GUARDIANS OF THE ARTS

TACA Silver Cup Award honorees Jennifer Altabef and Larry Angelilli bolster the arts through volunteerism.

BY LEE CULLUM PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN SMITH

TACA (The Arts Community Alliance) continues to propel the arts through the direst circumstances. They recognize it takes all hands on deck to achieve this. To that end, each year TACA recognizes two outstanding leaders in the community serving on boards, fundraising, donating time and savvy-thinking to bolster our cultural institutions. This year’s honorees are no exception.

“Jennifer Burr Altabef and Larry Angelilli represent the very best of Dallas arts philanthropy,” said Terry D. Loftis, TACA’s Donna Wilhelm Family President and Executive Director. “Their selfless giving of time and talent to organizations including the AT&T Performing Arts Center, Dallas Theater Center, and many others have made sustainable impacts on artists and organizations. They are most deserving as our TACA Silver Cup Award honorees for 2022, and we look forward to celebrating them on April 21 at the National at Thompson Dallas.”

Jennifer Altabef has a way of gravitating toward whatever action is the most demanding, without always intending to. No sooner had she agreed to chair the board of the Dallas Theater Center than the Kalita Humphreys tumbled into her portfolio. As the only theater ever designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it had to be saved from ruin—not an easy assignment when passionate advocates were arguing for purity of restoration while theater people insisted on technical capacities for modern production.

Jennifer Scripps, director of arts and culture at City Hall, guided this ill-starred schooner through troubled waters by creating a steering committee composed of interested parties, a coalition of the willing and the skeptical, to select an architect. That’s when Jennifer Altabef stepped in. A lawyer for 28 years, she knew how to establish a lasting rapport that has yielded spectacular results: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, one of the most inventive architectural firms in the world, was happily selected by the steering committee and just as cheerfully applauded by Altabef’s principal clients at Dallas Theater Center—though now, actually, her client is the city itself.

“I like to go for the people with the biggest ideas,” says Altabef in a phone conversation. Now those big ideas must be applied to the master plan, long since due in Scripps’ office and now revved up again, after a long Covid collapse, with a deadline extended to the end of this year.

This is a backbreaking assignment. DS+R must harmonize its thinking, never conventional, with that of historic preservation architect T. Gunny Harboe, recognized expert in the Chicago School that gave birth to Frank Lloyd Wright. DS+R also must come up with a workable approach to two new, small theaters—one a black box with 100 seats, the other a proscenium house for an audience of 200. These would be perfect for groups like Soul Rep, currently performing at the South Dallas Cultural Center, which could do part of its season on the Kalita campus. “We hope that two of the three theaters could always have something happening,” notes Altabef. Companies could create “audience awareness of each other. We need a strong theater ecosystem. This would help.”

Of course, the master plan also has to deal with landscape design, by Reed Hilderbrand, not only preserving Wright’s “naturalistic vision,” Altabef explains, but also connecting it to the Katy Trail (with maybe a small restaurant along the way), as well as to William Dean Park, so near and yet so far. The city now wants them “to make more land” says Altabef, pointing out that now “there is a ton of asphalt. We must make it appear more of a piece.” That is, the park, the theaters, and Turtle Creek Boulevard.

All that’s required now is to raise the last 25 percent of $2 million needed for the master plan. If it passes muster, finally, with the city council, then perhaps seed funding for the project might be found in a bond election, possibly in 2024. Then Altabef wants to see a management contract with the city similar to that negotiated for the Meyerson by Kim Noltemy, CEO of the Dallas Symphony. The question for the Kalita is: How much of this refurbished theater is deferred maintenance that should be funded by the city?

Of course, territory like this is nothing new to Altabef. She chaired the board of the Dallas Zoo when its management went private and can testify, “I have seen it work, this sort of transition.” She also was in charge of the savannah that was created for elephants and giraffes to roam freely.

We have little time left to discuss the SMU Meadows School of the Arts executive board, which she leads (it’s also involved in a building renovation), or KERA, where she is the immediate past chair ( a wellsuited assignment since she set out to be a journalist at SMU, but needed to pay off her student loans, so she borrowed more money to go to SMU law school and settled all her debts by the age of 40), or the boards of the NPR Foundation and AT&T Performing Arts Center. Nor did we talk enough about her remarkable husband, Peter, chair and CEO of Unisys and one-time CEO of Perot Systems, among other posts. The important thing, though, is that he’s a lawyer, and he met Jennifer when they both clerked for federal judges at the courthouse. Also, that both their offspring, Hayley and Will, are attorneys. Law is the family profession.

In summing up Jennifer Altabef, if that can be done at all, an architect comes to mind: Daniel Burnham, who helped rebuild Chicago after the fire of 1871. Burnham used to say, “Make no little plans.” Indeed, Altabef wouldn’t dream of it.

“Jennifer Burr Altabef and Larry Angelilli represent the very best of Dallas arts philanthropy. Their selfless giving of time and talent to organizations including the AT&T Performing Arts Center, Dallas Theater Center, and many others have made sustainable impacts on artists and organizations. They are most deserving as our TACA Silver Cup Award honorees for 2022, and we look forward to celebrating them on April 21 at the National at Thompson Dallas.”

—Terry D. Loftis, TACA’s Donna Wilhelm Family President and Executive Director

Larry Angelilli is the last person you would think of to be drawn habitually to enterprises in extremism. But he is the one who has battled catastrophe over and over, in business and the arts. “If a company is doing well, it doesn’t need you,” a headhunter once told him. It’s when doom is dawning and the end is near that he is indispensable. “My career,” he explains in a telephone interview, “has been one crisis to the next.”

It was during the relentless fallout from the crash of 2008 that Angelilli was summoned to MoneyGram to help put that company back together. The new day took hold and now he is chief financial officer of a flourishing operation. Its services are so essential that when Covid started shutting down cities all over the world, they begged MoneyGram to stay open because people still needed a way to send remittances home to families, wherever they were. “Our people are proud of what they do,” says Angelilli.

Go back a decade and Angelilli was on the board of the Dallas Theater Center for a year when 9/11 struck. He was stranded in Chicago, which was bad enough, but even worse, some DTC actors couldn’t get back from New York. That meant shows had to be cancelled. “It was devastating,” he lamented, and the trouble went on and on. By then on the finance committee, Angelilli met once a week with DTC board leader Deedie Rose and others to find a way through the fog, through “triage,” he says. They survived. Then came the move to the new Wyly Theatre over which he presided as president of the board with chairman Frank Risch. Though highly successful, the transfer was not without anxiety. They doubled the budget of DTC, a nervy thing to do in the wake of September 29, 2008, a date that lives in infamy for financial people like Angelilli.

It worked, however, so the AT&T Performing Arts Center was more than relieved to have him on its board when bad trouble came calling there. It was the same calamity, the crash of 2008, and it left ATTPAC with a debt of $150 million and a capital structure that had crumbled into obsolescence. “It no longer applied,” he says. “It was a complicated capital markets transaction. A lot of people can’t understand it. You can’t fix what you don’t understand.” Angelilli did understand it and played a pivotal role in saving yet another situation. So did many others, he stresses, raising “a ton of money.” The city helped. The banks did their part. Everybody rallied, and the show went on.

Until the pandemic. When the coronavirus struck, “MoneyGram’s business was down 40 percent overnight,” Angelilli remembers, “and ATTPAC’s was down 100 percent. Zero revenue.” We “tightened things up…and came out of it,” he points out. “Hadestown did extremely well. Demand is here. People want to come.” Still, “it’s not over yet.”

“Traumatic” is how he describes the age of Covid, in the arts and at MoneyGram, where they stayed open but under vastly different circumstances. “Immigration fell to practicality nothing all over the world,” he notes. “To levels not seen since World War II. Borders closed all over the world. That’s part of our labor shortage today. People can’t move. Some countries export labor, not goods. If people can’t move, there’s a devastating impact.”

Angelilli grew up in Detroit, a perfect city in which to learn the uses of adversity. In “slow-motion decline” since the 1970s, this capital of American carmakers crumbled along with the industry. Even so, Angelilli had some good years at Chrysler before a federal bailout, bankruptcy, and misbegotten mergers took their toll. He went on to NationsBank, north of Philadelphia, and it was NationsBank, now Bank of America, that brought him to Dallas in 1997, just in time for the Russian debt crisis.

“I have had a 40-year career of learning,” says Angelilli, and the arts, especially dance and theater, have seen him through. They still do. “I’m in a stressful job,” he explains. He finds “calm, emotional release” in the theater. He and his wife, Anne, finally returned to the Wyly last fall to see Tiny Beautiful Things and Cake Ladies, after two years at home. “When something is gone,” he reflects, “you realize how much” it meant to you.

“We have our house in order,” he says of ATTPAC. “I’m proud of everybody. We’re financially as tight as any business I’ve ever worked for. Everybody is doing their best work.” For this affable, effective antidote to Dr. Doom, that’s saying a lot. P