Leo Kim
RUTH AND JOHN HUSS: Dedicated to the arts and to SPA students.
Mary Todd Lincoln is a meaty role for a young actress, and Ruth S. Huss, class of ’57, recalls the great fun she had in the role in the Summit School’s 1956 production of “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.” The lead female role in Robert E. Sherwood’s 1938 play calls for hysterical outbursts and contemptuous insults mixed with Southern belle charm—a scenerychewing role that earned Huss an award for her efforts. “I’m not sure if it was for best actress or best worker bee, but it was a lot of fun,” says Huss. Ensuring that the next generation of students at St. Paul Academy and Summit School has the same opportunities to test themselves, try out new roles, and perform before the community was one of the reasons Ruth and her husband John Huss made the lead gift toward the new performing arts center at SPA, a 34,000-squarefoot building that will be named in their honor when it opens in 2015. While Huss went on to study art at Smith College, she believes having access to a wide-ranging arts curriculum has benefits far beyond the academic. “One of the great values of arts education—it’s just fun.” The Husses are well-known arts and culture supporters in the Twin Cities, serving on the boards of the Minnesota Opera, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Minnesota Historical Society among many others. As a trustee at SPA, Huss says she
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saw the growing need for a dedicated gathering space for the school community, “rather than having to put up those awful folding chairs in the gymnasium,” At the same time, her husband John, a trustee at Lake Forest Academy (an independent school outside Chicago), had seen the positive impact a similar arts and communitybuilding space, the Cressey Center for the Arts, had for his own alma mater. “We knew from the start that a performing arts center like this is a project that hits our candle power, and that we’d be interested in supporting it,” says John Huss. “But being part of funding the gathering space and auditorium [at Lake Forest] made it an easier sell if you will, because I saw what it did for that school.” Over the years, the Husses have helped fund projects as varied as arts documentaries for public television to new works of music that have played to global audiences. But John says he and his wife were both amazed by the student performers at a recent SPA concert performance at O’Shaughnessy Auditorium at St. Catherine University. “SPA is a liberal arts school—not a music school—but we were just blown away by these kids and the quality of what they’re doing,” he says. Having a performance space of their own, he says, “will just allow them to do their job even better, and give them the tools they can enjoy for the rest of their lives.” u