High-energy area

the West Bank Arts Quarter

Ferguson Hall

by Martha Coventry

From M, fall 2003

The new West Bank Arts Quarter, like other famous districts, is as much a frame of mind as a geographical location.

Cross into New Orleans's French Quarter or Paris's Quartier Latin, and you feel yourself come alive to the energy of that particular place. In one corner of the University's West Bank--with its buildings sidling up to the eclectic Cedar-Riverside neighborhood--the energy you feel is art, giving off its sense of endless possibility.

Come celebrate the West Bank Arts Quarter--October 10-12, 2003

Friday, October 10, 2003, 4:30-7:30 p.m.
Arts Quarter Collective Fall Arts Festival

Saturday, October 11, 2003, 8-11 p.m.
Art Moves: Department of Art faculty exhibition opening reception in the new Regis Center for Art.

Sunday, October 12, 2003, noon-3 p.m.
Public open house for the West Bank Arts Quarter, with performances, behind-the-scenes tours, child-friendly activities, and more.

Dance, theater, and music have been rubbing elbows on the West Bank since the 1990s, when the Barbara Barker Center for Dance and the Ted Mann Concert Hall moved in near Ferguson Hall (music) and the Rarig Center (theater). But, until this fall, the visual arts had been on the other side of Washington Avenue in a facility that even its most nostalgic fans call sorely inadequate.

The Regis Center for Art--the jutting, angling, embracing new art building--has now brought them across the avenue and into the creative fold, and serves as an anchor to the West Bank Arts Quarter. Teachers and students now have the rare chance (we are one of the few universities in the nation with all of its arts disciplines located in a single district) to explore what it might mean to work together in the spirit and form of collaboration.

Art professor Lynn Lukkas and music colleague Doug Geers taught a class last spring as a foray into making collaboration part of the broader arts curriculum--a curriculum that serves 10,000 students--while still respecting individual disciplines. And the Arts Quarter Collective, a group of students that encourages public art performance, has been at the collaboration game since 2001. Last year, graduate student Allen Peterson poured molten iron to form giant bee shapes while students Andrea Zimmerman and Sarah Baumert led dancers through movements with his freshly cast, still-glowing creations.

The arts quarter will help students focus their studies, but it will also open them to new choices and new colleagues.

"The better access you have to other artists, the more you can form collaborations that will last outside the buildings," says Nikki Schultz, a senior in theater and an Arts Quarter Collective member. "The arts quarter will create a whirlwind of ideas. That's scary, but also exciting."

College of Liberal Arts dean Steven Rosenstone thinks the University should be a place where students and faculty can take risks and push the edges of what society thinks about art. The 160,000 audience members expected to visit the quarter this year will find unpredictable experiences, promises Rosenstone, created not only by University faculty and students, but also by some of the best artists in the world.

A few weeks before fall semester, carpenters were still working on the innovative and striking Regis Center for Art, designed by architecture professor Garth Rockcastle of the firm Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle. The landscaping has yet to be finished and the signage still needs some tweaking, but on the building's welcoming broad brick plaza, dance students from the neighboring Barbara Barker Center for Dance were happily practicing their moves. The quarter had already become their playground and the art building their shared practice space.