Columbia Arts Initiative
President Lee C. Bollinger created the Arts Initiative at Columbia University in 2004 to change the role of the arts across the university, and hired Mosher as its first director, a position he stepped down from in Fall 2010. Since its inception the Initiative has developed programs to enliven the arts on campus and to link the university's intellectual mission to New York's cultural life. Among its programs are Passport to NYC, which provides Columbia students with free admission at 28 New York City museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA and the Guggenheim. The Ticket and Information Center (online and at the student center) provides free and discount tickets to NYC plays, concerts and films as well as campus events; 45,000 tickets are sold or distributed each semester. ArtsLink makes it possible for professors to assign live cultural events as easily as they assign books; because ArtsLink tickets are subsidized, the events cost the as much as a paperback. To extend Arts Initiative benefits beyond the student population, the Columbia Alumni Arts League was created to serve alumni, faculty and staff.
In 2005, Mosher collaborated with Peter Brook, bringing Brook's company, CICT, to Barnard College for a month-long residency. This residency marked a break in the long-standing relationship between Mr. Brook and Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Brook staged Tierno Bokar, based on the life of the Malian sufi of the same name. The play was adapted for the stage by Marie-Helene Estienne from Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar, le sage de Bandiagara by Amadou Hampate Ba (translated into English under A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar). The book and play detail Bokar's life and message of religious tolerance. See also West African Sufi. The Religious Heritage and Spiritual Search of Cerno Bokar Saalif Taal by Louis Brenner. Columbia University produced 44 related events, lectures, and workshops that were attended by over 3,200 people throughout the run of Tierno Bokar. Panel discussions focused on topics of religious tolerance and Muslim tradition in West Africa.
In fall 2006 Mosher's Arts Initiative again hosted a foreign luminary - this time playwright and former president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel.
Read more about this topic: Gregory Mosher
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