Hogan Medlin’s arts plan remains stalled

While the status of former student body president Hogan Medlin’s student arts innovation endowment remains vague, a separate student group is prepared to offer its own vision of the future of the University’s artistic community.

The group, a subcommittee of the Chancellor’s Student Innovation Team, will present a working draft of its arts plan — titled Carolina Creates — at a Sept.19 kickoff meeting.

And while Medlin’s ambitious plan seems to have stalled, Carolina Creates’ authors have tried to avoid the executive structure of last year’s plan.

“Hogan’s plan didn’t go anywhere after Hogan left,” said Ian Lee, vice chairman of the Chancellor’s Student Innovation Team. Lee is also a member of The Daily Tar Heel’s editorial board.

Medlin led the Arts Innovation Steering Committee, which gathered some of the University’s highest-ranking artistic figures for a year-long policy workshop.

“He spent the year setting policy guidelines, not structure, and there’s nobody left to pick up the pieces,” Lee said.

Those missing pieces include a partially endowed enrichment fund for the arts, which was kickstarted in April by an anonymous $20,000 donation. Medlin had originally planned to create a separate council to manage the fund.

The status of that endowment is unknown, and Medlin, who is out of the country on a Fulbright fellowship, did not respond to requests for comment.

“Nothing’s been continued, from what I know,” Student Body President Mary Cooper said. “Hogan’s dream was great, but now we’re concerned with how to give students access to the arts.”

Ben Neal, co-chairman of the Arts Advocacy Committee who also helped draft Medlin’s arts plan, was not aware of any further progress on the endowment.

The new group’s working draft identifies four distinct areas — music, visual arts, writers and global initiatives — as broad springboards for fostering student expression, said Hudson Vincent, the chairman of the student innovation team.

Planned initiatives include free student music performances in campus spaces, student visual art in academic buildings and a writer’s festival for student, faculty and staff writers, among others.

An exhaustive and hazily-defined website is also in the works, which Vincent said will ultimately serve as the home page for creative endeavours at the University.

“We’re hoping the website will help foster connective abilities across disciplines,” Vincent said.

Many of the Carolina Creates projects are near implementation, owing in part to the group’s attachment to Chancellor Holden Thorp’s Innovate@Carolina fundraising campaign.

But members of the group say that the projects also owe a debt to Medlin’s committee for priming University leaders on the campus’ artistic deficits.

“It’d be stupid to disregard Hogan’s work,” Vincent said. “Initiatives are duplicated, sure, but he did a great job laying out the problem. It’d be stupid to just dismiss that work.”

Contact the Arts Editor at arts@dailytarheel.com.