Jack A. DeVelbiss Ph.D.

Dean, Fine & Performing Arts

1974-1986

Jack DeVelbiss served as Sinclair’s first dean of Fine and Performing Arts.  He had served as director of the Living Arts Center, a pilot project funded for three years starting in 1966 by the U.S. Office of Education.  The program, easily one of the most innovative and provocative plans to surface in the country, made Dayton the focus of national attention.  It brought educators and artist here from throughout the United States to see the center in action.

In the three years of the program, some 1,100 children went through the classes at the center, which was housed in a former coffee mill and warehouse on Linden Avenue.  In addition, 27,000 others were exposed to the arts at the center and in their own classrooms over the three-year period.

The Living Arts Center program is one that educators still talk about.   So, too, are the area residents who spent precious hours and days with guest artists.  Concert pianist Lorin Hollander and Nerine Barrett were here several times for residencies.  Poet Gwendolyn Brooks read her work and encouraged young writers.  Actress Agnes Moorehead came home to spend time with the students – mostly from the upper six grades.

The program was a revelation for educators everywhere.  But not more so than DeVelbiss himself.   He’d been in charge of instrumental music at Colonel White and was just about to give up on the high school teaching role.  The job was “eating him alive,” he said.  But then the planning grant for the center came through.

As DeVelbiss used to say about the students at the center, “They’ve learned that artists are human beings who have toothaches and mortgages.”

DeVelbiss put together a high-powered faculty.  Artist Bing Davis and dancer-choreographer Chao-Li Chi, drama instructor Jim Payne and pianist-program director Glenn Ray were on the teaching staff.

DeVelbiss went from the Living Arts Center program to create a fine arts department for Sinclair Community College and later sever as dean.  He convinced skeptics that the arts could thrive at a community college, and initiated degree programs in the arts, pulling many of the original from the ranks of the public school system.

Information from Betty Dietz Krebs, Dayton Daily News August 3, 1988.