Mountain View College’s art gallery and extensive art collection celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2020. For five decades, the college gallery has celebrated the work of students, faculty, and the Dallas art community, and supported creators by purchasing work to display permanently.
The MVC campus is filled with artwork – but because of coronavirus, it is also temporarily closed to the public. To help celebrate our college’s historic legacy from home, gallery director Alison Starr has assembled a video presentation and a SharePoint slideshow of all the catalogued works in the college collection. (Student or employee ID login is required for the slideshow, but everyone can access the video version on YouTube.)
Watching the video or flipping through the slides is a fascinating look through the history of the college and its generations of students and staff.
As MVC art professor James Behan wrote in a 2018 article, “What has developed is a visual historical record of the art trends in Dallas County, from the modern minimalist impulses of the 1970’s to the postmodern re-emergence of the human figure in the 1980’s and beyond.”
Building a college legacy
The MVC art collection began with a donation of work by Margaret McDermott, the philanthropist who was the founding Vice Chair of the DCCCD Board of Trustees. The oldest work in the college’s possession dates from 1952.
Since McDermott’s contribution, the collection has grown with the college.
“We have received work either as a donation or a purchase,” Starr explains. “We’ve purchased some faculty work, but the majority of the works that we have purchased are former students or current students. There may be some works of art in the collection where we just kind of inherited it because someone left it, possibly.”
One of the driving forces behind the collection is the annual League for Innovation exhibition initiated by professors Larry Felty and John Cowan, at which students from across the DCCCD display their finest work. This show enables Mountain View to purchase work by students from all the colleges in the District.
“There’s something that is really special about the League exhibition and being able to buy work from that,” Starr says. “Yes, there’s student work and they’re learning, but to be able to build a collection from around the District – what professors are teaching and how students respond to that – is very significant. It’s a support for the student, affirmation as well.”
Organizing the collection
In total, Mountain View College has over 300 works of art in its permanent collection. Starr counts 323 in her database, but around a dozen are missing, and others are counted separately in the collections of academic divisions.
“I’m willing to bet there are more that I just don’t know about,” Starr adds.
When she became the campus’s gallery director three years ago, Starr inherited a collection which was not catalogued, and employees around campus would occasionally discover long-lost artwork hidden in storage closets.
Starr rounded up the lost work, created a database listing each work, title, and creator, and asked MVC Marketing graphic designer Pat Broda to help create labels for each piece. Since then, dozens of paintings, drawings, and sculptures have appeared in the college’s hallways and public spaces, each with plaques identifying the artists.
Thanks to her efforts, Mountain View now feels like one big gallery. Starr also credits
Omniplan, the architecture firm that designed and built the college 50 years ago.
“It’s a great place for art,” she says. “Just because of its openness. The architect is the same architect that did NorthPark Mall. He had a sensibility of space, and he has a clear interest in design architecture and art.”
Campus is closed for now – but the MVC art collection lives online through the new video presentation. DCCCD students and faculty can also view the full collection in slideshow format on SharePoint Online (login required).
Learn more about the MVC Gallery.