|
August 1999
From vision to reality ...
... a home and showplace for the arts
Story first printed in the 1999 Summer edition of Perspective newspaper for alumni and friends.
"Nothing can be more delightful to the cultivated mind than the combination of the useful with the beautiful."
So wrote Anna Baker under the heading "Art at Purdue" in the 1890 Souvenir yearbook published by Sigma Chi fraternity.
Miss Baker taught wood carving and other subjects in the old School of Industrial Art, which occupied Art Hall on the West Lafayette Campus. Her time was an early heyday for the arts on campus - an era that produced the likes of cartoonist John McCutcheon, author Newton Booth Tarkington and playwright George Ade and saw the first performances of the Glee Club and the marching band.
Even the Purdue seal at the time reflected the place the arts occupied. The same year Miss Baker extolled the union of the utilitarian and the aesthetic, the annual bulletin of classes was adorned with a seal featuring the main pillars of a Purdue education: Engineering, Science, Art and Agriculture.
Those strengths remain today, joined by an array of kindred subjects ranging from consumer and family sciences to nursing to pharmacy.
As Purdue diversified and matured since Miss Baker's time, the arts similarly branched out. The University boasts thriving academic programs in visual and performing arts, as well as co-curricular offerings through the Purdue Musical Organizations, Convocations and Lectures, and Galleries.
Those programs, though, can be hard to find. Offices, workshops and recital rooms of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts are located in a half-dozen buildings. Purdue Musical Organizations, while providing entertainment across the country and around the world, use undersized and cramped rehearsal space.
The arts, despite their roots and their place alongside technical education at Purdue, have taken the space that is left rather than having a home of their own.
A first step to return the arts to their rightful place at the University was taken in April. The Indiana General Assembly approved a $20.75 million building that will replace visual and performing arts academic and administrative space now dispersed throughout campus. A much more ambitious plan to provide a home for curricular and co-curricular arts on the West Lafayette Campus also is in place.
To be anchored on the north by the new academic building, the proposed Visual and Performing Arts Center will be a showplace for exhibits, performances and productions that will offer the campus and Greater Lafayette community a showplace for the arts.
"The excellence of any university depends more than anything else on its ability to recruit and retain outstanding faculty and students and provide for them the kind of environment in which they can develop in full all their talents," says President Steven Beering, who proposed the Visual and Performing Arts Center in 1994. "World-class facilities for the visual and performing arts are essential to that purpose."
The proposed 300,000-square-foot center will be a hub of cultural education and outreach. Students and faculty will mingle with arts patrons drawn to plays and concerts. The work of students in photography, ceramics and textiles will gain exposure undreamt of in current quarters in the Creative
Arts Buildings at Northwestern and Stadium avenues. A relocated John Purdue Room restaurant - complete with teaching facilities and space for cooking demonstrations - will welcome theatre-goers.
A three-story glass atrium will join the academic building with rehearsal, performance and gallery space. The atrium will be used for exhibits and as a lobby and reception area.
Work likely will begin next summer on the academic building. Later phases will include a performance hall, rehearsal space for PMO, exhibit area for Galleries, offices for Convocations and Lectures, and the restaurant.
Although the state will fund academic space, the remaining amount will be the focus of a fund-raising campaign.
"This will be the arts pavilion that the campus has always lacked but that so many alumni and friends, students, faculty, and staff agree a great university needs," says Margaret Rowe, dean of the School of Liberal Arts. "It is my hope that the many Purdue alumni who believe deeply in the edifying influence that the arts and beauty play in our lives will support this project."
Stories by Jay Cooperider
Photographs by David Umberger
Links to other related stories:
War-surplus buildings will go the way of Liberty Bonds
Visual and Performing Arts Center would link campus, community
The arts' reach: Visual, performing arts
enrollments exceed 8,000 a year
To the Purdue News and Photos Page
|
Purdue News
