OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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By Colin Bowyer, Communications Manager - June 18, 2024
Larry Rodgers, outgoing dean of the College of Liberal Arts (CLA), has always believed in the profound importance of the visual and performing arts and has worked hard to increase their visibility and impact at OSU and in the Corvallis community. Rodgers, since the beginning, has recognized that as a part of any University education, the arts provide the context and inspiration for discovery—they drive a culture of creativity, innovation, and diversity that is essential to a thriving academic ecosystem, regardless of the discipline.
The arts are central to developing valuable cognitive, critical thinking, and technical skills, while also strengthening social ties, increasing the core values of empathy and respect for diversity, and enhancing educational engagement. And the arts are an ideal means of learning about cultures and experiences apart from one’s own.
The university’s beating heart for the arts, CLA and the School of Visual, Performing, and Design Arts (SVPDA), formerly known as the School of Arts and Communication until 2021, serve as the academic home for students in art, graphic design, music, and theatre. Regardless of their declared major, undergraduate students flock to courses in SVPDA as creative outlets that allow them to develop their passions.
“The School of Visual, Performing, and Design Arts is a tight-knit and storied program with an outward-looking looking creative community,” explains Rodgers. “Upon arriving at the College of Liberal Arts, I saw the need to strengthen arts education to the same level as the university’s STEM-curriculum.”
“In the music area, we worked to shore up support for OSU’s fantastic marching band, under the expert direction of Olin Hannum. We hired Bob Santelli, who came to OSU, having worked at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and served as the inaugural Executive Director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. Bob initiated the hugely popular American Strings series, Album Club, Composers in the Round, alongside other programs to amplify music’s impact on a diverse range of university communities.”
Rodgers was instrumental in reorganizing the arts into its own school within CLA, separating it from speech and new media communications, and, in 2022, bringing in nationally prominent scholar Peter Swendsen as the inaugural holder of the Patricia Valian Reser Chair and Director of Visual, Performing and Design Arts. An accomplished composer, Swendsen was previously at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio, and was excited by the opportunity to lead the newly established school.
“We are in the midst of a transformational moment in the arts, and our students stand poised to reimagine and redefine our practices and industries,” said Swendsen. “Larry has been a champion of the arts since before I arrived at OSU, and his continued support of students and faculty within the School of Visual, Performing, and Design Arts has been invaluable."
But strong arts programs also require expansive, purpose-built spaces. “When I arrived at CLA,” explains Rodgers, “there was not one single square foot of CLA space in the 15 or so buildings we occupied on campus that was being used for its original purpose. The School of Writing, Literature, and Film was in the old forestry building. The School of History, Philosophy, and Religion ended up in Milam Hall, which was built for the science department. All over campus, CLA had been shoehorned into old spaces and nowhere was that more evident than in Community Hall, which was the university’s oldest building and simply put, not designed as a music building. The Music faculty and students were simply better than the physical space they occupied."
One of CLA’s designated spaces was also one of OSU’s most historic and enduring buildings, Fairbanks Hall, which was home to classrooms, faculty offices and gallery spaces. Rodgers identified that the building was long-overdue for a comprehensive renovation that would create critically needed new space, better meet the needs of faculty and students, and, also, fully showcase the incredible artistic and creative activity taking place on campus. Reopened in 2023, the newly-renovated Fairbanks Hall features up-to-date art and graphic design studios and reimagined galleries, reestablishing the historic building as a campus marvel and point of pride for CLA.
One of the hallmarks of CLA’s latest Strategic Plan is to fully integrate and amplify the arts—elevating creativity within OSU’s research mission and bringing national visibility to the university’s programs with timely cultural topics. With significant momentum behind the arts, the goal is not only relevant, but highlights an incredibly exciting future for the college.
Rodgers’ devotion to elevating the arts at OSU ultimately led to the construction of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts (PRAx).
Conversations about a new performing arts center started decades ago, but they were merely conversations, without any concrete plans. Immense collaboration was necessary between central leadership, the OSU Foundation, SVPDA faculty, and local arts organizations, all of whom were on the same page about expressing a need for a dedicated space around the arts.
Rodgers visited more than 30 performing arts centers around the country and noticed how many arts-dedicated spaces came alive at night for a performance, but seemed like ghost-towns during the day. Rodgers wanted to create a living venue; a space where people could visit, but also students could interact with and learn from. After a design process with dozens of architects and campus partners on Zoom during COVID, Rodgers ensured three critical elements were incorporated into the arts’ new home: innovative architecture, a focus on student experience, and world-class acoustics.
Under the OSU Foundation’s guidance, CLA launched the “Cornerstone for the Arts” fundraising challenge in 2012. Patricia Valian Reser, ’60, Hon. Ph.D. ’19, had made a gift of $5 million, which was anonymous at that time, and other donors responded with a total of more than $1 million to meet the challenge. This successful effort went directly to support student and faculty arts programs but as importantly, it created a community of donors and laid the foundation necessary for PRAx—originally referred to as the OSU Arts and Education Complex—to become a reality.
When PRAx opened its doors to the public in the spring of 2024, the OSU and broader Corvallis communities were welcomed into a spectacular, first-of-its-kind space on the university’s campus. The $75 million, 49,000 square-foot arts and humanities hub incorporates the arts in their fullest form: through theatrical, musical, and visual arts. PRAx features four indoor and two outdoor venues, as well as galleries and classrooms. It also has some one-of-kind features that ensure campus users find their way to PRAx throughout the day: The Dixie Luana Wooton Kenney Garden, complete with a sculptural hops forest and large student-friendly hammocks; the Toomey lobby, specially designed as an event and gathering space; study areas for students throughout the building and an adjacent rehearsal building that relieves some of Community Hall’s classroom pressures. Overall, PRAx creates a cultural hub that branches out to foster interdisciplinary collaborations across campus.
"This project has taken years to flesh out,” said Reser, ‘16, Hon. Ph.D. ‘19. “But in order for us to be all that we can be, in order for OSU to be all that it can be, there must be a strong liberal arts program. An investment in the arts is really an investment in our world.”
“Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential,” said Rodgers. “That includes collaboration across fields, across generations, across communities. We need to create conditions for collaborations between OSU’s academic community and artists looking to expand their practice or arts-based research into new realms with consequential impact. We now have the physical infrastructure for ideation and creation.”
In its inaugural Strategic Plan, PRAx lays out an interdisciplinary mission connecting the arts to the humanities, sciences, engineering, agricultural and more.
“The ‘x’ in PRAx stands for what we think of as a really critical mission at OSU,” said Peter Betjemann, the Patricia Valian Reser Executive Director of PRAx. “That’s to create intersections between the arts and all of the disciplines in the university to pursue experimental and innovative work. Larry has been a fierce advocate and supporter of that vision from the start.”
“It’s been a privilege to help shepherd this massive undertaking,” says Rodgers, “This project would have never been possible without the support of OSU’s leadership, particularly former president Ed Ray, Shawn L. Scoville, Tom McLennan and Grady Goodall from the OSU Foundation, and, most importantly, Pat Reser, our keystone donor.”
With extensive excitement and energy around PRAx and an incredible momentum behind the arts, the fullest potential hasn’t yet been realized. “Universities are most exciting when they’re dynamic,” says Rodgers. “What you want is that dynamism to be honored by everyone in charge, so that our smartest and best thinkers are empowered to be creative and forward looking, not willing to settle on keeping things the way they are.”
