Wake the Arts Center History

From Dr. Cindy Gendrich:

“It’s hard to believe that it’s been seventeen years since my friends and colleagues Sharon Andrews, Brook Davis, and I sat in Brook’s car and dreamed of artists’ work being more central to the life of Wake Forest. At that moment in 2007, I began obsessing about an interdisciplinary arts center that could imaginatively and energetically connect our entire campus, giving us all a time, place, and reason to talk about the things we most care about. With the encouragement of Michele Gillespie and Mark Welker, Music’s Louie Goldstein and I set about making it a reality.  

“The center planning process in 2010-2012 gave me and my team—now including Leah Roy (Theatre) and Christina Soriano (Dance)—time to reflect on who we wanted to be and what we wanted the center to do. And in 2012 I pitched the idea for the Interdisciplinary Performance and the Liberal Arts Center to the Research Advisory Council and our then-new provost, Rogan Kersh, and IPLACe was born.

“Hundreds of interdisciplinary partnerships followed, connecting nearly every academic and administrative unit on campus. Performances, classroom collaborations, talkbacks and salons, student initiatives, traditional scholarship, commissions of original work, and dozens of guest artist residencies enlivened our campus and brought new focus to the performing arts. Our NEA funded Music/Dance/Theatre/Media Studies collaboration with our Facilities colleagues and Austin-based Forklift Danceworks was perhaps the most visible thing we did from 2012-2020, but we supported over 600 events—both large and small—during that time.

“Finally, in 2021, we welcomed more Arts friends to the center, and renamed it the Interdisciplinary Arts Center. IAC continued to thrive, adding new committee members and supporting a broader variety of arts-focused work, while doubling down on important collaborations, like our university counseling troupe which started before the center was even fully funded. Christina Soriano, working as an Associate Provost, was able to attract millions of dollars of external funding, and demonstrate to Wake’s administration and development offices the value of the arts to a liberal arts education.  Improbably, we have found a way to institutionalize something that started as a shared dream in a hot car on a sunny August day. Now called the Wake the Arts Center, it is a part of Wake Forest that will, we hope, endure for a very long time.

“We still dream of our arts spaces being the state-of-the-art facilities that our students and faculty deserve, but—with our friends all over campus—we will work with what we have to keep making  high quality art, interdisciplinary connections, and friends. We will keep growing the awareness of the arts’ ability to spur new ideas, to enrich the lives of students, faculty, and staff, and to build human connection, both in- and outside Wake Forest.”

—Dr. Cindy Gendrich, August 2024