Origins and Evolution: The UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts (1965-1999)
- Encore Content
- 10 hours ago
- 6 min read
Encore Content stories are produced in paid partnership with the featured subjects. Each piece is written and edited with involvement from our editorial staff to ensure accuracy and clarity, with all information provided or approved by the sponsor. These stories do not necessarily reflect the views of Culture OC and do not constitute editorial endorsement. Each sponsored story is clearly labeled and created in alignment with our editorial standards.
by Peter Lefevre for UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts
Six decades. 25 Guggenheim Fellows. More than 1,000 students every year, producing hundreds of performances and exhibitions.
Numbers don’t tell the whole story of the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts, but they’re a revealing snapshot of the outsized impact the school has exerted on the regional and national artistic landscape.
From the June day in 1964 when President Lyndon B. Johnson dedicated the opening of the campus, its faculty artists have set their goals high. The new school of the arts was to be experimental. Challenging. Distinctly West Coast. Considering the suburban cliches that the city of Irvine is saddled with, “radical” and “avant garde” may not be the first words that come to mind when you think of the region, but maybe they should.
“The school has always fostered art that transformed and voices that matter,” says Tiffany Lopez, Claire Trevor Dean of the Arts and Professor in the School of Drama. “It’s renowned for doing cutting-edge contemporary art. Creativity, rigor and ambition have always been part of defining arts at UCI and central to the university’s mission.
“That edgy, boundary-pushing work that the school has done—that’s how the artists who came to UCI came to think about it. They were in extraordinary labs of creativity devoted to being forward-thinking.”
Clayton Garrison, founding dean of what was then called the School of Fine Arts, had a vision for the school that was interdisciplinary and built on the conservatory model. And the school’s defiant early stand against traditional arts pedagogy, and an insistence that arts education be radical, interdisciplinary and future-focused, has shaped generations of innovative artists and scholars.
PHOTO 1: Aerial view in spring of 1969 shows UC Irvine site of Fine Arts Village construction (in the middle right) and adjacent Mesa Court housing in foreground. PHOTO 2: Aerial view in spring of 1969 shows a view of the UC Irvine Fine Arts Village under construction and adjacent Mesa Court single student residences. Photos courtesy of UC Irvine Libraries, Special Collections and Archives. © UC Regents
Just look at the School of Art in 1965. Artists like David Hockney, Ed Moses and Robert Irwin played central roles in the early years, as did experimental video artist Nancy Buchanan and Barbara T. Smith, champions of the feminist art movement. Chris Burden (MFA ’71), best known for creating the Urban Light installation at LACMA (a landmark of Southern California art), pushed performance art to the extreme as a student, once by shooting himself in the arm, once by placing himself into a locker without food for five days.
Later, Catherine Lord, who served as chair of the Department of Art and director of the University Art Gallery in the ’90s (and is now a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences), elevated feminist and queer narratives that cemented UCI as a center for critical discourse.
Innovation doesn’t stop at the disciplinary borders, though.
The Department of Dance was largely shaped in those years by Eugene Loring, nationally celebrated choreographer of the famous 1938 ballet “Billy the Kid,” performed to a score by Aaron Copland. He was the dance department’s first chair and was still teaching when Molly Lynch was a student. Lynch, a UCI dance professor and former chair, puts much of the department’s successes at Loring’s feet.
“He had a vision for the department to be all-encompassing, all genres, ballet, modern and jazz, plus academics and kinesiology,” says Lynch. “He ran it like a professional company, with a focus on high quality. The faculty at the time were all professionals in the dance field, from modern companies and Broadway shows, made up of high-level professionals with really high standards.”
In addition to being one of the first collegiate dance departments in the nation to give equal weight to ballet and modern techniques, the department of that era was also distinguished by the presence of Antony Tudor, founding member of the American Ballet Theatre, who joined the Dance faculty in 1973, and Donald McKayle, who among many accomplishments was the first black man to choreograph major Broadway musicals (“Raisin” in 1973 and ”Sophisticated Ladies” in 1981).
“[Tudor] came in to teach every winter, and would restage some of his works,” says Lynch. ”That goes to a moment of historical importance, when you have Tudor teaching classes. He was very psychological about dancing: Why are you doing that? What is your hand doing? What are you thinking about? And that influenced how I teach now.”
As for McKayle, he served the department and his students for 28 years, creating more than 45 works with the UCI student dance troupe Etude Ensemble, and he was honored by the Kennedy Center in 2005 as a Master of African American Choreography.
“Our students are required to take all differing genres, movement analysis, injury prevention and a combo of practice of dance and academics,” says Lynch. “The foundation Loring laid was ahead of its time and is still a strong foundation today.”
Also ahead of its time was the Department of Drama, which established itself as an avant garde force from the start, when noted theatre director, playwright and drama critic Robert Cohen was named the department’s first chair.
“Cohen was there from the moment the school started, and was there for 50 years,” says Joel Veenstra, Chair of the Department of Drama. “We overlapped and it was thrilling to be led by someone with such a legacy and knowledge base. From the founding, he and the faculty set out an objective of how to create the school, that it had to offer students intellectual rigor and practical experience, and that tradition continues today.”
Highlights from the first three decades include playwriting courses taught by Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning writer William Inge (“Picnic,” “Bus Stop”, “Splendor in the Grass”), a production of Brecht’s “Mother Courage” featuring guest faculty artist Lotte Lenya, regular classroom visits by playwright Edward Albee, and courses taught by faculty member Jerzy Grotowski, the Polish theatre theorist and author of the highly influential text “Towards a Poor Theater.” (Grotowski joined the faculty under the condition that the university provide him with a barn and a yurt on campus, both of which still stand.) As the millennium came to a close, the department was welcoming its first Ph.D. cohort and had created the Experimental Theater, dedicated to avant-garde work.
As for the Department of Music, Michael Dessen, Professor and Robert & Marjorie Rawlins Chair of Music, also sees the spirit of creative excellence and interdisciplinary work woven into the history of his department.
“From the school’s founding, the Music Department has a long history of excellence in classical music, both performance and scholarship, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels,” he says, “and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the department began expanding into other areas by creating a jazz program and facilities for electronic music.”
Electronic composition and contemporary classical music has long been a part of the department’s work. By 1975, student composers under the direction of Professor Peter S. Odegard were hearing their work performed in the campus’s Concert Hall. Celebrated American composer/conductor Bernard Gilmore joined the faculty in 1982, and 1986 saw the opening of the Gassmann Electronic Music Laboratory, a home for computer composition classes, research and performance.
As the millennium came to a close the School was officially renamed the School of the Arts. A few months later, following the April 2000 death of Academy Award winner Claire Trevor, the School was renamed the Claire Trevor School of the Arts to honor the philanthropic support provided to the school by her and her step-son Donald Bren.
By that point, UCI’s arts community had become a fully formed collective recognized for experimental art, cross-cultural performance and interdisciplinary scholarship. It had firmly established itself as a major force in arts education, setting a strong foundation for the years to come.
NEXT WEEK (On Sept. 15): The UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts (2000-Present)
_gif.gif)
%20(1)_gif.gif)