Benedicta Arts Center

The Benedicta Arts Center was named after Mother Benedicta Riepp, the foundress of the Benedictine women of the United States. The BAC holds the Art, Music and Theater Departments.

The building committee had been planning and designing the structure from 1959 to 1962. Originally, plans were only made for the building of an auditorium with an additional small theater. However, the architects for the project, Dick Hammel, Curt Green and Bruce Abrahamson persuaded otherwise. Curt Green took the building committee, chaired by Sister Mary Patrick Murray and staffed by Sr. Fermin Escher, Sr. Colman O’Connell and Sr. Jacqueline Dubay, to six different states, to tour campus art facilities. He encouraged them to build with the future in mind. From this excursion, the auditorium became a 3 in 1 Arts Center. The Groundbreaking for the $3 million BAC took place in November of 1962, a ceremony blessed by Reverend Gunther Rolfson, OSB. A small effort was mounted by the religious community and the college, each contributing half the cost. The BAC was designed to have:

• 1,000 seat auditorium with portable seating to increase numbers to 1,150
• Through the acoustical consultants, Bolt, Beranek and Newman of Boston, the auditorium would have almost perfect acoustics. This was created with the combination of brick, wood and fabric, with adjustable acoustical treatment behind wooden baffles
• A small theater called the Forum, provided seating for 292. Flexible seating can be arranged for a thrust stage or a traditional proscenium production.
• An Arena with seating for 120 people was designed for rehearsal space for a play to be presented in the Forum. This space soon converted into a dance studio to be used also as an arena stage.
• The Music Hall would contain 8 classrooms
• 12 teacher studios for Music students
• Music Library
• Practice studios for 60 students
• An 8 rank portable pipe organ
• 6 art studios with light monitors that only let in the most desirable lighting

The Cornerstone was laid in March of 1963, the honors done by the President of the College, Sister Linnea, OSB. Two years after the groundbreaking, the Benedicta Arts Center was completed in 1964. The blessing of the Arts Center took place on July 19, 1964 by Bishop Peter Bartholome. The BAC would be the first of its kind in the Midwest. To commemorate the completion, the BAC hosted the premiere of Emmet Lavery’s The Ladies of Soissons.

Along with the premiere, the structure of the BAC, designed by Hammel and Green, was hailed by architects and the arts community as one of Minnesota’s finest cultural resources. In 1965, the BAC received an honorable mention from the Minnesota Society of Architects. Articles about the Arts Center would appear in the country’s leading architectural magazines, Progressive Architecture, as well as the Ford Foundation’s The College Newsletter. In addition to this acclaim, the design for the Center was acknowledged by the New York Journal of Architecture and also included in the “Ideal Theatre” exhibit in the Lincoln Center section of the New York Library.

The year the BAC was finished, 1964, there was a total of 9 Fine Arts majors. The construction of the BAC encouraged students to pursue the arts, and by 1974 there was an influx of over 200 majors within the Fine Arts area.

In 1977, thirteen years after completion, the Benedicta Arts Center under went slight renovations. These were funded by Foundation Grants and Individual Pledges. The renovations included:

• The Choral Hall was changed to a Recital Hall
• A skylight was added to the Ceramic Studio
• The steps outside of the entrance were remodeled
• The sound door was fixed between the Forum theater and the auditorium

In 2003, as part of a comprehensive campaign, $10 million were sought to renovate the BAC to add new construction and to build an endowment to subsidize fine arts programming. A lead gift of $3 million, a donation from Tom Petters, led to the Auditorium being named after his parents, Fred and Rosemary Petters. Petters is the CEO of Petters Companies Inc. and Redtag, Inc, president of Boom Buy, and on the Board of Trustees for the College of St. Benedict. A second lead gift of $3 million from Ben and Dorothy Goreki from Milaca named the Forum theater, the gallery and the new garden space.

In addition to the renovation, new construction created a music rehearsal space, a dance studio, a black box theater, an outdoor amphitheater, an enlarged lobby, and additional office space. Renovations included air conditioning and bringing the original building up to current codes.

The newly renovated BAC was completed during the summer and fall of 2006. A dedication and blessing of the new spaces was held on September 16, 2006.

Since the renovated BAC opened in September of 2006, it has received three awards for its architectural and interior designs.  The Honor Award was presented by the American Institute of Architects Minnesota in December 2006.  The International Interior Design Association's Northland Chapter named the renovated BAC the "Government/Institutional Award Winner" and awarded the building a "Fresh, Artistic, and Brilliant Award on April 19, 2007.   The third award was given on July 9, 2007 by the Society for College and University Planners with the American Institute of Architects-Committee on Architecture for Education, which presented the project with an "Honor Award for Excellence in Architecture for a Building Addition".

Special thanks to Sara Trent '08 for drafting this text.