UCR Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts

Scheduled to be completed in 2010, The Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts will be an interactive art facility housed in the renovated Rouse Building, a magnificent 1895 department store. The Culver Center will extend the vitality and community interactivity of UCR/California Museum of Photography and Sweeney Art Gallery by providing new exhibition space; a 100-seat film and video screening room; an atrium gallery for installation, music, and performance under a magnificent 40 foot high naturally illuminated clerestory monitor; a public café; a new seismically protected home for the UCR/CMP’s world-treasure Keystone-Mast glass plate stereo collection; and an advanced faculty and student research Media Lab.

The lower level basement facilities of the Culver Center devoted to collections, preservation and support are essential to the archival stability and long-term administration of ARTSblock. The expanded research and archival collection of UCR/CMP will be housed in this area where it will be much more easily accessible. Here, because of support from a Federal Save America’s Treasures grant, the world-famous Keystone-Mast glass negatives will be housed in seismically stable conditions. Additional support spaces include a fabrication workshop, a conservation room, administrative offices, and materials storage. The Culver will be equipped with state-of-the-art technology systems. It is an architectural synthesis of an 1895 building with today’s most advanced digital technology.

The Culver Center will become a major architectural feature of Riverside’s downtown Historic Arts district. This area includes a number of architectural gems of the late 19th century and early 20th century including the Mission Inn (1902); Julia Morgan’s Riverside YWCA (1929) which now houses the Riverside Art Museum; the Fox Theater (1929), which was the home of the premier of Gone with the Wind and is now being newly renovated into a 1,600-seat performing arts center for Broadway-style shows; the Municipal Auditorium (1927) which was the city’s First World War Soldiers’ Memorial Building and continues in use to this day; the art deco Kress Dime Store (c. 1925) renovated by architect Stanley Saitowitz in 1986 into the UCR/California Museum of Photography.