The founders of the University of Texas at Dallas acted out of necessity. In the early 1950s, Eugene McDermott, Cecil Howard Green, and J. Erik Jonsson’s newly formed Texas Instruments was expanding rapidly. In their attempts to manage this growth, they became aware of a shortcoming of the booming Southwestern city that had helped foster the success of their young company. To become an engineering powerhouse, TI would need to attract the top talent in engineering and the physical sciences. But Dallas, at the time not even a century old, didn’t have a top-tier university. They would have to found one.
The University of Texas at Dallas’ origins as a research institution for the tech sector are written into the school’s DNA. It’s known for its top-tier science programs and its brainy chess team. Even its visual arts program has sought to distinguish itself by bringing together the arts and technology as an interdisciplinary pursuit. The quiet founding of a new art history institute last summer, however, may mark a significant moment in the school’s evolution.
The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History had its origins in an informal newsletter project launched a year earlier by Richard Brettell, a UTD art professor, former Dallas Museum of Art director, and art critic for the Dallas Morning News. After randomly meeting a dealer of Old Masters prints living in North Dallas, Brettell recognized that despite the area’s lack of graduate-level art history programs, North Texas boasted a surprising number of art history Ph.D.s. So he created the DFW Art History Network, whose humble purpose, initially, was simply to connect art history professionals living in the region. When he looped in patron Edith O’Donnell—a longtime supporter of UTD with her husband, Peter—she came back with a challenge. Here was this community. Could UTD do something with this network? Was there a seed worth watering?
“She wanted to know if there was a there there,” Brettell says.
Brettell came back with an idea for an art history institute, like the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he spends his summers, and the MIT List Visual Art Center. Art history institutes fund scholarships, host conferences, and publish books, and some train graduate students. An institute at UTD would do all that, but this one would have a distinguishing attribute: two homes, one in UTD’s new Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building, and another in the Dallas Museum of Art. The idea was to promote scholarship and research, locate that scholarship in the city, and use the institute to bridge the university and the museum.
“Who is going to make a link between museums and universities, which is a frayed relationship in modern scholarship?” Brettell wondered. “I’ve worked in museums and universities my whole life and know from experience the advantages and disadvantages of working in both worlds. I think it is high time for them to work together more.”
O’Donnell liked the idea so much that she wrote a check for $17 million, a gift that was met with a $2.5 million augmentation from the University of Texas System. Just like that, a very well-funded art history institute materialized out of thin air, just as TI and UTD and Dallas itself all seemed to spring up, Pegasus-like, from uncultivated ground.
The Edith O’Donnell Art History Institute will endow five chairs boasting competitive international salaries and individual research budgets of $50,000, which means they have enough money attached to them to attract top scholars. The institute will also offer money and space at UTD and the DMA for scholars already living in the region. (Disclosure: my wife, Lucia Simek, is part of a curatorial team that is speaking with Brettell about possible funding for an art exhibition.) Brettell says he hopes they can eventually add Ph.D. and master’s programs, as there are no Ph.D. programs in art history in North Texas. Brettell also says they are courting one of the largest private art history libraries in the world, which would immediately give the new institute clout on par with the Ryerson at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ryerson, he says, is the only great art history research library between the coasts.
Brettell doesn’t want to dream up too much beyond this broad outline. Instead, he wants the new institution to acquire its own identity as it grows. Some of his friends in the profession have teased Brettell that scholars will not come to Dallas to do art history research. “The art historical community is coastal and very disdainful of Texas in the main,” he says. But the heads of other institutes, who have been visiting Dallas and meeting with Brettell, are intrigued by the idea of the UTD project.
“They are all fascinated by the strange constellation of the museums and the newness of it and the sense of possibility,” he says. “They say they could imagine doing things here that they couldn’t do at their own institutes.”
Still, in our results-driven age, the practical needs of an institute dedicated to art history may not be readily apparent, which is a problem. Perhaps the most important question is, How do you quantify the magnetic quality of brainpower in the life of a city? Sure, scholars attract scholars, research builds reputation. But the most important thing the institute will do for Dallas may simply be an extension of Brettell’s original goal with his little art history newsletter: to build community and conversation around a cultural discipline.
In his seminal work The City in History, Lewis Mumford wrote that a university’s value lies in its withdrawal from the immediate practical responsibilities, which enables a “reappraisal and renewal of the cultural heritage.”
“The system of knowledge was more important than the thing known,” Mumford writes about what distinguished the medieval university from the guilds and cathedral schools from which it emerged. “In the university, the functions of cultural storage, dissemination and interchange, and creative addition—perhaps the three most essential functions of the city—were adequately performed.”
The way that this new institute will encourage these three functions is what will prove most encouraging for UTD—and, by extension, Dallas as a whole. Founded out of need and just a half-century old, UTD is evolving into a vision of a mature city university.
This column appeared in the February issue of D Magazine.
Editor’s note: the original version of this story erroneously stated that Peter O’Donnell was deceased, that there is a moratorium on adding graduate programs at the university, and that the UT System matched the $17 million gift from Edith O’Donnell, implying a one-for-one match. It was actually an augmentation of $2.5 million from the system. We regret the errors.
