Viviana Smith/ Fourth Estate
The Center for the Arts is to be renovated with the help of a grand fundraising initiative
BY VIVIANA SMITH, SENIOR STAFF WRITER
On Feb. 6, Mason’s College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) announced their fundraising initiative, Give Voice, to renovate the Center for the Arts (CFA) on the Fairfax campus.
Give Voice, part of Mason’s first “one-billion-dollar comprehensive fundraising campaign,” hopes to raise $35 million to “modernize” the center into a “state-of-the-art venue.” The entire project, known as the “Center for the Arts reimagination project,” totals an estimated cost of $70 million dollars to complete.
Since 1990, the Center for the Arts has been a bustling epicenter for events and performances presented by various Mason colleges and acts as a host for arts organizations outside of Mason. According to their website, “each year, the Center welcomes hundreds of thousands of community members into its nearly 2,000-seat Concert Hall.”
According to the Give Voice information page, the expansion is necessary because the CFA “is no longer a match for the growth and evolution [Mason has] experienced.” The plan involves: reconstructing the Concert hall, remodeling the lobby, revamping the ticket office and reception area, constructing a new donor lounge, creating new studios and classrooms and updating equipment and other operations.
The reconstruction of the space would improve the long-standing technical and accessibility issues, acoustics for performances and the overall audience-experience.
The Center for the Arts has been a large part of Mason’s culture ever since former Mason First Lady Joanne Johnson’s efforts to boost the arts on campus during her husband’s university presidency. “With the Center of the Arts, I think you’ve really enriched the community in terms of its appreciation of the arts, and that’s something we didn’t have before,” Barry Dewberry, lead benefactor of the initiative said in a Mason-produced video for the initiative.
The boost for the arts reignited in April 2022 from a $10 million donation to Give Voice from Dewberry and Arlene Evans. The continuous support for the renovation of the arts is said to be a push in supporting “student success, research, innovation, community, and stewardship.”
While the project is expected to take about 16 months to complete, construction won’t begin until funding reaches the $35 million threshold, according to Rick Davis, Dean of Mason’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. The project has raised about $18 million to date, which is a little over half of their eight-figure goal.
“We have just begun (as of late April) an extensive planning study to determine the overall concept of the renovation or “reimagination,” Davis said in an emailed interview.
In the 2012 College of Visual & Performing Arts Facilities Master Plan, details of the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ future projects and initiatives mirrored the community’s need for renovations to performance centers on campus.
Davis explained that the study-in-progress will provide updated details about the estimated cost of the project.
Once the renovation begins, the Center will be “offline” for a little over one academic year in total, Davis shared. While the Center space will be under construction, accommodations will be made to keep student and other performance schedules in place, by using available venue spaces on and near the Fairfax and SciTech campuses.
“We will also maintain at least a portion of the Great Performances at Mason series, adjusting it for the capacities of the available venues and our sense of how adventurous our audience will be to travel around a bit,” Davis said.
Updates for the renovation can be followed through CFA’s email list, available for sign up on their website.
