VCUarts loses iconic professor, Gerald Donato, 68

Tom Gresham

VCU Communications and Public Relations

A retired arts professor, who was a key figure in the development of the VCU School of the Arts into a nationally recognized program, died Sunday.

Gerald Donato, 68, retired from teaching at VCU in 2005 after a 38-year career. He was an influential figure on campus who helped push the school’s artists in new, daring directions, according to Richard Toscan, Ph.D., dean of the VCU School of the Arts.

“Jerry was one of a group of faculty who joined the school as young artists in the late 60s and early 70s and painted like they didn’t live here,” Toscan said. “There was already a strong base here, but they blew open the options for painters in the same way and at the same time that others were doing the same in New York and Los Angeles.”

In 2007, the VCU School of the Arts Anderson Gallery hosted “Gerald Donato: Reinventing the Game,” an exhibition that gathered 40 years of Donato’s paintings, drawings and prints.

A selection of images from the exhibition and essays on Donato’s work are available on the Web site of Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts based at VCU.

In an accompanying essay to the exhibition, Richard Roth, former chairman of the Department of Painting and Printmaking at VCU, stated that Donato’s “irreverent, in-your-face attitude, born of Southside (Chicago) streets, is an American story. He revels in the vulgar and the underappreciated, and he stands defiant of all forms of artifice and authority.”

Roth stated Donato’s work is a “distinctly eccentric, off-kilter and sometimes perverse take on painting.”

Donato’s whimsical works belie the devotion with which he approached painting. He began his artistic career as a printmaker and originally taught lithography when he arrived at VCU, Roth stated.

“He realized he had the sensibility and constitution of a painter,” Roth stated.
“Donato taught himself to paint, methodically and with great determination, over a period of many years. He became not just a painter, but a hard-core, no-holds-barred painter’s painter.”

Donato was known for his witty, often subversive works that “mined both the high and the low,” according to Amy Moorefield, former curator of collections of the Anderson Gallery.

Moorefield wrote the introduction to “Reinventing the Game.” In the early 1980s, Donato began to frequently use a figure named “Mr. Man” in his works. The character, who was an appropriation of the Disney character “Steamboat Willie,” would appear in Donato’s works as his alter ego, according to Moorefield.

Donato’s work has been shown at a number of galleries and museums across the country, including solo exhibitions at the Reynolds Gallery, the 1708 Gallery (where he was a founding member) and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

Donato received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts during his career – one in painting and one in prints, books and/or drawings.

A celebration of Donato’s life is scheduled for Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Plant Zero Art Center, 0 E. 4th Street.

Information provided by VCU News Center.