Until the evening of Thursday, Sept. 30, 1000 W. Broad St. went by a prosaic description as Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts Building. Then, around 6:30 p.m., Murry N. DePillars’ name entered the Broad Street-scape, basked by glorious last-of-September golden light as a jazz combo assembled on the sidewalk first rolled a fanfare and then launched into a rollicking version of the Rebirth Brass Band’s “Do Whatcha Wanna.”
Among the many facets of DePillars, dean of the VCU School of the Arts during the crucial 20-year period of 1976-95, was a passion for the appreciation and promotion of jazz. He co-founded the Richmond Jazz Society. Within the lobby floor gallery space through Oct. 14 is an exhibition, “The Dean and More,” which gives a sampling of the arc of DePillars’ artistic life. The show is open to the public on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Here, too, is a permanent installation dedicated to his memory.
DePillars (1938-2008) served as the first Black dean of the VCU School of the Arts, and his dynamic stewardship guided the institution toward becoming one of the country’s largest and most influential public art schools. Academic leadership occupied one portion of a busy life that included art-making, art history and advocacy.
“He cultivated Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts into the powerhouse, top-ranked institution it is today,” Samantha Willis wrote in a piece for Richmond magazine about the 2017 DePillars retrospective at the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia, “yet many in Richmond don't know who Murry DePillars was, nor the legacy he left behind.”
Murry N. DePillars (Photo courtesy Special Collections and Archives, VCU Libraries)
On Sept. 18, 2020, the VCU board of visitors voted to recognize DePillars’ contributions, not only to the university but the greater region. This decision followed an examination of commemorations and memorials on VCU properties associated with the Confederacy. The Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU previously named its media center the Murry DePillars Learning Lab.
DePillars, a Chicago native, came out of the Great Migration, the 1910-70 exodus from the South of approximately 6 million Black Americans escaping racial violence and discrimination. DePillars' family, like many others, moved from Mississippi to Chicago. A painting by DePillars in the permanent collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is titled "From the Mississippi Delta" (1997).
DePillars earned his bachelor's degree in art education and his master's in urban studies from Roosevelt University, and he later received a Ph.D. in art education from Penn State. He also became a part of AfriCOBRA (African Commune Of Bad Relevant Artists), a collective of black artists formed in Chicago in 1968.
Mary DePillars, Murry's wife, at the building dedication event and debut of the permanent installation in his honor (Photo by Harry Kollatz Jr.)
DePillars came to VCU in 1971 at a time of institutional mission-building and physical expansion. The school was born of the 1968 merger of Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia. VCU, in the process of figuring out what it wanted to be when it grew up, became defined in part by a rambunctious arts program. DePillars, with wisdom and professionalism, grew the school’s endowment and its enrollment to more than 2,000 students. He practiced management by walking around, stopping by to speak with students and faculty, often trailing a cloud of aromatic pipe smoke.
During the early 1980s DePillars inaugurated the fall and spring VCU Jazz series, which brought to Richmond musicians of the caliber of Dizzy Gillespie and Carmen McRae, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and Ramsey Lewis, saxophonist Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean. He supported Doug Richards in the organization of VCU’s jazz studies program. Under DePillars’ direction, Ellis Marsalis Jr. came to VCU as a visiting professor, as did jazz violinist Joe Kennedy Jr. VCU’s performance venues grew to assist in presenting the results of these collaborations, which ran the gamut from jazz festivals to fashion shows. These activities brought together a wide assortment of the public.
DePillars believed in art’s power to unify. He didn’t back down from defending this position. The National Endowment for the Arts decided in 1992 to withhold a $10,000 grant from an Anderson Gallery exhibition featuring photographs of human body parts.
DePillars then resigned his seat on the NEA’s Expansion Arts/Arts in Education Initiative panel. He stated, "I did not resign to create a reaction. I resigned because of principle.”
The dean then spoke before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies. He testified that the NEA should receive maximum funding rather than abolition.
DePillars' "art in a briefcase" on display during the 2017 retrospective at the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia (Photo courtesy Richard Woodward)
Richard Woodward, curator of African art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, curated the 2017 DePillars exhibition and the presentation at the DePillars Building. He cites DePillars’ keen sensitivity and encyclopedic knowledge of African art history as well as an artistic impetus with his mobile art-in-a-briefcase setup — an analog laptop. His position required frequent traveling, and he used waiting times in airports to keep creating, using materials that fit in the small case. “He was busy as dean and didn’t have much time to make art,” Woodward says. “After his retirement, the paintings get much larger and layered by complexity and symbols rooted in the Black experience and African history and art history.”
Mary, DePillars’ wife, recalls him saying, “I have attempted to celebrate, affirm and present the augustness of the Black presence. It is my hope that one day we can acknowledge, appreciate and celebrate the presence of all people.”
