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>> There's the story that's always told, we were-- it was a blind date.
We were put together through people that knew him and me, but we didn't know each other.
And when he first came to pick me up on that first blind date, while waiting for me to come
out of my room, he looked around and in our living room there were the paintings,
there were the two pianos, there was the cello, there were the books,
there were all these things that became--
>> Trappings.
>> In our life, yes and he hadn't seen them in his house, although he wasn't deprived.
>> Not at all.
I wasn't deprived, but it certainly wasn't as culturally rich as her upbringing.
>> So, he's had a wonderful way of reacting to all these things and doing something about them.
>> And she wasn't bad looking either.
>> Thank you.
Well, I thought that no matter what I looked like, he had already fallen in love
with what he saw in the living room.
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>> I would hope that this center, what it does will make it possible for so many more people,
the students of course, but the whole people in the community to come to be more interested,
involved, come to have the love and the nourishment
that has been so vital to us in our life.
It's such a valuable thing for one's humanity.
>> Yeah.
>> To get access to and get nourished by.
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>> I think of Richard and Mary as quintessential Chicago philanthropists, which is to say,
they are not involved in just one institution, but in multiple institutions.
In their case it means the Arts Institute certainly,
but it also means the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, it means the radio station WFMT,
it means the University of Chicago, it means the Chicago Humanities Festival.
There's a coherence to their philanthropy.
It's making a difference in the lives of citizens in the areas that matter most to them,
the arts, the arts of humanist inquiry.
>> One of the points of the center is better to integrate the university into the life
of the arts in the city of Chicago.
Richard and Mary Gray have been so important in both realms for so many years.
They have been very, very prominent in the arts in the city and real bastions
of the arts here at the university.
>> Given what I take to be the sensitivity and discernment that they have brought
to their engagement with artwork, it seems only fitting that the project
of bringing together really interesting artists with really interesting scholars would come
with their support and that just seems to add excitement I think to the project.
>> And Mary of course comes with an incredible background as a student in Art History here
as someone who's thought particularly a lot about the public role of the arts in terms
of public sculpture and the public place of the arts on campus.
And Richard because he's been so important to the history of the arts at the University
of Chicago, Richard was one of the important people
at really getting the Smart Museum off the ground and growing into its large--
the large role that it has now, not just on campus but throughout the city.
>> The creation of the Gray Center crowns what seems to me an entire rethinking,
a characteristic rethinking of the place of the arts at this university.
From a position of relative neglect to a position at the very center of what it is
that we are doing as a university, incorporating the arts not
as adornment, but as central to our mission.
>> We adopted the University of Chicago, it's our community, it's our city, it's our university.
I mean, my wife has a degree from there.
I don't. I don't have a degree from anywhere, so it doesn't matter, but I adopted it.
I lived in the neighborhood, I became early on close to the university and close to all kinds
of people who are at the university, the faculty, the administration,
neighbors, part of the-- our community.
>> Because it gave us so much from the Chamber Music Series that we have been going
to since our first year of marriage.
>> At Mandel Hall.
>> At the Mandel Hall.
>> For the last fifty-plus years.
>> Of course and all along the way, of course meeting various people who became our friends.
>> It was our community.
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