Performing Arts

This story first appeared in The Dallas Morning News on Oct. 25, 2005.

It's hard to surprise Margaret McDermott, yet when friends at Texas Instruments put together a $5 million challenge grant in her honor for the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, she was stunned.

"You bet I was. I had no idea it was happening."

The grant, announced Monday evening at the Nasher Sculpture Center, netted $16 million, all new money and all destined for the newly named Margaret McDermott Performance Hall in the Winspear Opera House.

"TI is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year," said chairman Tom Engibous, "and to commemorate this historic occasion our foundation decided to honor Margaret for her lifetime of generosity and civic involvement."

The grant also fit the performing arts center's fundraising program with Euclidean precision.

"We had calculated that the Performance Hall was worth about $15 million for naming purposes," said Bill Lively, president of the performing arts center foundation, "and that's what we got. Some donors probably would not have given to the campaign for any other reason."

Thirty-one individuals and organizations contributed, representing both TI and the wide circle of McDermott admirers throughout Dallas. The gift brings to $193 million the amount raised toward the $275 million center. The center in the downtown Arts District consists of the Winspear Opera House by Foster and Partners of London; the Wyly Theatre, designed by Rem Koolhaas; and the smaller City Performance Hall from Skidmore Owings & Merrill and Corgan Associates of Dallas.

"It's wonderful to survive 93 years in the city where I was born, and to be able to help bring such an exciting project to fruition," the honoree said.

For Mrs. McDermott, widow of TI co-founder Eugene McDermott, being on the receiving end of a major gift is an unusual experience. Over the years she and her husband have given millions to civic, cultural and educational projects, including buildings and scholarships to MIT and the University of Texas at Dallas, and major gifts to the Dallas Museum of Art, the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center and, more recently, the design of three Trinity River bridges by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

In 1998, she gave the first $3 million toward the then pie-in-the-sky performing arts center to encourage others to come forward. It worked. Groundbreaking for the center is Nov. 10, with a grand opening scheduled for 2009.

"She's a treasure," said Mr. Lively. "Nobody has done more to nurture arts institutions in our city."

That's the kind of comment that makes Mrs. McDermott wince. Notoriously modest, she brushes aside requests for interviews and profiles by noting that she "was in journalism for 20 years and knows that the more you stay out of the headlines the better off you are." Most journalists would probably agree.

Yet in a few years, music and architecture will be making the headlines, with the Meyerson's Eugene McDermott Performance Hall framing one side of the center's Grand Plaza, the Margaret McDermott Performance Hall the other, an elegant parenthesis suggesting the shape of a long and remarkable life.