St. Thomas has a long tradition of effectively integrating the liberal arts with career preparation. The university has educated students admirably in the fields of music and art history despite a lack of adequate facilities for learning, rehearsing and appreciating the arts.
To remedy this situation, St. Thomas seeks to combine its existing programs in art history and music into a new School of the Arts within the College of Arts and Sciences, taking advantage of renovated and new facilities to serve students as well as arts organizations and programs of the Twin Cities. The departments of music and art history, each successful in its own right, will benefit from this mutual relationship and be able to explore more fully the linkages between the visual and musical arts.
St. Thomas’ Department of Music offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and its student ensembles have received national and international recognition. The Music Department is dedicated to the advancement of new music and has been responsible for commissioning more than 75 new works for instrumental and choral music by composers of international distinction.
The music faculty includes internationally known conductors, performers, composers and scholars, and many faculty members hold leadership offices in national organizations.
St. Thomas has achieved these successes despite lacking a performance facility of the proper size and adequate related facilities for music instruction. With many students majoring in music fields and still more students simply participating in music classes and activities for enjoyment, the university needs to remedy this facility problem soon.
If St. Thomas is able to secure gifts dedicated to this purpose from benefactors interested in the arts, the Music Department will relocate to a renovated MacPhail Building on the university’s downtown Minneapolis campus. In 2001, St. Thomas purchased the building, a Minneapolis historic landmark and former home of the MacPhail School of Music.
The funding will help to fund the building of department offices, rehearsal halls, classrooms, practice rooms, and an appropriate and aesthetic performance space on the Minneapolis campus, strengthening both the undergraduate and graduate programs in music.
St. Thomas’ Art History Department offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Both programs focus on understanding the cultural context of art in both Western and non-Western cultures, from antiquity to the present.
The department emphasizes in its teaching and scholarship a broad definition of the arts that incorporates architecture and media such as pottery, textiles, clothing, ornamental decoration and household goods. The importance of design and expression in both the utilitarian and the monumental are emphasized, and the faculty encourages students at all levels to become active researchers and investigators.
A major highlight of the School of the Arts will be the display, development and maintenance of the collection of the American Museum of Asmat Art, which was donated to St. Thomas by the Crosier Fathers and Brothers in Shoreview, Minn., as a result of their headquarters moving to Phoenix, Ariz., in the summer of 2007. In the late 1950s, the Crosier order of Catholic priests and brothers began missionary work with the Asmat, a tribal people indigenous to New Guinea. The collection consists of more than 1,500 objects and includes carvings, masks, shields, canoes, drums and other artifacts of Asmat culture. It is the premier Asmat art collection in the world.
A founding School of the Arts gift will support the integration of the academic curriculum with the development of exhibitions and programming for the Asmat collection and the visual arts at St. Thomas. Funding will be used to help endow the position of the director of the American Museum of Asmat Art and guarantee that the collection will be appropriately developed, maintained, and made accessible for exhibits and education purposes on campus and around the world.
Long-term plans include a permanent gallery in the new student center and other display spaces, enhancing the role of the collection as a model for integrating the academic and the museum worlds. Plans also include the further development of the university’s collection and curriculum in promoting an international perspective on art, active learning, K-12 educational outreach efforts and continued collaborative off-campus exhibitions.
St. Thomas’ new School of the Arts will position the university to serve better its students and faculty, and the very robust arts organizations and programs of the Twin Cities. It will educate generations of graduates – in not only the liberal arts but also business and professional fields – who are able to appreciate and contribute significantly to the arts in this region.