Background
Our faculty play a vital role in fulfilling the School's mission through their research, teaching, and mentoring. They represent the soul of the School. Director Jamie Walker has designated increasing support for faculty as one of the top three fundraising priorities for the School.
Endowing a named chair, professorship, or fellowship recognizes and secures the key role that faculty play in the School's mission. A named chair, which exists in perpetuity, sends a strong signal of the donor's and UW's commitment to outstanding teaching and research in the vital areas of art, art history, and design. Professorships provide prestige for the holder, but they also are essential funding for faculty to be able to make the time and space for research.
Below is a list of some current and past recipients of chairs, professorships, and fellowships. There are also testimonials of the benefits brought about by this kind of support. The School celebrates the endowments we have, but we must ask for more so that we can attract and keep the excellent faculty that our students and the region deserve.
Minimum endowment investments are $100,000 for a fellowship, $500,000 for a professorship, and $2million for a chair. Additional information is available in a College of Arts & Sciences brochure. For those who want to support faculty but are unable to give at these levels, there is the possibility of donating to existing endowments. Questions may be directed to Merith Bennett (mab4@uw.edu, 206-543-0971).
Recipients
Allan and Mary Kollar Endowed Professor/Fellow in American Art
School of Art + Art History + Design
- Lacey Baradel, Art History, current fellow
- Susan Casteras, Art History, previous professor
Dale Chihuly Endowed Chair in Glass
School of Art + Art History + Design
- Mark Zirpel, 3D4M: ceramics + glass + sculpture, current
Hermine Pruzan Endowed Faculty Fellow
School of Art + Art History + Design
- To be announced soon, current
- Ann Gale, Painting+ Drawing, previous
- Curt Labitzke, Interdisciplinary Visual Art, previous
- Amie McNeel, 3D4M: ceramics + glass + sculpture, previous
- Helen O’Toole, Painting + Drawing, previous
Jack and Grace Pruzan Endowed Faculty Fellow
School of Art + Art History + Design
- Doug Jeck, 3D4M: ceramics + glass + sculpture, current
- Helen O'Toole, Painting + Drawing, previous
Wyckoff Milliman Endowed Chair in Art
School of Art + Art History + Design
- Jamie Walker, Director, current
- Christopher Ozubko, Director, previous
Donald E. Petersen Professor in the Arts
College of Arts & Sciences
- Estelle Lingo, Art History, current
- Karen Cheng, Visual Communication Design, previous
- Paul Berger, Photomedia, previous
Donald E. Petersen Endowed Faculty Fellow
College of Arts & Sciences
- Ellen Garvens, Photomedia, current
- Estelle Lingo, Art History, previous
Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Professor in the Arts
College of Arts & Sciences
- Rebecca Cummins, Photomedia, current
- Zhi Lin, Painting + Drawing, previous
Mary and Cheney Cowles Endowed Professor
College of Arts & Sciences
- Haicheng Wang, Art History, current
Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed University Professor
University of Washington
- Axel Roesler, Interaction Design, current
- Doug Wadden, Visual Communication Design, previous
Testimonials
We asked several faculty members who have held one of the above positions to share something about how they used the funds they received.
Lacey Baradel
Acting Assistant Professor Baradel writes this: "Because of the generous research support provided by the Kollar Endowed Fellowship in American Art, I was able to travel to present new research at the 2018 annual conferences of the College Art Association and the Nineteenth Century Studies Association in Los Angeles and Philadelphia respectively. The fellowship also supports programing in American art, making it possible to bring top scholars in the field to the University of Washington. In addition to delivering the public Kollar American Art Lecture last year, Michael Lobel, Professor of Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, spent time speaking with students in my seminar about his award-winning research on the Ashcan artist John Sloan."
Karen Cheng
Professor Cheng used part of her Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professorship to delve deeper into information design. As she wrote to the Petersens, the funds "allowed me to conduct research, author a paper, and edit a special edition of ARCADE (a non-profit design journal) exploring this important sub-discipline of design." Cheng also did a research study on applying visual design principles to scientific figures, and she began work on a project now known as Smart Bins, both of which involved other UW faculty as well as students.
Doug Jeck
Part of Associate Professor Jeck's Jack and Grace Pruzan Endowed Faculty Fellowship coincided with sabbatical quarters. During autumn quarter 2017, he was able to travel to the C.R.E.T.A. Roman Countryside Studio in Italy. This is an excerpt of what he wrote to the Pruzans: "For six weeks, I lived and worked, in glorious solitude at a country house with a modest ceramic studio 40 minutes from the center of Rome as a resident artist. Exploring Italy as an artist consumed by the human form has been a dream of mine for nearly 35 years… the season I experienced in Italy was the most concentrated, inspiring, fulfilling, and affirming time of my adult life. The Jack and Grace Pruzan Fellowship funded my residency fee, travel to and within Italy, and allowed me the freedom to fully embrace what I know to be a landmark episode in my creative, artistic identity."
Helen O'Toole
Professor O'Toole credits the Jack and Grace Pruzan Endowed Faculty Fellowship (and her previous Hermine Pruzan Endowed Faculty Fellowship) with providing the essential support needed to create work that was recognized in 2016 when she received a Contemporary Northwest Art Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In a letter to the Pruzans, she also wrote about how the funds have benefited students. O'Toole was able to hire students as studio assistants, and they learned from observing her practice. She also traveled to see artworks in major collections and has been able to share her observations with students in the classroom, describing details that can rarely be seen in reproductions.
Mark Zirpel
Support from the Dale Chihuly Endowed Chair in Glass has assisted Associate Professor Zirpel in developing all the facilities needed for the different types of glass work: kiln-forming, flame-working, cold-working, and, most recently, hot glass. When he had a sabbatical quarter in 2017, he used some of the time to work on his own artistic projects and part of it to expand his knowledge of hot glass by traveling to studios in Belfast, Northern Ireland; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Murano, Italy. He has also hired local glass artists to teach classes so that the students and he can learn more from them.
Jamie Walker
Following the lead of the previous holder of the Wyckoff Milliman Endowed Chair in Art — Professor Ozubko — Professor Walker has used these funds to benefit other School faculty. Twice a year, faculty members may apply for money to support travel or a variety of projects. Amounts awarded sometimes go as high as $5,000, but the average is between $1,500 to $2,000. Examples of supported proposals are:
- Defray costs associated with presenting a paper at the 19th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education held in Oslo, Norway.
- Production of catalogs and booklets for two upcoming exhibitions.
- Renewal of ICOM membership; travel to present a lecture at an exhibition opening in Poland; and acquisition of images and reproduction rights from the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.
- Purchase of books, software, and DVDs to be used as resource materials for the Design History course.
- Travel to Southeast University in Nanjing, China, to do preparatory research and planning for an Exploration Seminar proposal.
- Hire a research assistant to support work on the second edition of Designing Type and purchase of the typeface for the book.
- Purchase color images to illustrate an essay — "Bronzino's Beauty" — to be published in a monograph titled Perfection: The Essence of Art and Architecture in Early Modern Europe.
- Travel, accommodations, and registration costs for attending the biannual meeting of the European Architectural History Network in Tallinn, Estonia.
- Purchase of materials and supplies to produce a new body of work.