Dr. Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen

The sun now streams into the sky-lit rotunda of the Dr. Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center and many creative minds are working together under one roof. With more than 130,000 square feet of space, it is the sort of home that AU's talented artists and performers have long dreamed.

"The Katzen Arts Center truly exemplifies our commitment to arts at the heart of education," says Kay Mussell, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Over the years, the reputations of the various arts programs at AU have grown quietly in their separate locations. The art department built a strong national reputation in spite of having only 900 feet of gallery space tucked into the tiny Watkins Art Building at the far edge of campus. Now there is 30,000 square feet for professional exhibits and storage space for the valuable Katzen and Watkins art collections, all in a prominent facility on Ward Circle. The music department now has state-of-the-art classrooms and rehearsal rooms, with the added benefit of the gleaming new Abramson Family Rectial Hall. There is a dance studio, a studio theatre, and new studio space for students in the visual arts.

"While the arts disciplines all have their own core techniques, concerns, and values, they also have much to say to each other, and with each other to their audience," says Mussell. "With all our arts programs are under one roof… the possibilities for creative collaboration among faculty and students in all the programs is magnified many times. [With the Katzen Arts Center], we are fulfilling our long-term commitments in the arts for our students and for our community."

Alumni of these arts programs are well known in Washington, across the country, and indeed around the world, Mussell says. AU began building its reputation in the arts with its Watkins Collection, which started in the 1940s as a modest tribute to a retired art professor, but expanded over the years until it now has more than 4,400 pieces of art. Tucked away at AU, there have been prints, drawings, and paintings by a long list of modern masters including Pablo Picasso, Edouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Ben Shahn, Sam Gilliam, Gene Davis, Milton Avery, and Grace Hartigan.

While many of them have graced offices around campus and been the basis of shows, the collection has never had an exhibition space worthy of its quality.

That has now changed. The Katzens' $10 million naming gift for the building and additional donation of an art collection, combined with many generous gifts by alumni and other donors over the years, enabled the university to engage architects to design the space and finally break ground and begin construction in 2002.

At the groundbreaking ceremony, Dr. Cyrus Katzen looked around at the crowd of ambassadors, city council members, and long-time AU supporters and said, with a catch in his throat, "Myrtle and I are very humble. AU is a great institution, and we are proud to be part of it."

Originally published in American magazine, by Sally Acharya