WVU officials announce plans for art museum

Jan. 23--West Virginia University will finally get an art museum, adding a dimension the state's flagship university has lacked, WVU officials have announced.

"This has been a dream of ours for years," said Bernie Schultz, dean of WVU's College of Creative Arts. "It's been a long time coming."

The art museum will go into the Erickson Alumni Center, which is scheduled to move into a new and bigger building near Ruby Memorial Hospital in early 2008, Schultz said. The Erickson Center is the next building over from the Creative Arts Center, but 120 yards of mostly wooded area separate them.

WVU will apparently become the first college in the state to house an art museum. The only two accredited art museums in the state are the Huntington Museum of Art and the Avampato Discovery Museum in Charleston.

"It's not just going to be a campus art museum," Schultz said. "This will serve the university, the town and the region. It will open up programs for our students and for the community."

Many of the flagship universities of the Midwest -- Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin at Madison -- have art museums. So do the University of Montana, University of Wyoming and South Dakota State, states whose combined population barely tops West Virginia's 1.8 million. Even Williams College in Massachusetts and the College of Wooster in Ohio, private colleges with no more than 2,000 students, have art museums.

WVU President David Hardesty decided that this was the right time and the Erickson Center the right place for a museum, Schultz said. "To have a museum in a building which is itself a work of art will be a nice thing for the state."

Post-modernist architect Michael Graves designed the Erickson Center and has first refusal on any renovations, said William Windsor, associate dean of the College of Creative Arts.

Built in 1986, the Erickson Center was an early work for Graves, who also designed the O'Reilly Theater in Pittsburgh's Cultural District and the Walt Disney World Dolphin and Swan Hotels in Orlando. Graves has done multiple renovations/additions at both the Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta and the Newark Museum in New Jersey.

Money needed to renovate Erickson Hall, add on a climate-controlled storage center and perhaps a study center, and create an endowment will come to at least $6 million or $7 million, said Schultz. He expects that funding will come from both public and private sources.

Fundraising falls to the College of Creative Arts, Schultz said, adding that he and the college's development director, Clara Pascoe, will lead the effort. Endowment funds can help fund maintenance, operations, art purchases and/or educational programs.

The museum will open in late 2008 or early 2009, Schultz expects.

College of Creative Arts leaders have been laying the groundwork for the museum, courting Harvey Peyton and Dr. Gina Puzzuoli, the two most active art collectors in the Kanawha Valley, said Bob Bridges, the university's art curator. Peyton has given mostly paintings, and Puzzuoli has given more than 100 works, mostly prints and other works on paper like drawings and watercolors but also a few paintings on canvas.

"I'm excited about it," Peyton said. "Penn State has a great art museum. University of Nebraska has a great art museum. It will be a great thing for campus life."

Peyton said he expects to continue giving art. "Not to turn my back on the Avampato Museum, but there's enough to go around."

For more than two decades after the Creative Arts Center opened in 1968, WVU's only art exhibit spaces were two 1,000-square-foot galleries, renovated in 1995 and renamed the Maseros Galleries.

Space for displaying art has increased since then. When WVU built a new library, the renovated old library got the James Horner Davis Family Galleries, totaling about 750 square feet. Stewart Hall, where WVU's president and vice presidents have offices, now has a small mezzanine gallery. An expanded president's house now includes an art gallery where exhibits rotate.

The university has the world's largest collection of art by Monongalia County native and WVU graduate Blanche Lazzell, who won lasting fame for her pioneering work with the white-line color woodblock print. (A New York collector has more woodblock prints, but WVU has a broader range of her work, including quite a few oil paintings.)

WVU's total art collection includes more than 3,000 pieces, including some from art professors -- those have been welcome additions -- and others from graduate students, Bridges said. "Once the museum becomes established, we'll focus on having a museum collection. The other work won't be [sold off]. We'll also have a university collection."

Is the collection well-rounded? "I would say it is rounding," Bridges said. "Through its history, it has taken anything of quality that has come its way. We really rely on a handful of people at this point. We think many more will step up when the time comes."

To contact staff writer Bob Schwarz, use e-mail or call 348-1249.

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