$1 Million Gift Transforms Visual Arts At Colorado State University
Thursday, February 27, 1997
FORT COLLINS--Colorado State University's art department,
backed by a $1 million gift from a donor who requested anonymity,
will bring to campus major national and international artists and
art critics to work with students and faculty beginning this
fall.
Peter Plagens, art critic for Newsweek magazine, is
scheduled to visit campus in November as the first in a series of
events made possible by the endowment, the largest gift given to
the College of Liberal Arts.
More than half the funds generated through the endowment
will go for visiting artist and visiting critic events.
"We're thrilled to begin our program with such a prestigious
critic," said Linny Frickman, gallery director. "Peter Plagens is
an expert on modern art on the West Coast, and he's highly
regarded as a painter as well as a critic. Through his work in
Newsweek and other media, he presents art in all its
manifestations to a wide audience."
The visiting artist series, still in its planning stages, is
envisioned by the art department as a way to put students,
faculty and the community in touch with the latest creative
thinking and practices in the art world.
"A series of major art figures will come to Colorado State
each year to work with students and faculty and interact with the
university and the community at large," said Phil Risbeck, art
department chairman and professor.
"We want to bring in the very best artists and commentators
on the arts, people who are known and respected nationally and
internationally," Risbeck said. "The events will be significant
for the university, the community, the state and beyond. We have
an independence we didn't have before.
"The gift was one of the most remarkable events in the
history of our department," he said. "It will forever change
visual arts on campus."
The donor was impressed with how faculty in the College of
Liberal Arts attended to special needs of students, said Loren
Crabtree, dean of the college.
"Faculty go the extra mile for students, and the donor
appreciated that," Crabtree said. "The endowment will enhance the
art department's reputation as the best in the region."
Risbeck emphasized that, before the gift was made to the art
department, the university and College of Liberal Arts were
generous in securing additional funding for the art department to
bring in programs such as Painting in Paris and the Robert
Colescott exhibition. Now, because of the gift, the art
department will have broader options.
"We had an excellent visiting artist program in the 1970s,
and the endowment will allow us to revive that tradition,"
Risbeck said.
About 40 percent of the proceeds from the endowment will go
to maintaining and enhancing the Stanley G. Wold Visual Resource
Center, an electronic library housed in the Visual Arts Building.
The center includes CD-ROM and video players, disk storage, study
carrels, a slide library and a small book library.
"Before the endowment, we had an $800 budget each semester,"
said Ruth Pettigrew, director of the Wold Resource Center. "Now
we'll have a yearly budget ranging between $18,000 and $20,000."
With the boost in budget, Pettigrew plans to improve access
to art images and information by increasing the slide collection
and enhancing computer and CD-ROM capabilities. She also would
like to increase hours of operation for the center and possibly
add graduate assistants to the work-study personnel who now help
run the center. In addition, Pettigrew said the gift will allow
the upgrading of computer access to art catalogues, both for use
by university students via Gopher and other computer programs and
as an information source on World Wide Web.
"It's mind-boggling what the gift is doing," Pettigrew said.
"I've had to reverse my own thinking and go from really low-
budget plans to much bigger possibilities.
"It's exciting--five years ago I wrote a vision statement
that included projects and plans I wanted to see become reality,
and it's all beginning to happen. Those projects may have
happened anyway, but now the endowment will help them happen a
lot faster."
For more information, contact Linny Frickman at (970)
491-7634.
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