Rick Davis, Dean of George Mason University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and Executive Director of the Hylton Center
Dear Friends,
As you may know, the Center for the Arts and the Hylton Performing Arts Center are part of George Mason University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. Collectively, we are a community of more than 2,000 students, faculty, and staff. We are seven academic units (on four campuses), two community academies, two performing arts centers, the nation's best pep band, and many galleries, theaters, and studios. Every one of us can play a vital role in this viral time.
Our visual artists can show us how to find and reveal hidden beauty in chaos or opacity, following the sculptor’s wisdom that the shapes within the stone.
Our dancers can help us know what it is to balance and soar, first at a safely social distance and then, by design, joyously, together.
Our singers and players can teach us how to breathe with purpose and passion, to resonate together in harmony.
Our actors, who know that all the world’s a stage, can help us imagine what it’s like to be someone else; some call it empathy, they call it craft.
Our filmmakers can show us how to frame an image for maximum meaning, and to make stories out of seemingly disconnected moments.
Our game designers can lead us on quests through imaginary worlds to help us learn to navigate an ever-changing real one.
Our arts managers can help us understand the long-range strategies, the value propositions, and the hidden calculations that make everything possible.
Our academies can reach the youngest and the oldest among us, beginning and extending the artistic journey across the whole continuum of life.
Our Green Machine can prove how people from all points of the human compass come together and make inspiration a contagion.
Our venues, the Center for the Arts (Fairfax) and the Hylton Performing Arts Center (Manassas), will soon resound again with music, dance, and drama; our galleries will welcome back the curious whose eyes, minds, and hearts need nourishment; our studios and screening rooms will hum with the energy of invention. Absence will beget presence with renewed hunger, need, and urgency.
We like to say that the arts create community. This isolating moment challenges and inspires us to find new ways to make that promise true. And the mission has never been so vital.
- Rick Davis, Dean of George Mason University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and Executive Director of the Hylton Center
We would like to once again thank our supportive patrons for your understanding as we communicate with you surrounding the cancellations of events. As a reminder, all performances and events at George Mason University venues are cancelled through May 18, 2020.
Additional information, including options for ticket holders, can be found here: