In Short
As a student in the Creative Arts Enterprise program, you will hone your artistic skills as a musician, visual artist, or theatrical artist, while also expanding your knowledge of administration, marketing, publicity, and entrepreneurship. CAE graduates are well positioned to be active and thriving artists and arts administrators in the contemporary creative economy.
Program Overview
The Creative Arts Enterprise major program equips you to be an active and engaged arts professional in the modern world. You will select a concentration in Music, Theater, or Visual Art, and get extensive training in that artistic discipline. In addition, you will take a highly customizable set of coursework in entrepreneurship, marketing, and professional writing. The major allows you to develop a personalized and flexible set of skills, with which you will emerge as a creative artist ready to meet the needs of audiences and arts organizations in a shifting global economy.
You will be prepared for a career as a fine or performing artist with a solid grasp of how to manage the entrepreneurial aspects of being a professional in the arts, and also for a career as an arts administrator, promoter, or other position with a diverse set of organizational demands, but where a strong grounding as a fine or performing artist is highly beneficial.
The CAE program draws on the expertise of invested faculty in multiple departments and disciplines across campus, and allows students to form multiple mentoring relationships across subject areas. The degree is awarded as a Bachelor of Arts (BA), and you will need to complete courses demonstrating intermediate proficiency in a world language - further positioning you as a versatile arts professional.
Are you a current Fitchburg State student looking to change your major to Creative Arts Enterprise? Please fill out this internal transfer form, and consult the Registrar's Office.
Experiential Opportunities
Internships
ARTeries
Concert Band
Fitchburg State Choirs
Community Orchestra
Jazz and Modern Band
Study Abroad
Curriculum and Other Information
Students who complete this program will be able to:
- Demonstrate proficiency in the core tools and skills of their artistic practice
- Evaluate and critique works from their artistic discipline through the lens of appropriate theoretical and historical contexts
- Develop writing skills needed to address diverse audiences in a variety of professional products and genres
- Integrate academic work with public engagement to produce audience-aware marketing products, artworks, and performances
- Apply entrepreneurial skills (market opportunity recognition and creation, risk assessment, financing, strategic planning, etc.) to artistic practices and institutions
- Develop an understanding of the ways that the arts impact community social and economic development
- Administrator and manager of arts organizations (orchestras, theaters, galleries, museums, choirs, bands, studios)
- Professional visual artist, musician, actor, director, etc.
- Arts nonprofit administrator
- Artist promoter / marketer
- Curator / museum worker
- Craft and fine artist
- Art director
- Theatrical producer / director
- Arts entrepreneur, creating the new arts-focused businesses of the future
The Creative Arts Enterprise program creates and enhances institutional ties to our local community, with mutual benefit to students and arts organizations in the region. The city of Fitchburg's focus on the arts as a means of renewal involves an ever-growing number of arts projects and organizations dedicated to this work, which creates opportunities for our students and program graduates alike. To highlight just a few examples of projects that represent this focus:
- NewVue Communities, a non-profit organization working on a range of community issues, runs a Fitchburg Arts Stewards Training program, and as a result the city now has an active and growing Arts Stewards community group
- The BF Brown / Fitchburg Arts Community project involves a large number of live-work artist studio spaces across the street from the Fitchburg Art Museum
- The Community Mural Institute, resulting in three large-scale murals in Fitchburg’s downtown neighborhood, each developed in collaboration with a specific community group to honor their work
- The City of Fitchburg’s recent NEA-funded Main Street Arts Project, commissioning public art pieces for four key intersections downtown
- The university’s acquisition and development of a major theatrical space on Main Street in downtown Fitchburg