A Legacy Worth Celebrating
Anniversaries of UC Irvine and the Claire Trevor School of the Arts offer a moment of reflection and possibility
By Christine Byrd
Every day, UC Irvine students and visitors walk by Claire Trevor’s Oscar and Emmy awards outside the theater named in her honor — golden reminders of that rare alchemy between artistic excellence and popular success.
This year marks 25 years since the Claire Trevor School of the Arts was renamed for the actor and the 60th anniversary of the founding of UC Irvine — when the department of fine arts was founded with top-notch faculty representing art, dance, drama and music.
“Anniversaries are moments for us to look back and see how we stand within a lineage — who opened the door, and who opened it even wider for us to step through,” said Tiffany López, Claire Trevor Dean of the Arts. “They remind us that the evolution of our ideas and our art-making is part of a larger legacy of artists. We get to see what has evolved over the years and what remains as the core of our work: making art that transforms and uplifting voices that matter.”
Image: Claire Trevor seated in the backyard of her home in Orange County.
Trevor’s seven-decade career spanned theater, radio, television and film, where she earned the title “Queen of Noir” playing opposite such stars as John Wayne, Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. With less than five minutes on screen as Humphrey Bogart’s ex-girlfriend in the 1937 Dead End, she earned her first Oscar nod, ultimately winning the Academy Award the following decade for her supporting role in Bogart’s Key Largo. In 1956, she won the Emmy for best actress in a live episode of Producer’s Showcase.
Upon retiring, Trevor frequented UC Irvine Arts programs, attending performances and offering encouragement to students. In 1999, she donated to the renovation of the Village Theater. Now bearing her name, it remains the school’s largest venue. Trevor told the crowd gathered in the theater, “I believe in young people today, and the theater is one place to develop your imagination.”
Over the years, Trevor’s generosity enabled countless imaginations to take flight on stage, in the studio and behind the scenes. After her passing, her sons Peter and Donald Bren made a transformative gift in her honor that created an endowed deanship, three endowed professorships, an educational arts program with local elementary and high schools, and provided crucial discretionary funds, all of which continue to make an impact. Today, Trevor’s legacy lives on through others whose work continues to shape, inspire and evolve the arts at UC Irvine.
Nancy Buchanan
Artist and Activist
This summer, Truthfully, Nancy Buchanan opened at The Brick in Los Angeles, the first comprehensive retrospective of the UC Irvine alum’s decades-long artistic career. To many who know her, it feels like, truthfully, Nancy Buchanan is getting her due.
"As an art student at UC Irvine from 1965 to 1971, Nancy Buchanan emerged from the heart of a dynamic period of experimentation with new media — an experience that deeply informed her continued exploration of the social capacities of art throughout the 1970s,” said Kevin Appel, chair of the Department of Art. “I’m especially excited to see her receiving long-overdue recognition in her current exhibition at The Brick. Her contributions are both significant and richly deserving of this renewed attention."
“She wants art to change the world – and believes it can.”
While earning her 1969 bachelor’s and 1971 M.F.A. from UC Irvine, Buchanan was taught by David Hockney, Vija Celmins, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell. However, it was her relationships with fellow graduate alumni that made the deepest impression. She was one of several students who founded F Space, a cooperative gallery where Buchanan staged such provocative pieces as Hair Transplant. (F Space was also the site of Chris Burden’s notorious 1971 performance Shoot.) Ephemera from her early performances and a re-creation of Buchanan’s M.F.A. thesis will be on display at The Brick.
Image: Nancy Buchanan and her dog Baxter, the Irish Wolfhound, 1974. Courtesy of Nancy Buchanan and The Brick. Photo by Ransom Rideout.
“Nancy has never wavered in her dedication to community, activism and art,” said Catherine Taft, co-curator of Truthfully, Nancy Buchanan. “She is a voracious collaborator and champions the ideas of others alongside her own. I think this is what truly allows her to stand out among her contemporaries.”
The 2022 exhibition how we are in time and space at the Armory in Pasadena showcased Buchanan’s work alongside fellow UC Irvine M.F.A. alumni Marcia Hafif and Barbara T. Smith. How the three women remained in creative conversation with one another over decades intrigued curator Michael Ned Holte, associate dean of the School of Art at CalArts, where Buchanan taught in the School of Film and Video for 24 years.
“Nancy is not just making commentary; she’s an activist too. She wants art to change the world — and believes it can,” added Holte. “Perhaps that comes out of an idealism in the time and place where she emerged as an artist.”
Buchanan’s half-century of work spans mediums, often engaging with feminism, nuclear proliferation, economics and environmentalism, and has been shown in exhibitions at MOMA, MOCA, the Centre Pompidou, the Getty Research Institute, four of the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time exhibitions and in the Carnegie International. In 2016, she returned to UC Irvine to organize a piece for The Art of Performance in the xMPL.
“Nancy’s work feels as relevant and fresh as it did at the time she created it,” said Holte. “That’s the marker of a great artist.”
The retrospective, Truthfully, Nancy Buchanan runs through Sept. 20, 2025. Learn more at the-brick.org.
Donald McKayle
Dance’s Humanitarian
Donald McKayle was already legendary when he joined the UC Irvine faculty in 1989. By dedicating the last 30 years of his career to the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, the dancer, choreographer and director profoundly shaped the school.
“He was such a treasure for UCI between the steady stream of new work he created and the collaborative energy he brought to the school,” said Alan Terricciano,
UC Irvine professor of dance, who played piano for at least 500 of McKayle’s dance classes and composed scores for some of his later works. “People loved working with him across all departments, and he elevated the reputation of UC Irvine with his presence.”
Image: Donald McKayle choreographing with students in the UCI Arts dance studio. Photo by Steve Zylius.
A Primetime Emmy winner and four-time Tony nominee, McKayle brought his stage magic to UC Irvine by choreographing musical productions. Yet McKayle is best known for his concert dance. Today, his works are performed internationally by modern dance troupes such as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. Though McKayle’s choreography is famously demanding, Dayton Contemporary Dance’s artistic director, Debbie Blundin Diggs, remembers him saying, “Anybody can learn the steps, but can they tell the story?”
His early works often told stories of the African American experience, such as Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder (1959), about life on a chain gang, and They Called Her Moses (1953), about Harriet Tubman, which featured a solo for a young Alvin Ailey. Later, he addressed broader social issues such as police brutality, immigration and refugee crises. McKayle restaged many of his older works for students at UC Irvine and created new pieces using the UCI Etude Ensemble as a choreography lab from 1995 until his passing in 2018.
Among the many current Department of Dance faculty who have performed or taught McKayle's work is acclaimed choreographer Lar Lubovitch, UC Irvine Distinguished Professor of dance, who danced in McKayle’s company in the 1950s.
“Donald’s memory lives on through the many dancers he helped shape and the colleagues at UCI and elsewhere, who worked with him closely,” said Terricciano.
In 2001, McKayle became one of the three inaugural Claire Trevor Professors, and in 2012, he received the Commemorative Claire Trevor Star at a celebrity-studded tribute that raised funds for the Donald McKayle Endowment for Modern Dance. Today, the fund supports scholarships and dance productions, ensuring that even UC Irvine dancers who can never know the beloved artist personally can still be uplifted by his legacy.
“Being a legend means more than individual brilliance. It’s about putting creative excellence into motion and shaping the next generation of artists and change-makers.”
“Being a legend means more than individual brilliance. It’s about putting creative excellence into motion and shaping the next generation of artists and change-makers,” said López, arts dean. “That’s the legacy of giants like McKayle, Cohen, and many others whose influence lives on in our students.”
Robert Cohen
Dramatic Educator
Many know Robert Cohen’s name from the prominent gold lettering on Mesa Road, where a theater now honors him. But his legacy on campus began before any theater stood there, back when UC Irvine drama students performed in a converted classroom in the Humanities building.
Cohen arrived before the campus opened in 1965 as one of two full-time drama faculty for a handful of undergraduates. Over the next 50 years, he helped build the Department of Drama from the ground up while also earning international acclaim as a playwright, director, scholar and critic. Above all else, he was an educator, impacting just about every single UC Irvine drama student — and many more around the globe.
Image: Robert Cohen leading a class at UCI Arts.
He published 24 books, many translated internationally, including Acting Power and Acting One, which was the most widely used acting textbook in the U.S. by the mid-1990s.
Acting Professionally made a lasting impression on current Department of Drama Chair Joel Veenstra, who first read it as an undergraduate in Michigan.
“A long time later, I was able to come to UCI and meet him, and there was kind of this aura around him of knowledge and legacy — almost a divinity in this space,” said Veenstra, who earned his M.F.A. in drama from UCI in 2011 and later joined the faculty.
Cohen was also a generous collaborator, co-authoring books and producing plays with faculty and graduate students, including Veenstra. Nearly all 26 current drama faculty knew or worked with him, and his influence continues to ripple through the department’s almost 300 students. Even today, incoming undergraduate students read Cohen’s Theater Brief, now in its 13th edition.
“...there was kind of this aura around him of knowledge and legacy — almost a divinity in this space.”
Over the years, Cohen has directly or indirectly impacted the lives of nearly every alum of the drama department. One story Cohen often told was about a father in the 1970s who called to ask if his son had any real future in acting. The student, Jon Lovitz, would go on to become a celebrated Saturday Night Live actor and comedian.
Cohen became one of the first three Claire Trevor Professors in 2001. He and his wife created their own legacy of giving by establishing the Robert and Lorna Cohen Endowment for Excellence in Drama, which continues to fuel excellence in the department. In 2011, the school’s Studio Theatre was renamed in his honor, and in 2016, the couple were honored with a Claire Trevor Commemorative Star — both visible reminders of the Cohens’ legacy.
“One of Robert Cohen’s strengths that is still in our spirit is an entrepreneurial, innovative pursuit of excellence,” Veenstra said. “He had a track record of turning obstacles into opportunities through creativity — and that’s alive and well in our department today.”
H. Colin Slim
The Scholarly Musician
H. Colin Slim made a habit of ringing a bell outside his office to rally sluggish students before his early morning classes, so vigorously that the clapper made a hole in it. When he retired in 1994, students mounted the bell, engraved it with their names, and presented it to him with heartfelt messages.
“That was very touching,” Slim recalled in a 2016 interview with UC Irvine Libraries. “That was a very beautiful experience to know that one had made some impression.”
As founding chair of the Department of Music and UC Irvine’s first music faculty member, Slim’s impact continues to reverberate, especially in the school’s commitment to combining music performance with musicology.
Image: H. Colin Slim with students.
“Colin did his best to establish this idea in that the music faculty and students would be well versed both in music performance and in music history and music research, rather than being single mindedly focused on one or the other,” said David Brodbeck, professor of music who remained close with Slim until his death in 2019. “That remains a significant part of Colin’s legacy today.”
A renowned musicologist, Slim wrote about Italian madrigals, motets, and keyboard and lute music of the Renaissance. He published definitive editions of Alessandro Scarlatti’s Massimo Puppieno and Gioacchino Rossini’s La donna del lago.
Slim was also a noted scholar of Igor Stravinsky — and knew the composer personally. While a student at the University of British Columbia in 1952, Slim met Stravinsky while performing his Concerto for Two Pianos on national Canadian TV. He became an avid collector of the Russian expatriate’s materials and eventually published the influential Stravinsky in the Americas.
After earning his Ph.D. in music history from Harvard, Slim was teaching at the University of Chicago when he was recruited to the brand-new campus at Irvine, where he would initially be the only music professor.
Slim served as chair of the music department for its first 13 years. Unlike colleagues in dance, drama and art, Slim was more scholar than artist, though he showcased his performance chops, too. He soloed Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto at UC Irvine and occasionally conducted.
“People who invest in the arts ... understand that art is transformational.”
In 1989, Slim was elected president of the American Musicological Society (AMS). Today, thanks to an endowment he created, AMS annually bestows the H. Colin Slim Award for the best musicological article. (An award UC Irvine’s Brodbeck won in 2010.) Slim was elected to the prestigious Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.
In honor of his parents, who put him in piano lessons at age 4, Slim created the Harry and Marjorie Anne Slim Memorial Scholarship, which today continues his legacy of supporting undergraduate music education at UC Irvine.
Shaping the Future
Slim, Cohen, McKayle, Buchanan and Trevor represent the kind of visionaries whose creativity and generosity have helped define the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Their spirit endures not only in their work but in the students they mentored, the programs they shaped, and the foundation they laid for future generations to build upon.
“The legacy of artists is deeply connected to the legacy of patrons. People who invest in the arts — by naming a building or endowing a fund — understand that art is transformational,” said López, the arts dean. “Their support shapes what’s possible today and what will be remembered tomorrow.”
To learn more about how you can make a lasting impact at UCI Arts, visit arts.uci.edu/ways-give.
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