The University of Texas at Dallas unveiled this week yet another example of how it's becoming a power broker, not to mention a major player in the region's art scene.

In an announcement shared first with The Dallas Morning News, UTD is acquiring the Crow Museum of Asian Art, giving it a presence in the Dallas Arts District.

But that's not all. The Crow Collection, begun by the late Trammell and Margaret Crow in the 1960s and expanded as a downtown museum in 1998, will donate its entire holdings to UTD in addition to supplying $23 million in funding for a Crow museum on the school's Richardson campus.

This comes within months of UTD announcing its acquisition of the Barrett Collection of Swiss Art, which also includes plans to build an on-campus museum for the purpose of housing more than 400 works of rare Swiss art.

"It's making us more and more a truly well-rounded, great university," Hobson Wildenthal, the executive vice president of UTD, said this week. "That's the ultimate bottom line and what inspired President Benson."

That would be UTD President Richard Benson, who in a statement said, "This is a period of enormous growth for the arts at UTD." He acknowledged the fact that 43 percent of the school's freshman class is Asian and that the campus is perched within "a growing area of Asian-American communities."

Evelyn Chun looks up at Jacob Hashimoto's installation Nuvole against the Facade of a Residence at the Crow Museum of Asian Art in Dallas on Jan. 24, 2019. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

Wildenthal said at least $20 million of the $23 million being given by the Crow Collection is designated for the UTD branch of the Crow, while a separate fund-raising effort seeks $20 million more for the Barrett museum. He envisions both as part of "an Athenaeum complex" expected to open in less than five years.

And then there's the aspect of the Crow having a presence in downtown Dallas.

"The Dallas Arts District evolved out of nothing," Wildenthal said. "And now, it's something that is truly impressive, with the opera, the symphony, the DMA and the Nasher. And here we are at UT Dallas, owning the Crow in this fantastic nexus of culture and art."

In September 2018, the Crow Collection ushered in its 20th year by changing the name of its Arts District space to the Crow Museum of Asian Art, which also announced a 5,000-square-foot expansion that completed the fourth quadrant of its building at 2010 Flora St.

Its landmark exhibition, "Jacob Hashimoto: Clouds and Chaos," which runs through April 14, is the first offering in the newly expanded Crow.

UTD's taking over the collection and the museum comes at a time when the school is advancing rapidly in the arts.

Known primarily as a science-engineering-business school, UTD first began focusing on the arts about a dozen years ago, Wildenthal said, when it launched an art and technology program, powered by a donation from Dallas philanthropist Peter O'Donnell.

In 2013, the university dedicated in his wife's name the $60 million Edith O'Donnell Arts and Technology building.

"And then, it really took off out of the blue with Edith O'Donnell's $17 million gift to create the Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History" in 2014, said Wildenthal, who called it "a profile-changing gift."

In 2017, the then-105-year-old Margaret McDermott, who died in 2018, created the Richard Brettell Award in the Arts, which every other year bestows an award of $150,000 upon an artist "whose body of work demonstrates a lifetime of achievement in their field."

Brettell occupies the Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Chair of Arts and Aesthetic Studies and the Edith O'Donnell Distinguished University Chair at UTD. He recently retired as art critic of The News.

Wildenthal gave much of the credit for UTD's arts ascendancy to the 70-year-old Brettell, whom he called "a truly extraordinary human being and a fantastic scholar internationally. All of these things would not have it happened were it not for the inspiration and energy of Rick Brettell. He's a Johnny Appleseed of great ideas and great opportunity."

Rick Brettell, former art critic of The Dallas Morning News, is photographed at his Dallas home on Dec. 5, 2018 with his miniature poodle, Laney. Brettell is founding director of the Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas and a former director of the Dallas Museum of Art. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

Trammell S. Crow, president of the Crow Family Foundation and the son of Margaret and Trammell Crow, has overseen the development of the Crow Museum of Asian Art since it opened in the Arts District 20 years ago.

"There are mixed feelings," Crow said of the announcement, adding with a chuckle, "and there's bound to be a Chinese word for that. It doesn't reduce any of the pride that we have in the collection. Family-wide, it doubles, doesn't it, really? I think the museum out north will be so strong and just naturally the Asian community, sooner or later, will visit that one more than downtown."

Crow cited another reason for liking the new location: Much of the collection's inventory remains locked in storage. An added presence in Richardson gives it a chance to display the collection's more than 1,000 works in a secondary location, rather than have them languish in a warehouse. At the moment, Wildenthal said, less than 30 percent of the collection is shown in the downtown museum.

A crystal sphere is a personal favorite of Trammell S. Crow, president of the Crow Family Foundation and the son of Margaret and Trammell Crow. (Rose Baca / Staff Photographer)

Asked to name his favorite object in the Crow Collection, Crow said he first "had to swallow the lump in my throat. But that crystal ball, second largest in the world. When children come up to it, and they look at the crystal ball, and they realize that they're looking at an upside-down image of the world ... I love that."

The Crow is known for having one of the best collections of Qing Dynasty jades in the Western world, which Crow director Amy Lewis Hofland says "you can't find in one place anywhere else."

Crow credits Hofland "with keeping the spirit of my mother alive in that museum."

Hofland became director of the Crow in August 2002 and will continue in that capacity with new ownership and an added presence on the UTD campus.

"I'm thrilled to see this museum carried into a future that is everlasting," she said. "We've been working toward sustainability since Margaret [Crow] passed away in 2014. She was really the guiding light of the collection. We've known for a long time that, for this museum to last forever, it needs to be supported beyond the founding family. And a university home gives us access to students and a student audience that we're so excited about.

"It will still be one museum, but with two locations. We will be aligning ourselves with the resources of the campus, to have programs generated through professors, fellows and international partnerships."

Hofland said the Crow museum was attracted to UTD because of "what it's done in the last 25 years and where we see the university headed."

Plus, it gives the collection the chance to widen its Asian audience, many of whom had complained about the difficulties in going downtown. The idea that the region "needed an art museum north of Interstate 635 was," Hofland said, "incredibly appealing."