‘An Instrument to Be Played’

In 2017, the stars are aligning for an epic cultural marker in a city that seems increasingly intoxicated by the power and potential of the arts. Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art, a $41 million traffic-stopper of a museum with a modernist, otherworldly vibe, is scheduled to open in late October at West Broad and Belvidere streets. (UPDATE, June 29, 2017: ICA director Lisa Freiman says the institute's opening will be delayed until the spring of 2018 because of a revised schedule for construction completion.)

It will have overcome construction delays, costs that rose by $9 million and design refinements that officials say are typical in a building of its architectural complexity and scope. The added space and cost involved in the building’s construction “is in line with both VCU and private donors’ intent and enthusiasm to build a world-class art institution in Richmond,” says Roberta Oster Sachs, the institute’s interim director of communications.

The Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) has no state funding, and it’s the largest privately funded arts project in VCU’s history.

As the ICA’s opening approaches, VCU’s School of the Arts retains its status as the No. 1 public fine arts graduate program in the country (tied with the University of California-Los Angeles, and second among all schools), as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Like two blazing suns in the same orbit, the ICA’s arrival and the School of the Arts’ high ranking represent an opportunity to shine a brilliant light on each other, as well as on the city’s — and VCU’s — aspirations for national recognition.

“As a research university, it is our responsibility to enlighten the mind and share what arts has meant to human existence,” VCU President Michael Rao says by email. “Art is how we express ourselves as humans and is a record of our history. This will forever change the landscape of Richmond by bringing the world to see VCU and the ICA.”

In its galleries and related spaces, the ICA will bear witness to a long line of Richmonders with deep roots in the arts. Among them are the late Beverly Reynolds, a gallery owner and audacious champion of the building and of contemporary art; as well as Frances Lewis, who, with her late husband, the legendary retailer Sydney Lewis, are regarded by many as progenitors of the modern contemporary arts movement in the city through their patronage of contemporary artists and their donations to the VMFA.

The First Exhibition: When it opens to the public, the Institute for Contemporary Art also will present its inaugural exhibition, “Declaration,” featuring work by Louisiana-born, Detroit-based letterpress printer and book artist Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.; Italian visual artist Marinella Senatore, who works in a variety of media; and Baltimore-based artist and composer Paul Rucker, who has reinterpreted Ku Klux Klan robes using diverse fabrics and patterns; as well as Richmond artists and VCU alumni. An ICA announcement says the exhibition will highlight art’s power to spark change, “examining themes of protest, social justice, connection and creative community.”

B.J. Kocen, co-owner of the Glavé Kocen Gallery on West Main Street, compares the ICA to an inexorably rising tide that will lift artists and galleries alike. In innumerable ways, he says, it will be a pulse point for what’s happening in contemporary art worldwide. Some of the best and the latest in contemporary art will pass through Richmond.

“I think it’s a big thing for the community, for the entire community,” Kocen says. “I can’t see a downside.”

But there is a huge question looming over what is shaping up to be a celebratory year for the arts at VCU: Who will take Joe Seipel’s place as dean of VCU’s School of the Arts?

Over 40 years in a variety of high-powered positions, Seipel created the nation’s No. 1 graduate sculpture program at VCU and helped propel the School of the Arts (aka VCUarts) into the national conversation. The search is underway for his successor.

“I’m sure they will be very cautious,” Seipel says, expressing a hope for a tireless advocate for the arts school, which he describes as an evolving powerhouse.

“The new dean search is currently in phase II — that is, the search committee is in the process of building the candidate pool and reviewing the candidate pool,” says Suzanne A. Silitch, the school’s director of communications. There are four phases to the search, and the current timeline does not specify a date for the announcement of a new dean.

Seipel made construction of the ICA a major goal when he became dean in 2011. But he retired in June 2016, failing to see it completed on his watch.

One ranking faculty member speculated that disagreements over the ICA may have contributed to Seipel’s decision to retire, a move that surprised and perplexed many of his colleagues, given that the completion of his legacy project, the ICA, was within reach.

“He had some great ideas, some great initiatives … the ICA was one of them,” says Robert Meganck, a professor of illustration. “Another one was that he was going to restructure the whole school. When he came in, he called all the faculty together and he says, ‘I want you to imagine you’re going to start a school from scratch and you can do anything you want.’ ” Meganck, who recently stepped down as chairman of the Department of Communication Arts, says there were some middle administrators who resisted the proposed restructuring, fearing that it might result in losses of students and funding.

Seipel, 69, cited a desire to return to his studio as a central reason for his retirement. But he’s still in a dean’s chair, though not at VCU. Seipel is serving as interim dean of the 10,000-student Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in Manhattan. He says speculation about his departure is no more than that.

“I did not retire because of issues with the ICA,” he says. “I remain very excited and positive about the ICA. I want to be very clear about that. It will be of huge benefit on numerous fronts for the School of Arts, VCU, Richmond, the students and the citizens of Richmond. I remain very proud of what influence I may have had in its becoming a reality.”

Still, Seipel acknowledges that there were areas of disagreement with regard to fundraising and authority over the museum.

He says those disagreements occurred before Lisa Freiman, former senior curator and chair of the contemporary art department at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, was named director of the ICA in May 2013. He was chair of the search committee that named her.

For her part, Freiman describes Seipel as a “godfather, the person within the organization who has the historical knowledge, the experience, the political savvy … who’s going to give you good, honest advice.”

For years, he and former art school dean Richard Toscan took the lead on fundraising for the ICA, delivering $32 million to $33 million, Seipel says.

“Joe did an incredible job of bringing together the group to develop the ICA,” says Sarah Cunningham, executive director for research at VCUarts and chairwoman of Richmond’s Public Art Commission. “We had never had such a capital campaign for such a massive project.”

The ICA, in a recent publication, states that “Seipel’s commitment to a new exhibition venue was the pivotal endorsement required to make the project a reality.”

But Seipel is quick to add that there was a lot of heavy lifting all around, because the money had to be raised privately, and most of it had to be in hand before ground could even be broken.

“There is always cooperation from the president and central VCU Development, but the actual boots on the ground fundraising was done with the School of the Arts’ Development Office and the ICA Development Committee. They were incredible, wonderful, tireless advocates,” he says. “I had envisioned [that] I and VCUarts would continue to be involved in the fundraising, especially for the building funds,” he adds.

But that did not occur. In 2015, according to a timeline provided by the ICA, when the museum hired a full-time director of development, VCUarts was no longer responsible for fundraising for the ICA. Perhaps of more concern to Seipel was the shift in reporting authority for shaping the ICA that occurred just before Freiman arrived.

“The former provost and the president decided to take it from the School of Arts and put it under the umbrella of the provost,” Seipel says. “I was never pleased with the new arrangement of oversight. I thought it should have been under the School of the Arts for the first several years and then migrate to the university once it had more fully formed.”

A statement from the ICA says the reporting structure to the provost “is in keeping with best practices for university art museums,” as outlined in a 2011 publication of the Association of Art Museum Directors. “From the beginning of its conception, the ICA was conceived as an independent unit and a universitywide initiative,” the statement says. “The director was always meant to report to the provost.”

Freiman says by email the reason for that structure is that “the position of the art museum within the central academic structure reconfirms and emphasizes the relevance of its collections and programs to all of the university or college, rather than to any one part, and recognizes the public service and outreach mission of the museum.”

The ICA is nearing completion at a time when colleges and universities around the country are investing in the arts. The Art Newspaper, which covers the art world internationally, reported in its January edition that universities are building art museums and related enterprises largely because administrators recognize that the arts can promote nimble thinking, student demand, innovative collaboration and cooperative donors.

The publication says rising demand for museums at leading schools that have traditionally marginalized the arts has sparked what looks like an “arms race” for facilities. Among other projects, the newspaper article cited a $50 million interdisciplinary arts center that will open at Duke University in January 2018. At Princeton, a $330 million arts and transportation hub is due to open in October.

An image of the ICA was featured in The Art Newspaper’s coverage, and Freiman was quoted as saying that there was a lot of pressure from the community to have a world-class art facility and to bring in a major architect, because community members knew it was going to bring prestige and attention. She says she doesn’t look at the wave of new museums on campuses as an arms race.

“I think there is a general understanding that the one thing you can’t outsource in America is intelligence and creativity,” Freiman says. “I think what you’re seeing is tied to the whole movement around entrepreneurism in the United States, which recognizes the importance of innovation.”

The ICA will take over the role of VCU’s now-closed Anderson Gallery in exhibiting new art from outside the university, while The Depot building at Laurel and Broad will provide space for student work. The Anderson’s art collection has gone to the university’s library for display.

“The Anderson Gallery had 40-plus years of wonderful programming, but it was limited by the facility,” Freiman says. “The facility was dilapidated, and it was not accessible, and it didn’t have a freight elevator, and it didn’t have HVAC controls, and so that automatically means you can’t be in the same league as a serious institution … because people won’t give you the loans [of art].”

Seipel notes that the Anderson Gallery was not accredited by the American Association of Museums.

“Is a museum mandatory? I guess not, but will it help? Yes.” —Joe Seipel, former dean of VCU School of the Arts

“If you look at our colleagues in the top schools — Yale, Rhode Island School of Design — they all have connections to museums to borrow work and show work,” he says. “Is a museum mandatory? I guess not, but will it help? Yes. It’s a huge deal having one of the world’s great architects, Steven Holl, design it. This museum is getting a lot of attention in New York.”

For VCUarts, the ICA will bolster efforts to recruit students and faculty, something that benefits the university as a whole, Seipel says. The arts school educates approximately 3,000 undergraduates and more than 180 graduates through programs in Richmond and Qatar.

“The School of the Arts has the largest percentage of out-of-state students [30 percent] of any program in the university,” Seipel says. “Those students tend to pay a lot more tuition.”

Its reputation and presence counterbalance VCU’s well-established medical campus on the opposite end of Broad Street, completing the triad that most people think of when they think of VCU: arts, medicine, basketball.

As Freiman brings the ICA and its programming to reality, she says she wants to embed it into the university and community, to bring the highest possible value to students, faculty and alumni, as well as ordinary Richmonders. Admission to the institute and its programs will be free.

It is, she says, “about accessibility, openness, diversity and keeping it free. You won’t have to have a Ph.D. in contemporary art or art history in order to appreciate the experience. We will give people tools to interpret the work or dig deeper, but if [they] want to come in just for a cup of coffee or to enjoy a glass of wine … all of that is great.”

When she asked donors, particularly the Markel Corp. — “our biggest supporter from the standpoint of personal contributions and corporate” — why they contributed, they told her the ICA will raise the quality of life in the region, and that’s important in competing for the highest-quality employees, especially among millennials.

“Millennials these days have expectations about what their cities are going to be like and the experiences they have and their personal time,” Freiman says. “They want to have time to spend with their family and friends … and support things that they believe in.”

In recognition of Markel Corp.'s contributions, the ICA building is designated The Markel Center.

The museum’s status as a cultural landmark is largely established even before it opens, because of Holl’s involvement. One of the nation’s most influential and honored architects, the New York-based Holl also is a watercolorist and a tenured professor at Columbia University, where he often teaches about the relationship between music and architecture.

Freiman says Holl described the ICA as “an instrument to be played,” suggesting that its flexibility allows for exhibitions, film screenings, public lectures, performances, symposia and community events, as circumstances require.

Holl is the second architect tasked with the project. The first, Charles Gwathmey, also an international architectural star of the modernist school, died in August 2009.

“He was a brutalist architect — it would have been such a different thing,” Freiman says. Brutalist architecture involves a predominance of exposed concrete in construction, with some of the buildings created during its heyday described as typically massive and “fortress-like.”

Holl was selected to design the ICA in 2011.

Freiman says the soaring art museum also was supposed to go where VCU’s engineering school is, but that in regrouping after the death of Gwathmey, the Broad and Belvidere site became available.

“It became clear that the ICA could become a gateway for the city and the university,” Freiman says, with one entrance facing the communities it would serve and the other entrance facing the university’s Monroe Park Campus.

For the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, just a few blocks away in the Jackson Ward neighborhood, the ICA represents another opportunity to collaborate in telling untold and forgotten stories, says Adele Johnson, interim executive director.

“We’re looking at stories that tell of African-Americans that have struggles and, just as important, African-Americans that have achieved,” she says. “I’ve had some initial conversations [with ICA officials] and they are very interested in being inclusive and showing an outreach that … promotes equity in the arts.”

Janine Bell, president and artistic director of Elegba Folklore Society, agrees. “Our interaction with the ICA so far suggests that there is a desire to make important cultural connections with regards to the African-American story,” she says by email. “We hope to be a real partner in the institute’s evolution, as we can learn and benefit from each other in the ultimate service of community and visitors.”

Emily Smith, executive director of the 1708 Gallery on West Broad Street, says the ICA and its exhibitions will set a high bar for the contemporary arts community and will embolden artists, galleries and audiences to expand their horizons. Like the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, she says, the ICA will be a community space.

“I feel like it’s a symbol of connectivity,” Smith says, where people will gather, converse and find points of access in discussions about the art they see and the dramatic impact of the building’s architecture. She believes everyone will likely have an opinion about whether they like the looks of the building, which itself is a work of art and open to interpretation and critical appraisal.

“Contemporary art can be challenging,” she says.

Among the design elements in the three-story structure are exterior walls sheathed in pre-weathered, satin-finish zinc. Geothermal wells will provide heating and cooling, three green roofs will absorb stormwater and provide insulation, and specialized glass walls will exhaust heat in the summer and capture it in the winter.

The cost and breadth of the ICA have grown spectacularly since it was first announced in 2011 as a 32,000-square-foot building with a projected budget of $32 million.

Six years later, the cost has climbed to more than $41 million, and its dimensions have grown to 41,000 square feet, as the cost of materials and the museum’s space requirements and needs have increased.

“The difference in budget had to do with real bids tied to final construction design,” Sachs says. “It’s normal for the concept of a new building to evolve over the course of the design process.”

Even before she was officially hired, Freiman told VCU officials that the building needed room for storage, offices and a space for performers to dress, and they agreed. That addition — an expansion and finishing off of a planned basement — carried a $2 million price tag. ICA officials say the addition did not delay the museum’s projected 2015 opening. But concerns about the building’s stability did, and construction paused for 12 weeks to address unspecified technical issues. The opening was pushed back until 2016, and then to 2017.

Money is still being raised for construction and other purposes.

“We have just over $35 [million], with $1.6 million to go,” Carol Anne Baker Lajoie, the ICA’s director of development, said in mid-March, adding that the university’s development office is raising another $4 million. In addition, the ICA is conducting an endowment campaign with an initial goal of $12 million.

“But it will keep increasing as time goes on,” Freiman says, “because we would like to have a really robust endowment that allows us to be financially viable ongoing, without the stresses of having to fundraise all the time.”

 “This project has been 20 years in the making, and I’ve been at it for four years, and … when I came on board, I was the first full-time staff member of the ICA,” Freiman adds. “My first day, I was sitting in my office and [she snaps her fingers for emphasis] — build a museum! How do I do that?”

“Top-notch artists ... will want to show in that building.” —Jay Barrows, fine arts dealer, consultant and ICA donor

Ever since, she has been raising money, hiring staffers, planning shows and trying to keep her head above water amid a flood of last-minute details and shifting priorities. Freiman says that while many have seen the ICA under construction, its true nature — and its delights — have yet to be revealed.

“We haven’t turned it on yet; it’s not finished,” she says. “There’s going to be a period of time when the cranes are gone, and it’s closed off and it’s going to be a giant mystery … what the heck is going on inside there? We’ll be spending months getting ready, once the building is turned over to us.” The turnover is expected to occur in early summer.

Because it is not a collecting museum, the ICA holdings will be forever new, as exhibitions arrive and depart.

Fine-arts dealer and consultant Jay Barrows says the ICA’s construction — he is a donor — is “a major coup for the city of Richmond. It will attract some very top-notch artists, because they will want to show in that building.”

He also expects cultural tourists from every corner of the globe to come to Richmond to view Holl’s latest creation or take in a particular exhibition of significance, and then go out into the city to eat, tour and enjoy the sights, all part of the ICA’s role in fostering economic development.

Barrows has been collecting and selling fine art in the Richmond area for years, and he’s the longtime curator of the Sydney and Frances Lewis collection of modern and contemporary art. Looking back over the past few decades, Barrows observes a flowering of the arts in Richmond, from the recent $150 million expansion of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to the increasing recognition of the School of the Arts, to the proliferation of art galleries, knowledgeable collectors and willing donors.

“There’s money here — old money, new money,” Barrows says, “and they seem to be putting money in cultural, education things that will only benefit the city.”

Arts Centers on the Rise

Demand for museums at leading schools has sparked a new kind of “arms race” for facilities, according to a January report in The Art Newspaper. Here’s a timeline for other openings:

Feb. 24, 2017

Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts in Houston, a $30 million, 50,000-square-foot building designed by Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan

April 22, 2017

Columbia University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts in New York City, an eight-story, 60,000-square-foot structure designed by Paris- and Genoa, Italy–based Renzo Piano Building Workshop, and part of Columbia’s new $6.3 billion Manhattanville campus

October 2017

Princeton University’s Arts and Transit Project, incorporating the Lewis Center for the Arts, in Princeton, New Jersey, a 145,000-square-foot complex including an arts tower by Steven Holl Architects

January 2018

Duke University’s Arts Center in Durham, North Carolina, a $50 million, 71,000-square-foot facility designed by William Rawn Associates