Not surprisingly, student support in the form of scholarships, bursaries and financial prizes is the most popular form of donor support we receive. Consider Doug Gray, who created the
Eleanor Gray Memorial Piano & Voice Duo Competition Prize in 2025 to both honour the memory of his mother and support Music students in two of our strongest areas — voice and piano.
We are also fortunate to have more named
professorships than most UVic faculties, thanks to the likes of the Audain and Rubinoff foundations, and generous philanthropists like Wayne Crookes and the Southam, Lehan and Wurlitzer families. These endowed positions ensure that recruiting top-tier research talent remains a priority in Fine Arts.
Another area where donors have a direct impact on the student experience is with facility upgrades. There’s no question that our purpose-built facilities have long set us apart from other universities — yet those unique labs, studios, galleries and performance spaces also require constant technological upgrades to remain competitive.
Longtime Visual Arts professor Lynda Gammon has remained engaged with both Fine Arts and Victoria’s arts scene since retiring in 2015, now working with students as a Professor Emeritus. Realizing that one of the Fine Arts computer labs was in need of an upgrade, Gammon donated $10,000 this year to assist with much-needed improvements and to finance a new computer system — a change she was happy to make, given her history with the space: Gammon was Associate Dean under former Fine Arts Dean Anthony Welch when the first Fine Arts computer lab was established in the early 1990s.
“There was a lot of contention back then about whether computers could even be used to make art and what their role in the Faculty would be,” she recalls. “It took quite a bit of effort to push it forward — but once it was established, it quickly made such a huge difference.”
With Gammon’s assistance, the walls of our smaller computer lab — which serves as a digital photography
studio with a large-scale printer and negative scanner — have now been changed from peach to gray (to better reflect the true colour of photography), a magnetic photo board has been installed and a new computer was purchased which can run 3D neural-net calculations to better manipulate digital imagery.
Gammon appreciates the unique contribution retired faculty members can make. “We’re not your average donor: because we’ve been involved with the University and the students, we have a better idea of what’s needed,” she says. “I remember what it was like when we got a new piece of equipment — like the large-format printer — and how it not only allowed us to teach better but also helped my own art career. Incoming students are going to want to do things that are more than just traditional painting or sculpture.”
Offering first-hand experience with cutting-edge technology is just another way for our students to gain a competitive edge. “Once they graduate, they get jobs because they’ve learned how to use our computer systems,” she says. “It’s so essential for artists to not find technology scary, to realize how it might fit in with their practice . . . if you don’t take some of those fears away when they’re students, then it becomes an unapproachable barrier.”
