Spelman Receives $30 Million Gift From Trustee Ronda Stryker and Spouse, William Johnston, to Support New Center for Innovation & the Arts

ATLANTA, Dec. 13, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Spelman College has received the largest gift from living donors in its 137-year history from long-standing Spelman trustee Ronda Stryker and spouse William Johnston. The transformative $30 million gift will help build the Center for Innovation & the Arts, the College's first new academic facility since 1996.

Chicago architect, Jeanne Gang, founding principal of the firm Studio Gang, has completed a schematic design of the 85,000 square foot building that will occupy a current parking lot at Spelman at the corner of Westview Drive and Lee Street.

"As former educators who believe strongly in social justice, Bill and I have great appreciation for how Spelman provides a superior education for students that encourages them to be global change agents," said Stryker, a director of the medical equipment company Stryker Corp., as well as vice chair and director of Greenleaf Trust, an investment bank chaired by Johnston.

"Spelman alumnae are leaders across every field imaginable, breaking new ground, while tackling some of the world's most challenging issues from health disparities to the digital divide. We are thrilled to support a building that will encourage students to master technology, innovation and the arts." 

Stryker has been a trustee of Spelman since 1997 and currently serves as the vice chair of the Spelman College Board of Trustees and chair of the Board's Arts, Innovation & Technology Committee.

Consistent and extraordinary giving from the Stryker family has had a significant impact on Spelman. Their gift to establish the Gordon-Zeto Center for Global Education, for example, funded the expansion and ongoing operation of the College's study abroad program. As a result, the Institute of International Education's Open Doors report notes that Spelman sends more Black students to study abroad than any other baccalaureate college in the country with 75 percent of its 2018 graduating class having studied abroad.

Support from the Stryker family has benefitted numerous other Spelman initiatives, including the Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts, science initiatives, summer internships, the Annual Fund, the President's Safety Net Fund, and renovations to Sisters Chapel and the Wellness Center at Read Hall.

"Ronda Stryker has been staunchly committed to the mission and ideals of Spelman College for more than 20 years. She has been an unstinting advocate for our students and has supported a wide range of strategic initiatives, critical to Spelman's long term sustainability and the success of our students," said Mary Schmidt Campbell, Ph.D., president of Spelman.

"With this historic gift, yet again, Ronda's support will be transformational. Her contribution ensures that Spelman students will be prepared to tackle the challenges of our changing world through innovation, creativity and the dynamic intersection of science, technology, engineering, arts and math (also known as STEAM)."

Including the generous gift from Stryker and Johnston, the College has raised more than one-third of the total cost of the CI&A, which received its first support from Leonard and Louise Riggio in 2016. The cost of the new facility, which includes an operating endowment and state of the art technology, is $86 million.  

The Center for Innovation & the Arts
The CI&A enables the College to bring together in one building its considerable strength in STEM with its award-winning programs in the arts. The hub of the building will be the Innovation Lab, co-directed by Brown-Simmons Professor of Computer Science Jerry Volcy, Ph.D., and Associate Professor De Angela Duff, MFA, whose work sits at the intersection of art, design, and technology, in consultation with Senior Adviser Topper Carew, Ph.D., a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

For the first time in the College's history, the same building will house all of Spelman's arts programs – art, art history, curatorial studies, dance, digital media, documentary filmmaking, photography, music and theater.

A major feature of the building will be its "Front Porch," an element of the design that opens up the entrance of the CI&A to the Westside community and offers a set of ground floor amenities. They include an expansion of the award-winning Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, a digital theater housing publicly accessible performances, technology events, film screenings and a cafe.

A schematic of the CI&A demonstrates the innovation and intentionality behind creating a unique interdisciplinary environment. The facility will offer different scales of gathering and assorted modes of connecting and collaborating for learning and risk taking in the liberal arts.

ARTS@Spelman New Programming
Under the leadership of award-winning, innovative independent filmmaker, Ayoka Chenzira, Ph.D., division chair for the Arts, Arts@Spelman has developed a new initiative and several new majors and minors that join Music and Theater & Performance including:

• Documentary Filmmaking (major)
• Photography (major)
• Dance Performance & Choreography (major)
• Art History (major)
• Curatorial Studies (minor)
• Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History and Curatorial Studies, funded with a recent gift from the Walton Family Foundation

Several distinguished faculty have joined Spelman in the past three years either as permanent or distinguished visitors. They include photographer Myra Greene, filmmaker Julie Dash, director/performer/choreographer Aku Kadogo and playwright Will Power. Art historians and curators, Cheryl Finley, Ph.D., associate professor at Cornell University, and Lowery Stokes Sims, Ph.D., former curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and former executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, serve as senior advisers to the Art History and Curatorial Studies Collective. Andrea Barnwell-Brownlee, Ph.D., also a member of the Art History and Curatorial Studies Collective and director of the Spelman Museum, was recently named Atlanta's Best Curator by Atlanta Magazine.

Spelman innovation and arts leaders shared their thoughts on this significant gift:

Ayoka Chenzira, Ph.D., Division Chair for the Arts, Spelman College
"This generous gift by Ronda Stryker and William Johnston represents a deep understanding of the value of Black women's research as it relates to artistic creative expression and the use and integration of technology to help discover and articulate new forms of imaginative processes that engage with global conversations. Spelman students will be at the forefront of these new discoveries as a result of this gift."

Jerry Volcy, Ph.D. Co-Director, Spelman Innovation Lab, Brown-Simmons Professor of Computer Science
"Ronda's gift takes us one big step closer to realizing a center that aims to prepare women of color to become tomorrow's agents of innovative change."

Topper Carew, Ph.D., Senior Adviser, Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History and Curatorial Studies
"The Stryker gift will further support the unprecedented ascendancy of the great Spelman women and their continuing stellar contribution to American society."

De Angela Duff, MFA, Associate Professor, Co-Director of the Spelman College Innovation Lab
"Ronda Stryker's gift empowers Spelman College to educate 21st century, women-of-color visionaries who will create a cultural paradigm shift by embracing creativity at the intersection of the arts and technology and harnessing the power of innovation."

About Ronda Stryker 
Ronda Stryker has been a member of the Spelman College Board of Trustees since 1997. She currently serves as vice chair of the Board and chairs the Board’s Arts, Innovation & Technology Committee. She is a member of the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, serves on the Board of Directors of Stryker Corporation and is vice chair of Greenleaf Trust, a Michigan chartered trust bank. Stryker previously served as a director at Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo Community Foundation and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. As co-chair of the Women’s Education Coalition, she was instrumental in helping to raise more than $1 million to form the organization, which supports women who return to school as non-traditional students. Stryker’s philanthropic interests are focused on the empowerment of women and support of non-traditional student enhancement programs at colleges and universities. Additionally, her charitable gifting seeks to assist in the elimination of racism, sexism and homophobia.

About William Johnston
As chairman of Greenleaf Trust, William Johnston focuses on culture, vision, mission and high-level strategies. In addition, he is chairman of Greenleaf Companies (inclusive of Greenleaf Trust; Greenleaf Hospitality, Inc.; and Catalyst Development Company, L.L.C.); he serves as trustee of Western Michigan University, as well as the Genevieve and Donald S. Gilmore Foundation. Johnston also serves on the board of directors of Southwest Michigan First Economic Development Corporation, Bronson Healthcare Group, HUMANeX, Special-Lite Corporation and the Western Michigan University Foundation. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Western Michigan University.

About Spelman College
Founded in 1881, Spelman College is a leading liberal arts college widely recognized as the global leader in the education of women of African descent. Located in Atlanta, the College's picturesque campus is home to 2,100 students. Spelman is the country's leading producer of Black women who complete Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The College's status is confirmed by U.S. News and World Report, which ranked Spelman No. 51 among all liberal arts colleges and No. 1 among historically Black colleges and universities. The Wall Street Journal ranked the College No. 3, nationally, in terms of student satisfaction. Outstanding alumnae include Children's Defense Fund Founder Marian Wright Edelman, Starbucks Group President and COO Rosalind Brewer, former Acting Surgeon General and Spelman's first alumna President Audrey Forbes Manley, global bioinformatics geneticist Janina Jeff and authors Pearl Cleage and Tayari Jones. For more information, visit www.spelman.edu.

SOURCE Spelman College

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