The arts and humanities comprise the core and soul of our society – a fact we will celebrate at the University of Iowa in the Year of the Arts and Humanities. We will explore the intimate connections between creativity and culture fostered in the arts and humanities. New works will be commissioned and innovative thinkers encouraged to take new steps in their respective disciplines. And this is just the beginning of a larger commitment to the study of that which makes us fully human. Indeed this celebration will reach deeply and broadly into our community and throughout the state.

We wish to recognize the value of culture and enhance the role of the arts and humanities in society – in our schools, workplaces, houses of worship, and service organizations. What is culture? How does it influence our daily lives? How do the arts and humanities shape our society? These are some of the vital questions we will address. We hope to bring together other educational institutions, agencies of culture, artistic organizations – in short, anyone and everyone involved in the support and production of culture.

The life of discovery – this is what we will examine in a range of artistic and scholarly disciplines. The creative process in all of its dimensions – artistic, scholarly, scientific – will be the focus on campus. We will host conferences, forums, discussions; commission new works in literature, the visual and performing arts; initiate dialogues with artists, scholars, and scientists to learn how they do their work.

We will start with a symposium on the creative process, inviting leading scholars, artists, and scientists from the UI community and elsewhere to discuss their work and the routes they took to their discoveries. A year-long lecture series will complement the symposium so that at every turn we may watch some of the great minds of the age in action.

We will utilize the resources of radio, television, film, book publishing, gallery space, and the World Wide Web to highlight those exploring the frontiers of their disciplines, in interviews, profiles, documentaries, essays on the creative process, and exhibits.

Outreach to every corner of the state will be an integral part of this celebration. UI faculty will be encouraged to share their insights into the life of discovery with diverse audiences and constituencies, recognizing that all Iowans have a stake in what writers and composers find on the blank page, and artists paint on a canvas, and scholars learn in their encounters with texts old and new. Creativity, as Richard Florida argues in The Rise of the Creative Class, "is the driving force of economic growth." Thus we will examine how creativity shapes our lives, transforming rural and urban communities alike. "Simply the self-interest of mankind calls for a more general effort to foster the invention of life," Brewster Ghiselin noted in his seminal work, The Creative Process. The Year of the Arts and Humanities will promote that effort, that invention of life.