Katzen opens its doors to the public

BY SALLY ACHARYA

Art writers scribbled notes. Students proudly led visitors around classrooms and studios that still smelled of fresh paint. And faculty members and AU staff explored the newly opened Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center, heels clacking on the polished floors and exclamations of amazement echoing in the commodious space.

As the Katzen threw open its doors to the public for the first time this week, AU President Benjamin Ladner looked around and said, “We have built a small village here.”

Visitors had to agree. Each step introduced them to a new sight: a painting by a famed artist, a state-of-the-art stage, a sculpture hanging like a small planet with a glowing light at its core, and a seemingly endless array of classrooms, studios, and performance spaces to house all of AU’s arts faculties and students in one, splendid facility.

Photos by Jeff Watts

Artist Hsin-Hsi Chen discusses her pencil on paper installation, Journey, with sculptor John Ruppert.

At the Katzen, visitors can see Christine Buckton Tillman’s wool felt creation, forest from the trees.

The AU community long watched in curiosity as the curving walls of the Katzen rose from the hillock at Ward Circle. So, too, did the more than 100,000 drivers who pass the site each day.

Now the Katzen is open to the public, and many of the people who have already dropped by to see it—some on formal tours, others just stepping inside for a look at the building and its first exhibition, Soft Openings—have been shaking their head in wonderment. The 130,000-square foot complex is not only a major addition to campus, but one of the largest arts spaces in Washington, D.C.

“It’s as big as the quad, at least,” said Carole Gallaher, who was exploring the vast complex with fellow School of International Service faculty member Clarence Lusane. “They deserve this,” she said. Spotting a friend’s name on his new office door, she laughed, “I’m going to have to call him and say, ‘You lucky dog!’”

Members of the arts faculty know they’re lucky. “It’s fabulous. There will be so much more available to me as an artist,” enthused costume designer Barbara Tucker Parker, performing arts. AU’s visual and performing arts faculties have long worked in isolation from each other in small, out-of-the-way spaces. Now, as if overnight, their space has grown tremendously—and so has their opportunity for interaction.

“As performance artists, we’ve been isolated from the artistic community. Now I’ll be part of this building,” Parker said. “I’ll be schlepping costumes around, so now I’m going to sneak into life drawing classes. This is my home now!”

The view across the sound board into the Abramson Family Recital Hall.

The vastly expanded opportunity for interaction isn’t limited to faculty and students. “This building invites. There is nothing exclusive. It’s all inclusive,” Ladner noted. And indeed, sitting on one of the highest points left in the city for new construction, it will be a memorable symbol of AU for many thousands of passing cars, its glowing atrium enticing visitors to enter and enjoy some of the best of local and national art.

One person enticed into the building was two-year-old Reese Baldwin, who was ogling mammoth sculpted heads with his father, law student Randy Baldwin, and grandparents visiting from Texas. “We’ll be back to see our grandson and the museum,” said Delores Baldwin.

Student Justine Hirshfeld ’07 predicts that many of the visitors drawn by the new complex will be prospective students. “I’m just blown away by it,” said Hirshfeld, a graphic design major. As it happens, she transferred to AU in part because she knew the Katzen was on the horizon. Now, she says, the word is sure to get out. “It’ll make people come and look at the school more, and when you see it, how would you not want to study here?”

As the Katzen made its debut to “oohs” and “ahs,” patron Cy Katzen looked around the gallery of the building he made possible, and smiled. “It’s a little too small,” he quipped in the towering atrium, “but you can’t have everything.”

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