Dallas’s Southern Methodist University is celebrating its 100th birthday with a formidable gift: a $45 million grant from the Meadows Foundation, which is the largest single gift in the school’s history. Of that figure, $25 million is being given to SMU’s Meadows Museum. Sometimes called the “Prado on the Prairie,” it is marking its 50th birthday this year. The remaining $20 million is going to the college’s Meadows School of the Arts.
(There’s more good news for Northern Texas art institutions: philanthropist Edith O’Donnell is giving UT Dallas $17 million toward building a new art history institute in May.)
In an article in The Dallas Morning News, Linda Perryman Evans, the president and CEO of the Meadows Foundation and the great niece of museum founder Algur H. Meadows, said that the Meadows Foundation realizes, “There’s a lot of pain in the world, and we want to do whatever we can to eliminate that” by focusing on education, health, human services, civic and public affairs, and naturally, arts, and culture.
A Dallas businessman and philanthropist, Algur Meadows created his namesake foundation in 1948, later donating money to establish a museum at SMU in which he could display his private collection of Spanish art. Accordingly, Mark Roglán, director of the Meadows Museum, commented in the same article, “It’s huge. It will continue allowing us to be the center for Spanish art in America.”