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where soon preoccupied all interested parties in the early 1960s. In March 1963, the chairman of the Department of Art, Edward Maser, put forward a plan to create an arts center that would incorporate all of the department’s studio work and the teaching and research functions of the department with space for an art library, a University art museum, and the Renaissance Society. Maser believed that this large expansion of facilities could also provide space for non-credit student art making as well, creating one large “art group” on the South Campus distributed in a complex of interconnected buildings.177 Maser’s ambitious scheme explicitly broke with the Ryerson rule that the University should not develop its own permanent art museum. Maser had played a leading and successful role in establishing an art museum on the campus of the University of Kansas during his service there from 1953 to 1960.178 Maser would continue to lobby for the incorporation of an art gallery in planning for an art building that occurred in the later 1960s. It was largely owing to Maser’s advocacy and enthusiasm that the University came to create the Smart Gallery in 1971 – 73.179 Plans for a new art building became all the more relevant when the University decided to launch a new development campaign in the mid1960s. As I explained in my essay on housing last year, in July 1964 177. Maser to Beadle, March 24, 1963, as well as “Problems Related to Current Development of the Midway Studios Area for the Department of Art and some Future Possibilities,” Beadle Administration, Box 365, folder 16. 178. Murphy to Napier Wilt, August 15, 1960, Edward A. Maser File, Division of the Humanities Archive. 179. In 1961, Maser called for the creation of “a space to house a permanent art collection which it feels sure it can gather together from among the many art collectors in the region.” Maser to Leonard Meyer, November 17, 1961, Edward A. Maser File, Division of the Humanities Archive.