Center for Regional Excellence Cultural Discovery and Learning	Advanced Search

Mission and Vision

Northwest Indiana is remarkable in its cultural history, complexity, and the radical changes experienced since its industrial growth began with the nation’s huge demands for oil, steel, and other industrial products. Its cultures are dramatic in their diversity and acute in their need for a communal forum for cultural expression, documentation, and learning. From the industrial behemoths of Hammond, Whiting, East Chicago, and Gary to the malls of Merrillville, from the lakeshore dunes to the farms of Kouts, the cultural story of Northwest Indiana is visible in its architecture, land, languages, documents and photographs, arts, and even in the body language of its inhabitants. Every facet of our lives has been nuanced by the complexity of living in tight proximity to divergent cultures: the culture of steel; the culture of environmental appreciation and preservation; the culture of one’s native land; the culture of tilling the soil.

The Center for Regional Excellence serves as an architectural, geographic, academic and community center for discovery and learning unique to the region. Culture is its subject of study as seen through the eyes of various perspectives. It is interdisciplinary in scope, engaging diversity in all its dimensions. The Center provides opportunities for collaboration among academic disciplines as they strive to research and disseminate knowledge about the region’s culture, while engaging with students and the community in cultural discovery and learning. While the arts and humanities have traditionally focused on cultural exploration, so too are many other disciplines touched by the need to contribute to a greater understanding of our cultural selves. Fundamental ethical, economic, biologic, and social aspects of our lives are created through our cultural circumstances. Cultural discrimination has serious implications regarding the economic health of a community. Even in our limited geographic location, cultural and ethical beliefs and practices influence our personal health, life span, rates of victimization, access to education, democratic participation, and overall social welfare. As former IU President Myles Brand so eloquently put it, “Life would be impoverished, no matter our health and wealth, without art and music and literature. Rather than being incompatible, science and technology and the arts and humanities nourish one another and call upon a common set of intellectual qualities and habits of mind.” Engaging with these issues is the interdisciplinary job of a whole university working in harmony with its population.

The Center is simultaneously a place for intellectual engagement and discovery and a site for enacting critical and creative thinking about our cultural lives—a think tank moved beyond “ivory tower” conceptualizing into active and collaborative engagement with cultural issues. It is a multi-phased project to coalesce and enhance existing community and academic programs, leveraging current strengths to create initiatives. Working within a “culture of creativity,” the Center will explore the convergence of any discipline and its relationship to culture, for example, the intersections of cultural discovery and ethical, social and scientific inquiry, such as in special studies of the local environment and ecology, regional migration, civil rights movements, and urban and nonviolent studies. Through cultural events and community forums, the Center can serve as the cultural heart of the northwest Indiana community to expand our intellectual, aesthetic, environmental, and social awareness and appreciation of the region’s rich diversity.

As the home of IU Northwest's designated Areas of Excellence, the Center for Regional Excellence helps establish Indiana University Northwest’s unique identity as a place for sustainable health and well-being through cultural exploration and the study of cultural causation. The Center builds on IU Northwest’s excellent academic and co-curricular programs and facilities, many unique in the region, such as:

• The Calumet Regional Archives
• The Northwest Centers for Data and Analysis and Environmental Justice
• Gallery Northwest and the IU Northwest Gallery for Contemporary Art
• Theatre Northwest (13,00015,000 visitors/year) and Children’s Theatre (9,000/year)
• Student-centered creative activities such as Spirits, The Literary/Arts Magazine
• Steel Shavings Magazine, featuring oral histories by IU Northwest students
• Extension of the Diversity Programming Group’s array of community-based events

It can create a formal and virtual space for designing and realizing nascent proposals, such as:

• A sculpture garden and other public artworks, such as a large mosaic project
• Cutting-edge CAI/Technology in the Arts laboratory with digital imaging and remote access
• Enhanced urban, societal, and ethics studies
• Theatre and Art and Music festivals and other community partnerships

Eventually the Center envisions construction of an architecturally significant complex (on or near campus), planned in collaboration with city, regional, and other community groups, showcasing the architectural possibilities of the region and the cooperative relationship of campus and community. Its features would include galleries for art, historical, and scientific exhibitions; an auditorium for forums, lectures, and films; theatre and concert space for the performing arts; research labs utilizing traditional processes and new media; reading rooms for archival collections; a kitchen for ethnic foods; and plenty of open space—interior and exterior—for receptions, interactive exhibits, festivals, performances, and creative thinking and writing workshops. Even now, though, the Center has no physical boundaries: the entire campus can be a free-flowing study center with hands-on, interactive learning in a variety of spaces. The Center for Regional Excellence promotes the good health and well-being of the community as a place to enjoy, learn, discover, create, and renew and refresh, a place where students, faculty, staff, alumni, and local residents can participate in wide-ranging explorations of the region’s multifaceted culture as a lifelong endeavor.