From the Dean

After 15 years as dean and five before as senior associate dean, this is my final week “deaning” for the College of Fine Arts. I want to take this parting moment to say thank you to all of our friends, supporters and advocates, both on and off campus.

I’ve been flattered by the observation that this has been a period of great change for the college. Some of that change was sought out, and some was thrust upon us. Embracing change has come not a moment too soon in the fast-changing worlds of education, technology, culture and commerce. The creative disciplines that make up this college—and those newly finding their way in—are at a confluence of wild streams of innovation that make for hazards as well as world-changing opportunities, if we harness them.

I’m immodest enough to believe the College of Fine Arts is the most innovative public arts college in the country.

As a creative college, I’ve asked that we embrace the future as much as nurture our past; we’re big enough to be modernists in the morning and classicists in the evening. We can honor the high traditions of our shared culture while being irreverently populist in our inclusivity. I’ve insisted that we celebrate the well-turned hand every bit as much as the sagacious insight and the perfected performance just the same as startling acts of spontaneity. I’ve asked that we recognize the creativity in technological invention and entrepreneurial adventure as much as in selfless acts of artistic genius. I’ve never let the arts be treated as a decorative embellishment on this ambitious Forty Acres in this headstrong state. I’ve insisted that our students’ interests always figured first in measures of our own accomplishments as a faculty and a college.

The vision, so far as there was one, emerged of its own out of these contentious and sometimes irreconcilable aspirations.

And if we as a college have become all that, it’s in no small part because of the ambition and steadfast commitment of our Fine Arts Advisory Council, and our many friends and alumni. I’ve been humbled by your generosity, honored by your trust, and blessed by your friendship.

I am hugely optimistic about our future, as well as the future of the arts in public education—and all the more so for the rejuvenating leadership of our new dean, Dr. Ramón H. Rivera-Servera.

Being dean of the College of Fine Arts has been an enormously rewarding, creative challenge. I’ll miss it—most of it, anyway. And all of you. Thank you.

I could not be more eager to get back to teaching, and writing and thinking—more deeply and calmly—about the place of the arts in our lives, with the hope that I might contribute a bit of truth and beauty to a world in need of both.

In the next issue of Dean’s Insider and moving forward, you’ll be hearing from Dr. Rivera-Servera in this newsletter. I hope you’ll join me in giving him your warmest welcome.

Semper Excelsior!

Doug Dempster

And Texas Performing Arts (TPA) stage supervisor Conrad Haden has been there for all 40 years. In a terrific recent Spectrum News story, Conrad takes viewers on a behind-the-scenes tour of Bass Concert Hall and reflects back on his time in the venue.

Of course, this year has been the most challenging year on record for TPA, but executive director Bob Bursey is doing his best to make lemonade out of the lemons handed to him by a global pandemic and position the organization for a bright future.

While the stages have gone dark this year, Bob’s worked with his team to find creative ways to make good use of their spaces. The venue invited audiences back in for socially distanced, timed reservations to view Behind the Scenes: The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop, and they’ve also partnered with Fusebox Festival to create a much-needed residency program to support Austin-based artists and offer them space and support to create new work.

As we look ahead to the days when we are able to invite audiences back into Bass Concert Hall for live performances, we expect the venue to emerge stronger than ever. TPA recently announced its upcoming Broadway in Austin season for 2021-22, and it’s a stellar lineup with Hamilton, The Lion King, Mean Girls and other blockbuster hits.

And while the stages have been dark, TPA has taken the opportunity tackle updates and renovations in Bass to improve safety and the patron experience. When patrons return in the fall, they can expect to see new seating with improved sightlines in the balcony, a refreshed lobby space with additional circulation space to reduce crowding, improved audio/visual systems, better aisle lighting, fresh carpet and more. Additionally, the venue’s ventilation system has been upgraded to provide better air filtration throughout the hall.

I’m grateful to Bob for his steady leadership and to the entire TPA staff for their creativity and resilience in a year that has rocked the performing arts. I know they’re eager to see Bass stage light up again and for audiences to return to live performances.

Excelsior,

Doug Dempster

You can read more about Terry’s extraordinary life and accomplishments here.

Terry, as she’s known to friends, came from humble roots in South Texas. Along with her husband of 63 years, Joe R. Long, she has been one of the most honored and persistent philanthropists in Austin and Texas. It’s not the slightest exaggeration to say that the cultural life of Austin—from the Long Center, to the Austin Symphony, to UT’s Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, to our Piano and String faculty, to the Austin Soundwaves youth orchestra program—would simply not be culturally what it is had it not been for Terry and Joe’s devotions to Austin.

Famously gracious and modest, Terry also personified that Texas “can do” spirit—more nearly a steely “must do” spirit—that I’ve come to admire among the many Texas women who have led arts patronage in Texas and the U.S. for generations. Her goal in life was to help future generations of Texans by promoting education, medicine and the arts, which she and Joe managed to do generously by donating over $150 million over the years.

In 2004, the College of Fine Arts recognized Terry and Joe with the E. William Doty Award, our college’s highest honor, for their generosity and commitment to UT and our college. Their first major gift to the college was the lead funding to create the College of Fine Arts String Quartet Endowment, which brought the Miró Quartet to UT. This was followed by the creation of two endowed faculty chairs, one for piano and one for cello, held by distinguished faculty members Anton Nel and Bion Tsang, musicians they loved and who performed in their home many times. They also created a generous student scholarship in piano.

For many of the last 20 years, I’ve enjoyed the gilded elegance of attending house concerts at the Longs’ magnificent Austin mansion, “Longwood,” where Terry was the perfect hostess. She greeted every guest at the door with hugs and kisses, before ushering us into the concert salon that featured a one-of-a-kind Steinway grand piano surrounded by an extraordinary museum-quality art and jade collection. What a privilege to have been part of that period of house concerts introduced to the Longs and Austin by our former dean Dr. Robert Freeman.

Terry and Joe have prospered on a grand scale. They have fulfilled and lived the American dream. But they never forgot their modest beginnings, in countless ways. Just one example was her desire to build a community music program for underserved Hispanic children in East Austin. With support from the College of Fine Arts, Austin Soundwaves began more than 10 years ago with a handful of children in one charter school in East Austin. Today it’s providing free music instruction in more than a dozen schools to hundreds of children, many of whom are forging an educational path to UT Austin and the College of Fine Arts. Terry believed that music education would open educational and career opportunities to students. Austin Soundwaves is proving her right.

Terry and Joe have lived their lives as energetic, successful, principled members of our Austin and university community. Even more importantly, they lived their lives in a manner that stands as an example and a calling to the rest of us.

Let’s do our best not to disappoint Dr. Long.

Excelsior,

Doug Dempster

I hope you and yours came through this past week safe and healthy, with minimal damage to your homes. I hope you’ve enjoyed a warm bath and filled your pantry, commonplace conveniences that at least for the moment, seem precious luxuries.

In Austin, here on campus, we’ve been picking up the pieces. Swabbing out the floods and checking for power and internet. The campus community was scattered and displaced by the storm, but pulled together more tightly than ever, looking after one another. I took two faculty families into my home, which lost water, but not power and heat. We opened campus buildings as a refuge for students, faculty and staff who had no other options. I jogged over to campus during the worst of the storm to make sure our buildings were accessible and operating, which gave me the chance to watch young Texans frolicking heedlessly in more snow than many had ever seen before, and got to push some of their cars out of more snow than they knew how to drive in.

By the time you get this, we’ll be back in session having lost a week and a half of classes. We’re adjusting course schedules and learning objectives to get students through their coursework by the end of the semester. We’re restarting our COVID testing and vaccinations in Gregory Gym and inoculating more and more Austinites every day.

Our students don’t know it yet, but this past year has given them an invaluable gift. It’s tested their resilience, their mettle, their grit. They’ve learned to be creative and productive under the most confined and challenging conditions. They’ve learned to lean on others and to lend a hand. They’ve learned in fighting a pandemic or surviving a killer winter storm that going it alone can be a fatal prescription. They’ve learned how deeply committed their faculty and this university is to their education and their futures. They’ve been given a great gift of learning that they’re tougher and more capable and determined than they might have ever guessed. It is, to be sure, the school of hard knocks and life lessons, but it’s an unforgettable education nonetheless.

We’ve picked ourselves up, and today we restart our teaching and learning. Once again.

I am willfully treating last week’s horrendous winter storm as the altogether fittingly unforgettable climax, and finale, to an altogether unforgettably challenging year. I am taking arms against a sea of troubles by declaring this week’s full-on, glorious Texas sunshine as the awaited light at the end of this long tunnel. Mirabile dictu!

Excelsior!

Doug Dempster

Dr. Rivera-Servera comes to UT Austin from Northwestern University, where he chaired the Department of Performance Studies and the Department of Theatre in the School of Communication. He knows the College of Fine Arts and UT well as the first graduate of the Performance as Public Practice Ph.D. program in UT Austin’s Department of Theatre and Dance. He returns to Austin as the first Latino dean in the history of the College of Fine Arts.

Dr. Rivera-Servera is a prolific interdisciplinary scholar whose research explores the ways the arts contribute to social transformation and help us become a more intentionally collaborative and ethical society. His publications focus on creative ethnography, new work development and Black and Latinx arts and cultures in North America and the Caribbean. His scholarship documents a wide array of performance practices, ranging from theatre and concert dance to social dance, fashion and speech. He is the author of Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2012).

We have been through a period of tremendous change and growth during the last 14 years, and the college will continue to lean into the future under Dean Rivera-Severa’s leadership. I’m too immodest to wonder that the College of Fine Arts is anything less than the most entrepreneurial and innovative public university arts college in the country. We are resolutely populist in our inclusiveness and rigorously venerable in our traditions, but we are also impatiently progressive, entrepreneurial and unorthodox. And if we are all that, it’s in no small part because of the ambition and steadfast commitment of our Fine Arts Advisory Council, our friends and alumni.

I am hugely optimistic about the college’s future, as well as the future of the arts in public education in this country—and all the more so for Dr. Rivera-Servera being appointed the next dean of the College of Fine Arts.

I hope you’ll join me in giving a warm welcome to Dean Rivera-Servera. I look forward to working with him as he transitions into this new role.

Excelsior!

Doug Dempster