(Image: Lee Center for the Arts)
(Image: Lee Center for the Arts)
Big plans for Seattle University to create a new art museum along 12th Ave are exciting for the school but some of those closest to the school’s art scenes are rallying to save the much-loved and heavily used building it would replace — the Lee Center for the Arts.
It has been a busy 12 months for Seattle U, the 134-year-old private Jesuit school on Capitol Hill’s southern edge serving approximately 7,200 students.
In December, the school announced it would take over Cornish College of the Arts, the much smaller, 111-year-old private art school in the Denny Triangle neighborhood downtown. Last summer, property developer Dick Hedreen announced he would donate to Seattle University his family’s $300-million collection of more than 200 pieces of art (from Andy Warhol to Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg to Willem de Kooning, and more), in addition to $25 million in seed funding to create a new Seattle University Museum of Art (SUMA).
“We’re still working out logistics of the museum’s location, but it will likely be on a plot abutting 12th Avenue next to the Lee Center for the Arts,” a Seattle University spokesperson told CHS last year when Hedreen’s sizable donation was announced.
Those logistics are a little clearer now, as planning is underway for SUMA’s construction to begin in the summer of 2026, Seattle University told CHS this week. The new museum will replace the Lee Center.
It’s a decision that concerns many faculty members and students in Seattle University’s performing and visual arts departments. Janet Hayatshahi, an assistant professor in Seattle University’s Theatre Department, said the Lee Center’s demise “will not only have a detrimental effect on our campus but will also change the cultural landscape of Capitol Hill and the entire Seattle arts community.”
According to Seattle University officials, once the merger between the two educational institutions is finalized, Cornish will be renamed Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University and continue to operate in the Denny Triangle neighborhood. “We anticipate Seattle University’s Theater and Performing Arts programs will become part of the new Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University,” Seattle University told CHS this week. “This includes the Theater program and performing arts spaces, which will be available for use by current and future Seattle University students.” That makes the Lee Center expendable.
Named for Seattle University alumni Jeanne Marie and Rhoady Lee, Jr., the Lee Center, located at the corner of 12th Avenue and East Marion Street, houses a 150-seat, 3,000-square-foot theater and 1,400-square-foot lobby and art gallery inside a 22,000-square-foot concrete and wood-frame structure built in the 1930s. It served as an auto showroom before its $6.75 million renovation in 2006.
The Lee Center doesn’t just serve Seattle University students. Local theater groups have occasionally leased its black-box theater for its flexible seating configuration, costume and scene shops, dressing and green rooms, and even its catwalk allowing actors to enter and exit from overhead.
“The Lee Center has long served as a critical space for students and community members to express themselves, collaborate, and celebrate the arts,” said Anniyah Fitzhugh, a Seattle University student double majoring in Communication and Theatre. “It is one of the few spaces on campus where artistic expression is nurtured, and its loss would silence a vital voice within our university.”
Students and faculty members concerned by the situation say they are also frustrated by how they learned about this decision.
Academic program coordinator Aly Bedford and teaching professor Dominic CodyKramers recalled hearing rumors about the Lee Center’s demolition from frequent arts collaborators at Cornish. Bedford said, “At the point that the higher administration found they had to respond to what we had heard from our Cornish friends, they told us that this demolition was a done deal, that the higher administration—including the president and provost—and the board had made that final decision already with absolutely no input from us, the experts of performance spaces, and professionals in our Seattle arts community.”
“Shortly after notifying the provost’s office that rumors of the demolition were being heard, faculty and staff were called into a Zoom meeting on January 30 with [senior administrators] to officially inform us of their plans,” CodyKramers said.
Seattle University says the decision is justified by the benefits of SUMA (“an unparalleled access to world-class art and an enriched educational experience”) and the new access to Cornish’s three performance spaces, including the Alhadeff Studio Theater and Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center and Raisbeck Auditorium near Denny Way.
For those who who want to save the Lee, the massive arts donation to Seattle U is not shaping up to be an even trade.
Bedford says the Cornish Playhouse is a union house (“producing shows there is far more expensive—built into Cornish’s budget, not ours”) and traveling between Seattle University and Cornish’s theater spaces at Seattle Center and downtown is time-consuming and expensive. “The higher admin toured the Cornish performance spaces and decided—again, without consulting our professionals working in the Lee Center daily—that those were far better spaces,” said Bedford. “They don’t understand why it’s important to have a performance space on our campus.”
The loss of the Lee will also remove another arts and performance space from the neighborhood and the Seattle U campus.
This month, Seattle University’s Theatre Program is presenting Scratched Out — a showcase of student-produced storytelling, songs, and poetry—at the Lee Center. “We hope to use this production to also raise awareness and generate community support,” said Fitzhugh. “We are hoping this production will demonstrate to the administration just how essential the Lee Center is to our university.”
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No one at SU was asking for that art donation or this museum (they sure as hell didn’t give a shit about the arts when I was a student, as far as I can tell nothing’s changed outside of some extremely wealthy person getting to claim an outrageous donation.
The existing theater is one of the best black box facilities in the city and is less than 20 years old, and is an incredible resource for the students, artists, and patrons who use it. The Cornish facilities are miles away & the deal hasn’t even gone through yet. (The SU BA program is also very different from Cornish’s conservatory BFA programs, but that’s a whole separate thing.) I have no idea why they aren’t trying to incorporate the existing building into the design but the fact that the discussion wasn’t even had with department admins before the announcement came out doesn’t make me especially confident that this is getting handled well or will turn out well. Ugh.
When I went to Seattle U in the late 80’s the Arts department was in surplus WWll Barracks….and isn’t the Lee Center only like 10 years old?
It’s about 18 years old, but for a theater, especially in this city, that makes it VERY new still! There are few performance spaces in Seattle as well-equipped as the Lee Center, which has its own costume, prop, and scenic shops on-site and uses hands-on student labor to produce shows.
Classic prioritizing of donor prestige over education. What’s a university for, anyway?!
Someone I know had an elementary school production booked there. Several days from the performance they were told, without prior warning or agreement that because it was now a union shop they were not allowed to have the kids do sound or set jobs and that they had to pay the stage hands, even if they had nothing to do… they had to scramble and find a new venue as they had no budget for this pop surprise…
Do you mean the Cornish Playhouse? The Lee Center isn’t a union shop at all, it’s fully staffed by students. But they also don’t typically do a lot of outside rentals, and definitely not for elementary school shows.
Ah, yes, I see I was mixing up what was in the article. They were supposed to use Cornish. Indeed I can see why the students at SU wouldn’t want to lose this space. Cornish wouldn’t exactly be a good substitute, if they are forbidden from doing parts of the productions.
I think there may be opportunities to work alongside stagehands or shadow them, am not sure. And that’s also just so different from being given ownership over a job. It’s really just not possible to replicate that firsthand experience in a classroom or lecture hall.
I imagine that this is just the first shoe to drop. We should anticipate significant workforce reductions as SU attempts to manage the costs of absorbing Cornish while addressing the ongoing decline in enrollment.
We can also anticipate further pressures on donations to smaller arts orgs as the fundraising for SUMA’s capital campaign ramps up as well as operations. SU’s endowment is large but not that large.
Something is off kilter in the arts community’s philanthropic class(es). Consider the dispersal of the Barney Ebsworth Collection, the Paul G. Allen collection, the gift of the Hedreen collection to SU, the gift of the Benaroya collection to Tacoma Art Museum, and the placement of the Richard E. Land and Jane Lang Davis collection into a private foundation. Additionally, there is also the constant churn of private sales of works of the highest quality by Lucian Freud, Claude Monet, Kerry James Marshall, Barnett Newman, and so many other iconic artists.
This whole situation should give us all pause to ask why existing arts organizations are being overlooked as these major donors seek to cement their legacies. At best, this is shame. Other times, I wonder if this isn’t scandalous.
Agree that SU should try to retain the existing Lee art space. But… I can’t understand the tone here that the Hedreen donation of $300M in art plus $25M for a museum, is somehow bad. No good deed goes unpunished.
What tone are you talking about? No one in the article or comments has been against the Hedreen donation of art/museum, people are upset that plans for it will be at the expense of an existing community art space. It’s clearly sending a message to the students and faculty that a certain type of art is being preferred over others.
I think other commenters have raised important points about the power of the wealthy with donations, and generally the dealing in subjective commodities, like prestige are, that exist in markets they and other wealthy individuals have access and control over.
I don’t think anyone is angry about the donation, but the idea that existing educational spaces/resources/programs for the arts are getting displaced for a museum that, as far as I’m aware, no one asked for & there was no demand for. Not to mention–that money could go incredibly, incredibly far to help existing and future students were it put directly into existing programs (especially if the 300M of art was sold rather than being donated for display) but it instead is going towards what appears to be a vanity project for a super-wealthy person.
This is terrible!! I’m so sorry to any Seattle U students who have to go through this. And sending students to Cornish is not a solution. It’s over a mile way and is so incredibly inconsiderate to anyone who is using the theater from both Seattle U and Cornish Students.