From the Dean

Gratitude has been on my mind lately, and not just because of the recent Thanksgiving holiday. As I look back at all we’ve been through as a college in 2020, I’m so grateful to our faculty and staff for their herculean efforts to keep our classes and operations running. It’s no surprise that our college’s creativity and generous spirit has been at the heart of our successes in moving our college forward this year. I’m grateful to the faculty, who dove into the brave world of Zoom and continued to create positive learning experiences for our students. I’m grateful to our fearless department chairs, who made countless decisions to ensure safe and effective teaching and learning conditions for our students and faculty. I’m grateful to our staff for their tireless work over the spring, summer and fall as they adapted to constantly changing plans and conditions. I’m grateful to our students for bravely facing a year like no other, while showing compassion toward their faculty and one another. I’m grateful to our college’s Advisory Council and donors, who have continued their incredible advocacy of and investment in our college’s success. Thank you to each and every one of you for all that you’ve done this year. 2020 has been more stressful and challenging than we had ever imagined, but it’s made even more clear that when we work together, we can overcome mountains. Wishing you all a safe, COVID-free holiday! Excelsior!     Dean Doug Dempster

Edith O’Donnell, a longtime friend to the College of Fine Arts and a member of the college’s Advisory Council, passed away this past week at the age of 94. Our thoughts and hearts go out to her family and friends.

The Dallas Morning News referred to Edith without exaggeration as the “Mount Rushmore of Dallas philanthropists.” On the UT campus, it’s no understatement to say that our college and most of our faculty and students benefit from her generosity every single day. Edith, along with her husband Peter, have truly been two of the great arts and education philanthropists of Texas.

A UT graduate, she joined the Fine Arts Advisory Council in 1990. We honored her with the E. William Doty Award—our college’s highest honor—in 1997.

Her generosity to our college extends across many disciplines, including the Chair in Latin American Art History and Criticism, the History of Music Chair and the Theatre for Youth Chair, faculty endowments that have allowed us to attract and retain distinguished artists, scholars and performers.

She also helped establish the Dallas Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Art, which has supported more than 50 students since it was created in 1994. And her Visiting Artists Chair and the Visiting Chair in the Fine and Performing Arts have allowed us to elevate the profile of our programs and to expose our students to an incredible, diverse array of visiting guest artists and their work.

We’re enormously grateful to Edith O’Donnell. I’ll miss her gentle, generous spirit greatly. But that spirit will live on in our college, in our faculty and in our students, every day for many, many years to come.

Excelsior!

Doug Dempster
Dean

Dear Advisory Council Members,

I’m pleased to announce that Professor John Yancey, who has long served as the chair of the Fine Arts Diversity Committee, has accepted an executive appointment as the college’s first Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. In this position, he will lead efforts to advance diversity and inclusion in our student recruitment and admissions, in faculty and staff hiring and retention, and the college’s cultural climate.

Many of you met Associate Dean Yancey at the fall 2018 council meeting. He teaches painting and drawing in the Department of Art and Art History, which he joined in 1993. He’s held numerous leadership roles in the department and the college, including serving as department chair from 2005 to 2011.

Continue Reading Announcing John Yancey as Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Dear Advisory Council Members,

I am writing with the sad news that Meredith Long of Houston, a member of our Advisory Council since 1979, died yesterday at the age of 91. Our heartfelt condolences go out to his wife, Cornelia, and their family.

Meredith and Cornelia have been most generous, dedicated supporters of the College of Fine Arts. He and they, over the years, have also become personal friends, opening and sharing their homes, and family, and many loyal puppies with me. I hope you will have a chance to read my Dean’s Insider devoted to him.

Meredith leaves a wonderful legacy in our college through his generous endowments, beginning with his first, the Cornelia and Meredith Long Centennial Scholarship, in 1982. In more recent years, he created the Meredith and Cornelia Long Chair in Art and Art History and the Meredith and Cornelia Long Internship Fund. Their generosity has provided a hand up to many generations of our students and graduates.

Meredith was a model Advisory Council member. He unselfishly and steadfastly offered his time and talents to help with fundraising, advocacy, and advice. He educated me, as a new dean, about the art world in Texas, and he never faltered in his devotion to our college and to The University of Texas at Austin, his alma mater.

We’ve lost a great friend.

Sincerely,

Doug Dempster
Dean

Dear Advisory Council members,

I write to share the happy news that Professor Robert Ramirez is now the chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance, effective immediately. He will be holder of the Z.T. Scott Family Chair in Drama and the Susan Menefee Ragan Regents Professorship in Fine Arts.

Leading a department as complex as Theatre and Dance is never a small challenge. Doing that as an interim is extra challenging. Being interim chair during a pandemic when the world has been turned upside down and we’re asked to reinvent our pedagogical practices virtually overnight is something none of us could have anticipated and is surely nothing Robert ever signed up for in advance.

Continue Reading Announcing Robert Ramirez as Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance

Dear Advisory Council members,

I am pleased to announce that, effective immediately, Professor Susan Rather is now the department chair and Meredith and Cornelia Long Chair of Art and Art History in the Department of Art and Art History. She is the first woman chair in the department’s history and first art historian chair in many decades.

I am grateful to Susan for her able leadership as interim chair during the transition period this past year; she’s garnered my support and that of faculty. I’m also grateful to the search committee for their excellent work in evaluating internal candidates for this role.

Continue Reading Announcing Susan Rather as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History

Dear Advisory Council members,

I write to let you know that I will be stepping down as dean of the College of Fine Arts by the end of the 2020–2021 academic year. The provost will soon be making a public announcement, but I wanted you to hear from me directly. As I told you at the fall meeting, I plan to return to my long-deferred research and teaching interests after a long administrative career.

Serving as dean has been a great honor. It’s been the most gratifying good fortune to work alongside such a dedicated, smart and generous advisory council. My admiration for you is greater today than it was my first day as interim dean many years ago, and I admired you all enormously then.

We’ve been through a period of tremendous challenge, change and growth during the last ten years. I’m proud enough to believe that the college is among the very best public university arts colleges in the country, populist in our access, venerable in our traditions, but also admired for our progressiveness. I’m hugely optimistic about the college’s future as well as the future of arts education in this country.

The provost will be forming a search committee and launching a national search for the college’s next dean. In the meantime, there’s much still to be accomplished over the next year.

Excelsior!

Doug Dempster
Dean

Dear Advisory Council members,

I am writing to let you know that Jack Risley will be stepping down as chair of the Department of Art and Art History on Aug. 31, 2019.

Jack and his wife, Professor Amy Hauft, will be moving to St. Louis, where Amy has accepted a position as the director of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University. Please join me in thanking and congratulating them as they embark on this new chapter in their lives.

Continue Reading An Update in the Department of Art and Art History

Dear Friends,

As Advisory Council members, you are by now familiar with my refrain: technology, globalization, and new forms of creativity are rapidly changing the arts, artistic practices, the way we access and participate in cultural activities, the commerce of the arts, and the way “creatives” can and must make a living in the cultural and creative industries. And it’s incumbent on a public university arts college to adapt to those changes as rapidly—and radically—as our students need.

With that in mind, I am excited to share news of the creation of the new School of Design and Creative Technologies, a fourth major academic unit of the College of Fine Arts that will include a new Department of Design, a new Department of Arts and Entertainment Technologies, the Design Institute for Health, the Center for Integrated Design, as well as a new creative entrepreneurship and innovation initiative.

Continue Reading Announcing the New School of Design and Creative Technologies