For over 20 years, Dr. Richard Brettell animated UT Dallas with his vision for a community united and enriched through artistic creation, education and appreciation. Following his death in July 2020, longtime friends and partners came together to spur the realization of Brettell’s dreams for the arts at UT Dallas. 

Nearly 40 individual gifts have raised over $412,000 for the Rick Brettell Memorial Fund, which will name a reading room in the soon-to-be-constructed UT Dallas Athenaeum in Brettell’s honor. 

The Athenaeum project was Brettell’s magnum opus in his final years at UT Dallas. Envisioned as an on-campus museum and performing arts complex, the Athenaeum will house world-class collections of art, including several gifted to the University in recent years such as the Barrett Collection of Swiss Art, the Crow Collection of Asian Art, the Wildenstein-Plattner Library and the Carolyn Brown Archives. Boasting classrooms and studios alongside traditional galleries, the Athenaeum will be a meeting place where students, faculty and community members can collaborate across disciplines and cultures.

Donations in Dr. Richard Brettell’s honor will name a reading room in the planned UT Dallas Athenaeum for the campus visionary.

“For Rick, his legacy was making the arts at UT Dallas a real and tangible thing,” said Michael Thomas, director of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History and Richard R. Brettell Distinguished University Chair. “This reading room will be the perfect place for him to be remembered. It represents an important combination of research and engagement with the arts, located in the place we hope will be the hub for the arts in the North Dallas community.” 

Thanks to decades of effort by leaders like Brettell and a progressive University vision that inspired the creation of the O’Donnell Institute and the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, UT Dallas is uniquely positioned to create a new arts district for North Texas right on its own campus. 

“We’re the only public university that has ‘Dallas’ in our name,” Thomas said. “We really make sure that Dallas is a part of everything we do. We have a responsibility to represent this city.” 

Part of this responsibility lies in integrating UT Dallas’ traditional areas of excellence with the arts to create a university environment unlike any other. By embracing an approach to art history and artistic expression that combines science, technology, engineering and mathematics with the creative disciplines, UT Dallas can offer new perspectives on the STEM fields and humanities while opening unexplored vistas for artistic endeavor. 

These efforts are already taking place in classrooms and studios across campus through work on conservation science and programs that apply digital technology to the arts. The construction of the Athenaeum will facilitate new partnerships that invite faculty and students to think differently about the place of art in our lives. 

“The Athenaeum and its collections will become our laboratories, our data sets for people to work with,” Thomas said. “Its collections will be study-oriented. We can put a piece of art in a classroom, and just from having that physical piece in a room, we can have an art historian talk about it, a historian talk about it, a scientist can come and tell you about its chemical composition and the process of restoration. It can be a laboratory for multiple disciplines, and it gives all levels of access for research and study.” 

Continued philanthropic support will be vital to realizing a new era for the arts in North Texas. Construction of the Athenaeum is estimated to cost $70 million. The University has already raised $35 million toward this goal. 

“Dallas has the philanthropists and the people who are willing to recognize a visionary like Rick,” Thomas said. “Now we have an obligation to make sure that this vision doesn’t result in anything short of first-rate. We’ll live up to the ideals that Rick created through the generosity of our supporters. There’s no excuse for us to be anything other than successful.”