New performance, rehearsal and gathering spaces will strengthen arts education and expand community programs
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Rendering Concept
Kansas City, Missouri, Sept. 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The 35,000-square-foot addition will create new spaces for music, dance and theatre while increasing the Conservatory’s capacity to serve students and the Kansas City community. Construction on Phase One is expected to take approximately 18 months.
“Today has been decades in the making,” UMKC Chancellor C. Mauli Agrawal said. “We are not simply adding square footage to the Olson Performing Arts Center. We are expanding a home where talent is discovered, nurtured and shared with the world.”
The new glass- and light-filled addition will extend from the east side of the Olson Performing Arts Center toward Volker Boulevard. It will include a large music ensemble rehearsal and performance space, two dance rehearsal halls, dance support spaces, a new accessible black-box theatre and areas where students can gather and collaborate.
The expansion will complement White Recital Hall, Spencer Theatre and the McIlrath Lobby, creating a more connected performing arts district within the building. It also will strengthen UMKC’s place in a vibrant cultural corridor near The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Kansas City Art Institute and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
“Our students, faculty and staff deserve space that matches their talents and excellence,” Agrawal said. “Nearly every major performing arts organization in Kansas City has roots in our faculty or alumni. These institutions were built here, and this is where the next generation of that creative workforce is being developed.”
The UMKC Conservatory offers more than 35 programs in music, dance, theatre and integrated arts. Its faculty members have earned honors including the Pulitzer Prize, Grammy Awards, Guggenheim Fellowships, Fulbright Awards and recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The groundbreaking marks the culmination of decades of planning and advocacy. The Performing Arts Center opened in 1979, but the Conservatory had outgrown the facility within a decade. Over the years, academic programs have been divided between buildings, with faculty and students adapting storage areas and other spaces to meet teaching, rehearsal and performance needs.
The center was renamed the James C. Olson Performing Arts Center in 2008 in honor of the former UMKC chancellor and University of Missouri System president. Olson’s daughter, Sarah, and granddaughter, Elizabeth, attended the groundbreaking and were recognized for their family’s enduring commitment to the arts and higher education.
Olson and his wife, Vera, championed the arts throughout their service to UMKC and the UM System. After their retirement, the Olson Fund was established to support arts programming across all four UM System universities.
This year also marks a century since a historic moment in the Conservatory’s development. In 1926, the Conservatory merged with the Horner Institute for Fine Arts, founded in 1914 by Charles Horner. Horner’s grandson, Charlie, joined the groundbreaking celebration as UMKC honored 100 years of shared history and looked toward the Conservatory’s next chapter.
Longtime Conservatory supporters Warren and Jenny Erdman were among the advocates who sustained the vision through multiple campaigns and proposals.
“This moment did not come easily, and it did not come quickly,” Warren Erdman said. “It’s proof that persistence, sustained over generations, is its own kind of instrument. You just have to keep practicing to master it.”
Erdman, a former chair of the University of Missouri Board of Curators, UMKC Trustee Emeritus and longtime Conservatory supporter, helped lead the effort to name the center for Olson.
The project’s premier benefactor is the Muriel McBrien Kauffman Family Foundation, led by Julia Irene Dennie-Kauffman. Hundreds of additional donors also contributed to the expansion.
For Conservatory Dean Courtney Crappell, the project represents far more than a new building.
“When our students have the right room, equipment and support, they will spend less energy working around limitations and more energy doing the demanding, imaginative work that brought them to Kansas City,” Crappell said.
The additional space will allow the Conservatory to increase enrollment in dance and theatre by as much as 40%. It also will support the new integrated performing arts minor, giving students studying subjects such as business, medicine, education and engineering more opportunities to develop creativity, confidence and communication skills through the arts.
The expansion will increase the Conservatory’s capacity for pre-college camps, after-school lessons, high school credit programs, competitions, master classes and professional development for arts educators. Conservatory Bridges, which provides intensive instruction to young performers preparing to audition for selective university programs, could grow from serving approximately 80 students to as many as 600 annually.
Students and faculty also will continue bringing the arts into hospitals, schools, libraries, parks and neighborhoods. Those efforts include the Healing and Harmony performance series in health care and hospice settings and music therapy research conducted across the region.
“The arts are how we connect with each other, and this is where that work starts,” Crappell said. “Home will be a creative, welcoming and accessible space where artists train, collaborate and belong.”
Phase Two of the project will focus on renovating existing facilities, including White Recital Hall. Plans call for additional classroom and theatre space, flexible areas for performances and special events and a central hub for student resources and collaboration.
Learn more about the UMKC Conservatory expansion
Attachments
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CONTACT: Stacy Downs UMKC 8162351441 [email protected]
