The University’s Center for Fine Arts (CFA) recently received an unsolicited $400,000 national grant award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting performance art.

CFA Director Pamela Tatge was excited to hear the news of the grant.

“It was one of the more surreal moments in my life,” Tatge said. “It was a wonderful moment where you can’t believe it is actually happening…. It was a wonderful surprise and it’s a very rare occurrence in the non-profit arts world to receive this unsolicited grant.”

The Foundation donated a total of 3.5 million dollars to five different institutions, including the American Repertory Theater, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and On the Boards. The CFA was the only department within a university to receive this award.

CFA Program Manager Erinn Roos-Brown expanded on why the University was a special selection for this grant.

“I really think it has a lot to do with…[the University’s] creative campus initiative and within in [that], the ICPP [Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance], given that there are no other…higher education degrees based on performance curation in the United States,” Roos-Brown said. “It’s a really big undertaking and a really important one to elevate performance in the U.S…. I think that this idea of teaching people how to perform curate performance, and taking the arts and elevating it to this new place of learning and teaching is really the main reason that…we were selected.”

Roos-Brown elaborated on what this grant means for the CFA.

“For me, it was a wonderful validation [of] the kind of work that we’ve been doing, that this kind of experimental nature in the arts on campuses is something big funders value,” Roos-Brown said. “When you look at the number of arts institutions in the country doing really interesting stuff, the fact that they only picked five—that’s just inspiring. Knowing that we were the only university of those gave us a lot of confidence to keep plowing away.”

However, the Foundation’s grant comes with some restrictions. Tatge described the process by which the University will receive the grant money over a period of up to four years.

“We will go through a self-assessment,” Tatge said. “They will give us an assessment tool [with which] we will survey ourselves and send the results to the consultant, who will then do a site visit and then meet…with leadership as well as faculty, students, and staff. It’s designed to be helpful to us….What they’ll be looking for is our organizational adaptability to change—that is what the program is called—as well as our ability to continue to innovate.”

The CFA will spend the money in a variety of ways, including staff expansion, creation of capital reserves, professional development, technology, board and staff retreats, convenings, and consultants. Tatge commented on the importance of grant money for these services.

“We can’t use the money for whatever we want to use it for; it has specific purposes,” Tatge said. “The important thing about a cash reserve is that it is made to be a rainy [day] fund that you always have, that you never sort of just spend.”

In addition to the grant money, the CFA will receive an added bonus of financial consultation from the Foundation.

“[T]hey’re giving us funding to bring the non-profit finance fund in to take a look at how we do our financial management and give us advice,” Tatge said. “That’s terrific; that’s another piece of the money we didn’t anticipate. And so for us—we’re a department in a large university—it’s going to be really helpful to look at how we can manage things better given the fact that we are an arts institution working within a larger institutional bureaucracy.”

President Michael Roth expressed his enthusiasm about the grant in a press release sent out by the CFA.

“This exciting award really speaks to the CFA’s tradition—40 years and counting—of building a community of creativity and experimentation,” Roth said in the press release. “Under (Director) Pam Tatge’s leadership our Center for the Arts has found ways to engage an increasingly diverse audience. An award like this also recognizes and supports Wesleyan’s extraordinary commitment to the arts.”