Generous boost for USC’s art school

USC will announce today that it has received a $23-million gift for its fine arts school from trustee Ed Roski and his wife, artist Gayle Garner Roski. In honor of the donation, which will increase the art school’s $5-million endowment more than fivefold, the school will be named the Gayle Garner Roski School of Fine Arts.

“This is a transformative gift,” said Ruth Weisberg, dean of the university’s art school. “It will allow us to realize our ambitious plans to invent the art school of the future.” Income from the endowment will help the school purchase new digital equipment and integrate it into the traditional curriculum, she said. The funds will also be used to enlarge the faculty, increase financial support for graduate students and enrich the undergraduate program.

The gift is not the largest received by the university. The late Walter Annenberg holds that record with a $120-million donation made in 1993. But $23 million is an enormous windfall for an art school.

“We were looking to see what we could do to make a difference,” said Ed Roski, a 1962 USC graduate who made a fortune in real estate development and is part-owner of the Lakers basketball team, the Kings hockey team and Staples Center. “It just felt to us that this was an opportunity to support the arts in a unique way and help a lot of deserving students take part in their dream and add to the fabric of Los Angeles. Art defines a society. It always has. Most of our knowledge of past societies has come through art. It shows what people were interested in and what they were about.”

Roski’s wife’s name, not his, will go on the school, he said, because she was educated there and has had a lifelong interest in art. “I thought it was appropriate,” he said. “She was in the art school; I was in the business school.”

Gayle Garner Roski attended USC from 1960-62 and met her future husband during her first week on campus. She established herself as a watercolorist and community arts supporter after raising three children. She is a Los Angeles Cultural Affairs commissioner and chairs the arts and furnishings committee at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown L.A.

“We are at a place in our lives where we are able to give back,” she said. “I feel so fortunate that we are able to help develop the art program at the school I loved.”

In a statement, USC President Steven B. Sample said: “We’re delighted that our school of fine arts will bear the name of an extraordinarily talented artist, alumna and advisor. ... Gayle and Ed Roski are affirming the preeminent place that the arts have in the intellectual and cultural life of a comprehensive research university.”

Longtime supporters of the university, the Roskis recently gave the art school $750,000 for a graduate student gallery in a renovated building three blocks north of the campus.

Established in 1895, USC’s art school is the oldest in Southern California and part of a galaxy of visual arts institutions -- including CalArts, UCLA’s art school, Art Center College of Design and Otis College of Art and Design -- often said to be the best in the country. Offering bachelor degrees in fine arts and studio arts, and master’s degrees in fine arts and public art studies, the USC school has about 300 undergraduate art majors, 110 art minors and 40 graduate students. The faculty is composed of 17 full-time professors and about 45 part-time instructors.

As for “the art school of the future,” Weisberg said, USC has already merged staffs of the photography and intermedia programs and is planning to create clustered labs for more efficient use of equipment. “The new technology is expensive,” she said. “We have to purchase and maintain a much wider variety than we ever dreamed of. At the same time, we don’t want to cannibalize very important traditional offerings. To do this right, we need massive support as well as the right people thinking about it. We have the right team. This support will allow us to create an art school that’s prepared for the ... 21st century.”