Creative Control: Artistic Exclusivity in the Atlanta University Center
Creative student leaders must utilize minimal resources and provide for their own in order to provide for others who lack the same drive.
Creatives are individuals who produce original and imaginative ideas through mediums they consider artistic. In the Atlanta University Center (AUC), creativity takes many shapes. Without spaces for students to express themselves in the AUC, students cultivate their own. Often times these spaces breed exclusivity.
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) breed confidence into their students by telling them their black identities are worth celebration. Students assume expectations of greatness to continue the historical culture of Black excellence and leadership of their institution. Many students attend the AUC with the hope of developing relationships while positioning themselves for occupational success. In finding tribes, people hyperfocus on aspects of their personality and seek those aspects in others to make groups for confirmation and acceptance. HBCUs function to bring Black creatives and students together to collaborate and create networks.
Some creatives and students have noticed how shaped groups often times exclude people who don’t personify the same ideas of creativity. This means that some creatives find tribes while others find difficulty.
“A lot of times there’s these subgroups that’re created,” Spelman Sophomore Ariana Valburn said. “If you’re not the type of weird are artistic that is palatable enough to still be deemed cool, like the social media creative that everyone likes, if you’re not a part of that then you’re barred from making connections with certain people.”
What’s most troubling is that without positive reinforcement, from neither the institution nor fellow creatives, some people quit. Where creatives express themselves through their imaginative productions, giving up on art is giving up on themselves. The AUC should be encouraging confidence and unique leadership, yet some have noticed our institution’s subtle encouragement of conformity. The subtle encouragement to conform breeds creative insecurity. Then creative insecurity is proliferated as students matriculate and realize their institutions don’t invest in students’ imaginations.
Students invest thousands of dollars in the AUC for a degree, which is essentially a lottery ticket for success, all to starve of adequate resources. The AUC must realize some students determine excellence based on traits that deviate from traditional values.
“I don’t feel like the AUC, specifically Morehouse, doesn’t cater to artists,” Washington said. “The AUC contributes to the idea that being an artist isn’t a realistic occupation. The spaces here cater more to business, STEM, and political science majors.”
““It hurts, moreso hinders, me as an artist,” Washington said. “When you don’t see other people doing your art you don’t have the opportunity to say you do art as much.”
HBCUs have rich history, yey they often operate with humble budgets. With the history of HBCUs being to shape leaders and intellectuals, the first spaces to be overlooked and underfunded are fine arts. Creative students lack resources to expand their visions unless they do the work themselves. This turns into students working creatively off campus and sharing the resources they find alone with their tribes. That’s not always a bad thing.
“I started the Resurgence Collective at Morehouse and we meet every Sunday in Spelman’s Cosby auditorium,” Morehouse College Junior Deandre Washington said. “Though that may sound exclusive it’s an open space for anyone who wants to come. The word collective, for me, is horizontal and anyone who has the time to join is a part of the collective.”
Campus collectives are made by students to foster community where there would otherwise be isolation. Luckily some students show their innate leadership by guiding and gathering other gifted students. Creative student leaders must utilize minimal resources and provide for their own in order to provide for others who lack the same drive.
In this way, the dysfunction of the AUC can both detrimental and beneficial. If AUC institutions are serious about producing new generations of Black leaders, it’s important for administration to realize that leadership takes different shapes and isn’t always represented through stereotypical personifications of initiative.
For Morehouse, Spelman, and Clark Atlanta University to progress, there must be a reconsideration of their goals within guiding students. That reconsideration must look like allocation of funds to nontraditional and creative majors. And, above anything, as the AUC asks for the best from its students, they must also listen when students ask for better resources.
