Steve Richardson ’86 doesn’t know if he likes broasted chicken. In fact, he’s not quite sure what it is. He does, however, like flame-broiled burgers. He also watches American Idol with his kids, has Polish relatives in his ancestry, and has lived in Milwaukee and in Richmond, Virginia, among other places.

These random details of Richardson’s life were revealed during a lengthy interview on The Wayne Eddy Affair, a Northfield talk radio program, during which Richardson answered questions about his childhood, his background in music and theater, and his family’s connections to the area. (His wife, Sarah, grew up in Northfield.) The two-hour interview last spring ended before Richardson got a chance to discuss his current passion: As Carleton’s first director of the arts, he is charged with increasing the visibility of the arts, leading the College’s transformation of the former Northfield Middle School building into the Arts Union, and facilitating innovative curricular collaborations both among the arts departments and between the arts and other disciplines.

You could call him the executive producer of Carleton’s arts movement. “I’m excited about the future of the arts at Carleton and the role I have in bringing creativity to the forefront of a Carleton education,” he says. “I’m not sure how interesting it was for Wayne’s listeners to hear about me as a toddler. I had a typical childhood, and it isn’t very relevant to what I’m doing now.” (Richardson did return to the radio station later in the spring to talk about the arts at Carleton.)

Richardson’s professional background is in arts administration. He spent 17 years at Theatre de la Jeune Lune in Minneapolis, starting out as marketing director and eventually becoming the company’s producing director. He developed creative partnerships with other arts organizations, both regionally and nationally, and helped the theater stage a production of Hamlet off-Broadway in New York. “My role was to ask the artists, ‘What do you want to make?’ and then figure out how to do it,” he says. “It was pulling together the resources and the teams to make it happen.”

Richardson brings that collaborative spirit to his job at Carleton.

“The thinking at Carleton is aimed squarely at interdisciplinary collaboration, and my role is to support and nurture those partner­ships,” he says. “We’re working to create a flexible environment where we can make things happen, beyond just putting people together and hoping something happens.”

Sitting squarely in the middle of Richardson’s job description, at least initially, is the transformation of the former Northfield Middle School building into Carleton’s Arts Union, the epicenter of the College’s campus initiative to integrate the arts more fully throughout the curriculum. Situated across from Nutting House on Third and Union Streets, the facility will house the departments of art and art history, cinema and media studies, English, and theater and dance, as well as a teaching museum, a centralized technology resource center, KRLX, the Perlman Learning and Teaching Center, and Presentation, Events, and Production Services. Performance venues include two dramatic arts theaters, a cinema, and two dance studios.

Planning for the structural aspects of the Arts Union is proceeding apace (architectural schematics are complete; construction currently is scheduled to begin in summer 2009) and Richardson, who began work at Carleton in December 2007, has been the liaison between the College and the project’s architects—the Minneapolis-based firm of Meyer, Scherer and Rockcastle—as floor plans have been developed in line with Carleton’s vision for the facility. The historic character of the building and its importance to the city of Northfield present unique opportunities. In other words, it’s not a start-from-scratch construction project, and Carleton is being careful to preserve portions of the original structure, such as exteriors dating from 1910 and the 1930s.

“There is huge value, when you are constructing a creative space, in including as much history and character and connection to the community as you can,” Richardson says. “We are working with architects who are skilled at remolding a building like this into something new. It will be a great mix of old, historic character and beautiful new spaces designed specifically for creative purposes.”

Richardson is now facilitating campus conversations about innovative collaborations—such as how to leverage technology to make multimedia projects across disciplinary lines—that will be forged and nurtured within the Arts Union, setting Carleton’s facility apart from others where the emphasis is on the final showcase of an artist’s work.

“We want to shift the focus to more of a workshop setting,” Richardson says. “The Arts Union is not conceived as a performing arts center. Certainly performances will take place there, but the guiding ethos of the place is where work gets made and shared. It’s about collaboration between students and students, students and faculty members, and students and visiting artists, who can share their process with others simply by staying at Carleton longer than for a one-time performance.”

The Arts Union, according to Richardson, is the physical embodiment of a larger curricular vision: preparing Carleton students to engage the world from a creative perspective. “The world is more fluid today than it’s ever been,” Richardson says. “Students are connected to anyone at any time, and they have access to any information they want. They need to be wide open to possibilities, to see how things fit together, and to not be bound by rules and systems, but be free to create their own. That is a capsule description of what artists do.”

Richardson envisions the Arts Union, with its emphasis on the process of making and sharing art, as a lively, open, animated space that naturally will draw students in the door. “The design of the building is really smart, because you can see all of the art happening, and people will want to be a part of that,” he says. Studios and workspaces surround a three-story vaulted and glass-enclosed atrium that is likely to become the building’s social gathering spot, serving as a lobby of sorts for the performance venues and offering spaces for informal, spontaneous exhibits and concerts. The atrium will have a café, which, for Richardson’s sake, might be persuaded to serve a broasted chicken sandwich.

Marla Holt is a writer and editor in Carleton’s Office of Publications.

Web Extra: View the schematic designs for the Arts Union.

What a Concept

Meyer, Scherer and Rockcastle, the Twin Cities–based architectural firm designing Carleton’s Arts Union, is celebrated for its creative and adaptive reuse of historic structures. The firm is perhaps best known locally for transforming Minneapolis’s Washburn flour mill into the Mill City Museum on the downtown riverfront. The firm’s conceptual vision for the Arts Union includes:

• a teaching museum and a dance studio with exterior views onto Third and College Streets, the main entry point for students and faculty members,
• a three-story, glass-enclosed atrium that radiates from the center of the building to the edges and provides a variety of gathering and exhibit spaces,
• interior open-air skyways to cross the atrium at each level,
• an outdoor sunken art yard with room for the creation of large-scale artworks, particularly sculpture and woodworking,
• facilities for the departments of art and art history, cinema and media studies, English, and theater and dance, including classrooms, faculty offices, studios, seminar rooms, and critique areas,
• enhanced space for the Perlman Learning and Teaching Center and KRLX radio,
• a centralized technology resource center to support sophisticated multimedia and multidisciplinary projects, and
• two dramatic arts theaters, a cinema, and an additional dance studio.