The Meadows Museum at SMU has chosen to expand — by adding its own institute

Even during the trying times of the era of COVID-19, the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University has marked a pair of major milestones. In May, the museum celebrated 20 years in its “new” building on the SMU campus. And now, the Meadows has established the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture.

The institute was made possible this past week via a $3 million gift from Linda P. Custard and her husband, William A. Custard, who are both SMU alums. The Custards met at SMU during the 1950s.

Linda has chaired the Meadows Museum Advisory Council for 10 years and is the second woman in 100 years at SMU to be given the title of Trustee Emerita. In the past, the Custards collaborated with The Meadows Foundation to endow the chair held by Mark A. Roglán, the director of the Meadows Museum.

Collaboration between the Custards and the foundation doesn’t stop there: When it comes to the institute, the couple’s $3 million is being matched with an additional $3 million from the foundation.

So, why did the Custards see the institute as a valuable expansion of the Meadows’ mission?

“An institute takes the museum to another level of inquiry and research,” Linda Custard says. “SMU is on a path to become an R1 university” — referring to an academic category used to classify U.S. universities that engage in “the highest levels of research activity.”

The Meadows, she says, “has a core collection that is without equal in Spanish art. But this will give us a whole new area of study, research, teaching and collaboration.”

The key word is research. Meadows officials see the institute as adding a research component to a museum that, in recent years in particular, has achieved international stature as a showcase for Spanish art. And, they say, it also bonds the museum with other SMU departments, such as its libraries and archives.

For the time being at least, the institute will not have its own building. In other words, no brick-and-mortar component. It will eventually be housed in what used to be a restaurant space in the Meadows called The Gates.

In the two decades since its move from the Owen Arts Center to its 66,000-square-foot building on Bishop Boulevard, the Meadows has acquired more than 200 works of art, including Francisco de Goya’s Portrait of Mariano Goya, the Artist’s Grandson (1827); Mariano Fortuny y Marsal’s Beach at Portici (1874); Salvador Dalí's The Fish Man (L’homme Poisson) (1930) and what is now the earliest painting in the collection, Pere Vall’s Saints Benedict and Onuphrius (circa 1410).

Over the years, visitors to the Meadows have included King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia of Spain; former President George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush; and even the Dalai Lama.

Updated Aug. 27 at 4:06 P.M.: This story has been updated with additional details about the new institute.