I have—and even just the fact that I know about curating as an option—comes from Augsburg,” McKenzie said. “I feel like if I mention Augsburg, people might think of the nursing program, or maybe science. I’m always like, ‘No—the art program!’”

An Augsburg arts school

The Augsburg Schwartz School of the Arts, first announced in April 2023, brings together the performing, visual, and narrative arts into a single hub of creative exchange at Augsburg. This new administrative structure includes existing programs in art and design, creative writing, film, music, music therapy, and theater, as well as new opportunities to innovate across disciplines.

At a time when access to arts education is increasingly jeopardized across the United States, creating a new arts school might be a countercultural move. But leaders at Augsburg see it as the perfect time to double down on creative expression.

“We’re staking a claim that the arts matter, the arts are essential for everyone, and that in a world moving toward automation, we need creative thinkers and creative problem solvers,” said Houltberg, who was tapped to lead the Schwartz School as its inaugural director. “We’re going to need the outcry and the ability to articulate the human experience, which art has done in all its various forms.”

The Schwartz School was made possible through a transformative gift from Regent Emeritus John Schwartz ’67, for whom the school is named. A longtime supporter of Augsburg music students, Schwartz sang baritone and toured Europe with the Augsburg choir as an undergraduate—an experience that ignited a lifelong love of choral music. His time at Augsburg indelibly shaped his worldview and his leadership approach over a four-decade career as a healthcare executive.

In many ways, he is the model for the goal Augsburg’s faculty has adopted for the Schwartz School: “a life changed through the arts.”

“Although his career was outside of music, I think John Schwartz exemplified the greatest hope we have for liberal arts students: that they have a love and appreciation for the arts, even if they go and do something completely different,” Houltberg said.

Designing from scratch

Two of Augsburg’s defining attributes—the diversity of its student body and its location in the heart of Minneapolis—make it a particularly exciting place to establish a destination arts hub, according to faculty.

“The arts constitute one of the most vital economic sectors in the Twin Cities, in turn one of the strongest creativity markets in the country,” said Kristina Boerger, the John N. Schwartz Professor of Choral Leadership and Conducting. “Serving our students—many of whom have not previously been privileged with access to quality arts education and training—means making strong arts education available in the heart of this metropolis.”

Artists’ ability to adapt to change and to work with fluidity makes the arts an ideal testing ground for a new, interdisciplinary school, added Houltberg. Twenty-first century artists are required to move between disciplines in a way that has only accelerated in recent years. Today’s students are arriving eager to collaborate, already innovating across genres, technologies, and boundaries.

The challenge has been coming up with a structure to facilitate and sustain this type of creative exploration, not constrain it. Over the past year, Houltberg has led the arts faculty in a collaborative process to develop a vision for a unified arts school with a distinctive Augsburg flair.

The faculty sorted into five working groups focused on intersections, identity, structure, curriculum, and “big ideas” for the Schwartz School. “I had always been apprehensive about trying to get consensus amongst faculty, because it’s challenging,” Houltberg laughed. “They’re all very intelligent, autonomous folks. And then if you have artists on top of that, they’re really independent thinkers!” But, he said, what quickly emerged was a powerful blend of creativity, openness, and camaraderie.

The working groups tackled big structural questions—not in the sense of a new building or physical location (neither of which is currently planned)—but in terms of how students spend their time and how the curriculum can be reimagined to facilitate interdisciplinary cross-pollination. New “on-ramp” and “sampler” courses are being developed to lower barriers to exploration for majors and non-majors alike. Parallel scheduling for lab time across programs will make it easier for students to work together—for example, writing original music for a theater production or collaborating on a film script—and for students from any discipline to attend events with local creatives.

There is also abundant opportunity to build on the strengths of existing programs in a multidisciplinary context. Rachel Bergman, the Leland B. Sateren ’35 Endowed Professor and Chair of Music, noted that in addition to performance, the music department offers a variety of degree types, including music business, music therapy, and music education. “One of the things we’ve been talking about in preliminary conversations is how to broaden that to look like arts education or arts administration, so that it’s more comprehensive than just music,” she said.

Bergman added, “I’ve been at several different institutions. It’s really refreshing to see how grassroots this process has been, in terms of the faculty having the opportunity to come together and figure out what we want the Schwartz School to look like.”

Learning by doing

Augsburg’s signature commitment to hands-on learning is perhaps nowhere more salient than in the arts. So it’s no surprise that even the process of developing the Schwartz School has been a site for collaborative learning and creative exchange.

As a film production and history double-major, Ellis Garton ’24 is intrigued by the ways film directing leverages different skill sets: storytelling, photography, screenwriting, and more. He learned of the Schwartz School through a documentary film production class last year, when the rationale for the school became immediately concrete.

Part of a team tasked with shooting a promotional video for the Schwartz School, Garton found himself working with a creative writing student on the assignment. “I kept thinking, this would have been helpful before now!” he said. “I could have known this person long before and developed a relationship, where we could have worked on projects together.”

Darcey Engen ’88, professor and chair of theater arts, pointed to this type of collaboration as the greatest promise of the Schwartz School. In an interview for the short film created by Garton and his teammates, she said, “We know that when students graduate, they tend to stick together. They call each other to work on projects. Your colleagues at Augsburg become your colleagues in life.

“Now, with the Schwartz School of the Arts, these students will leave with a music colleague, an art and design colleague, a film colleague, and that’s going to propel them forward to create really complex, culture-specific art in ways that we haven’t seen here at Augsburg before now.”

From trust to belonging

One after another, the faculty working groups zeroed in on the fact that arts “classrooms” permeate much further than the boundaries of campus. From concerts and exhibitions to performances and publications, the arts require public-facing engagement.

How do you foster the courage for students to put their work out into the world? By building trust—in themselves, their craft, and each other.

“One of the things that John [Schwartz] described to me in great detail was when he was singing in a European church,” Houltberg recounted. “He said, ‘I just remember thinking, I shouldn’t be here. I’m a small kid from a southwest Minnesota town.’

“In addition to amazing opportunities like singing in European churches, music gave him identity and belonging. Oftentimes, I think our students think, ‘I don’t belong here.’ But we know that they do. They just need the space and the time and the place and the opportunities to experience it.”

McKenzie found that sense of belonging in her design classes, as an intern in the Augsburg Galleries, and now as an alum, where she’s come full circle to partner with Houltberg and other Augsburg colleagues on a multidisciplinary project that will explore themes of climate change for The Great Northern on campus this January. She is delighted by the idea that the Schwartz School will bring a level of recognition to Augsburg’s arts programs that is commensurate with their quality.

“Personally, my life was changed by the arts,” she said. “By the arts at Augsburg.”

Read more about the life of John Schwartz ’67.

Top image: Augsburg students in a paper making and marbling art class (Photo by Courtney Perry)