A campus-based, community-oriented center for the public arts and humanities, committed to critical thinking and creativity in civic life.
 
In 1997, the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers-Newark was founded with the belief that the arts and humanities – in all their creativity and scholarly rigor – have a central role to play in the continued revitalization of Greater Newark. The Institute strives, in the finest university tradition, to satisfy a hunger for new ideas and new ways of looking at the city and the world. As part of a vibrant civic ecology, it engages a range of community partners and audiences through public programs whose collective objective is to help make Newark a more livable, interesting, and civically wholesome urban environment. Toward realizing that vision, Institute programs bring together the latest achievements in the arts and humanities with members of the community at-large including teachers, lawyers, students, corporate executives, medical professionals, parents, caregivers, elected officials, public servants, and life-long learners. The result is a more engaged and empathetic citizenry leveraging knowledge and insights generated by Institute programming to effect change in the community. Over the twenty years of its existence, the Institute has become a national model for how publicly engaged research universities can help cultivate a more livable city, one that thrives on the creative rhythms of the arts and humanities.