Message from the Dean
This year, the Herberger College has begun serious planning for the long-awaited completion phase of the ASU Fine Arts complex. The college is a partner in the university’s creation of the West Gateway project, which is to be located on a 13-acre site at the intersection of University Drive and Mill Avenue. West Gateway will provide a new home for the Herberger College and the W.P. Carey School of Business.
This major expansion enables us to consolidate the internationally recognized academic and artistic programs of the college. Bringing all our programs together offers huge benefits to students, faculty and audiences. We envision new collaborations of every imaginable variety – musicians composing for dancers, artists collaborating with playwrights and directors on new set designs, museum curators inviting studio artists to help shape a new exhibition. We also imagine cross-disciplinary engagement with our neighbors in the Carey School that might include an entrepreneurship course for the artistically inclined, as well as opportunities for future CEOs to develop their visual and performing arts literacy.
New facilities will enable the Herberger College to increase its outreach to the community by providing space for a new Community School aimed at learners from early childhood through retirement. New performance venues will include a 1,200-seat mediated performance hall and a 500-seat lecture hall, enabling the college to serve an even larger portion
of the campus and community.
The Herberger College’s presence at West Gateway will help solidify our competitive edge. All of the college’s academic programs – Art, Dance, Music, Theatre – are recognized nationally, including many programs and specialties listed in the top 20 by U.S. News & World Report and fine arts organizations. Our research units, the Institute for Studies in the Arts and the ASU Art Museum, are internationally recognized for setting the standard for innovation. Having all of these in proximity of the Arts and Business Gateway Project on the Tempe campus will have an incalculable impact locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.
J. Robert Wills, Dean
