Founded in 2022, Queens College’s School of Arts (SoA) promises to reshape how the arts are represented and organized across campus.
Simone L. Yearwood, the Dean of Faculty at the School of Arts and Humanities describes the SoA as “the most comprehensive, multidisciplinary arts education within the City University of New York (CUNY) system.” Almost four years after its initial establishment, the school is still taking shape, raising questions about how close it is to achieving its vision and what it currently offers students.
The SoA is home to the Aaron Copland School of Music, the Art Department, the Department of Drama, Theatre & Dance, the Creative Writing & Literary Translation MFA Program, and the Media Studies Department. The SoA also collaborates with the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, the Kupferberg Center for the Arts, the Louis Armstrong House Museum, and the Queens College Arts Center. According to the SoA website, these partnerships aim to connect students with a range of professional arts spaces, both on and off campus.
According to Dean Yearwood, the School of Arts was formally established to “meet the growing ambitions of its students” and to “advance the president’s vision for strengthening the college’s academic excellence and creative distinction.”
Yearwood added that formalizing the SoA strengthens “both artistic excellence and access” while helping students “build professional momentum, and pursue meaningful careers within New York City’s cultural life and beyond.” She also explained that the school would support students through “cross-disciplinary collaboration, sustained mentorship, and real-world preparation alongside rigorous academic training,” though her statement does not outline a specific timeline for when these goals will be met.
When asked what “official” status means in practical terms for the School of Arts, Yearwood explained how it “reflects a long-term commitment to establish the School of Arts as a stand-alone, fully accredited school,” comparing it to the development of the School of Business. Both websites provide reports on their respective school’s progress: the School of Business has a Strategic Plan document for 2024-2029, and the SoA produces annual reports.
Unlike the School of Business’s multi-year strategic plan, however, the SoA reports do not outline any specific future goals or projected timelines. Instead, the SoA report is more retrospective, providing a visual timeline of the year being reported, listing new and updated projects.
Yearwood defined the next steps for the SoA as centering on “intentional, strategic growth” and strengthening “connections between academic training, public presentation, leadership development, and professional practice, while continuing to identify new courses, programs, and partnerships that best support students’ artistic and career pathways.” She also said that the School of Art’s future progress based on these next steps “ensures the school’s growth is purposeful, coordinated, and responsive to the evolving needs of emerging artists and creative leaders.”
Silvia Mihai is an upper Senior majoring in Fine Arts and minoring in Business and Liberal Arts (BALA), has gained extensive experience through the SoA, and is currently a Social Media intern for the SoA who participated in the Arts Leadership Bootcamp, a weekend-long intensive program that introduces students to arts administration, leadership, and entrepreneurship.
“[The] SoA helped me prepare for a career in the arts through exhibition opportunities, workshops at the Bootcamp, and an internship,” said Mihai.
It’s been almost four years since the School of Arts was founded, and the school has expanded its programs and initiatives as it works towards a more clearly defined structure to become a stand-alone, fully accredited school.
Yearwood explicitly stated that the SoA plans to “strengthen interdisciplinary pathways, expand opportunities for creative practice and collaboration, and thoughtfully assess programmatic and facility needs.” When proceeding in the future, she says that any “future development will be guided by its ability to meaningfully support students’ artistic, scholarly, and professional trajectories at Queens College,” positioning the SoA as a long-term project that is still in progress.
While the school is still evolving, its next phases will determine how effectively these ambitions become a reality.
