Virginia Zic Was Instrumental In Founding Of SHU’s Art Department—

Following 35 Years Of Dedicated Service, Newtown Resident To Retire From Sacred Heart University

FAIRFIELD — Ordinarily, when relay runners reach the end of their course, they pass on the baton with effortless ease. It may be more difficult for Virginia Zic, though. When the Newtown resident retires at the end of June, the baton she will pass on is the ornate wooden mace that symbolizes the teaching authority of Sacred Heart University.

As the senior member of the university’s faculty, Ms Zic (rhymes with “bike”) has been entitled to carry the mace in formal academic convocations since 1997. She is, in fact, the most senior instructor in the university’s history.

After 35 years at the university, Ms Zic is anticipating a more leisurely lifestyle and the chance to devote greater time and energy to her art. She is the first member of SHU’s faculty to celebrate 35 years on staff, and to mark that milestone, SHU President Anthony J. Cernera, PhD, presented Ms Zic with a commemorative plaque during the school’s annual Founder’s Day luncheon in March.

Next to an engraved image of Ms Zic, an artist and educator, is the inscription, “A pioneer for life.” At Ms Zic’s request, the tribute is in lieu of a personal gift, and it will hang at the entrance to the art department.

Virginia Zic, a Chicago native, arrived on campus only two years after the establishment of Sacred Heart University in 1963. A friend had told her about “this new school in Connecticut that was breaking fresh ground in Catholic higher education,” Ms Zic recalled, with lay people as its staff and administration.

“I was hired as ‘an art person.’ For years I was the art faculty,” Ms Zic told The Newtown Bee in a February 1997 interview.

Having first worked nearly ten years in a part-time capacity at the university, with classes “some semesters,” Ms Zic continued, it took a little while for the university to see the need to provide more of a curriculum in its art vein.

Finally, with more and more students interested in taking art courses, the university established art as a major. What followed was a natural step for the university: An on-campus art gallery, The Gallery of Contemporary Art. By 1989, SHU’s art faculty was presenting an annual show of its own works, in addition to group and solo shows.

Ms Zic’s home is tastefully adorned with examples of her works, found in every first-floor room, representing different stages of the artist’s progression. She works in oil, acrylic, gouache, oil sticks, and watercolor, depending on the image and what she is in the mood to work with.

While her home is clearly not open to public walk-throughs for art lovers, the public has had a number of opportunities to enjoy her work when it has been included in shows at SHU’s Gallery of Contemporary Art.

The university’s first art instructor, Ms Zic has since touched the lives of thousands of students. At one time, all undergraduates were required to take courses in art and music. In 1977, Ms Zic went on to break new ground of her own when she oversaw the creation of an art department at Sacred Heart and coached its fledgling few art majors.

Today more than 90 men and women are pursuing bachelor’s programs in art, with concentrations in graphic design, illustration, and painting. About two-thirds of the art majors are in graphic arts, and Ms Zic says she is proud of the alumni who typically step into responsible positions in such firms as advertising agencies and art design houses.

“We have developed a very strong reputation for our programs, and our graduates have no difficulty landing responsible positions in the business world,” said Ms Zic. “Our recent student art exhibit in The Gallery of Contemporary Art is proof of the breadth and quality of our student artists.”

Ms Zic has been an artist all her life, demonstrating a talent for drawing and painting even in elementary school. Although her undergraduate study at DePaul University was in philosophy, she complemented it with courses at Art Institute of Chicago.

Her first graduate program was a dream come true for a young artist: She pursued advanced study abroad at Villa Schifanoia, a Renaissance palazzo that admitted, at the time, just 30 students each year, all women.

“The villa was stunning, with museum-quality furnishings and a view from my balcony of the Cathedral dome in Florence,” she recalled. “I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect spot for learning art.”

In anticipation of the more career-oriented direction of the SHU art department, Ms Zic returned to graduate study, earning an MFA at Syracuse in advertising design. Although she has always been an active painter, her teaching and administrative duties have, understandably, occupied a great deal of her time, so she looks forward to retirement for the more creative side to rise to the top.

“I plan to get caught up on 35 years of ‘To Dos,’” she admitted recently, “and I’m hoping to do some traveling as well.

“And I want to paint. I am still pursuing a series of paintings I call ‘Earth Fragments,’” she continued. “These works explore evocative and mysterious places in the earth such as caves or rock formations. I don’t paint from actuality; rather, I try to convey a feeling about a place.”

After 35 years, Virginia Zic is leaving a much different university than the institution she joined in 1965. She looks back on these three and a half decades with considerable satisfaction and pride, but is looking forward to the future with equal pleasure.