Hopkins Center for the Arts

Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College is located at 4 East Wheelock Street in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Among the many artists and groups featured in the 2014 season were renowned musician Reggie Watts and virtuoso American violinist Joshua Bell.

Its genesis was the promise for a new theater made in the late 1920s by then Dartmouth president Ernest Martin Hopkins to Warner Bentley, a newly recruited English faculty member with responsibility for the non-department theatre program.

Large windows looked into the theaters and design shops, practice rooms, art studios, and galleries — many of which proved impractical given the activity occurring within.

Public programs initiated by its first director, Warner Bentley, and his successor, Peter D. Smith, drew significant media coverage and made the Hopkins Center a regional and sometimes national destination.

For a number of years in the mid- and late 1960s, the Hop hosted a summer Congregation of the Arts, which featured summer theatre programs, a festival orchestra and resident chamber ensembles that performed works by distinguished contemporary composers invited to residencies, exhibitions of works by artists-in-residents, and special film series.

For many years the Hop remained ahead of the curve in its programming of imported events, and Peter Smith liked to joke that he was the only impresario who could fail to sell out a 900-seat hall for either Luciano Pavarotti or Bruce Springsteen — both of whom were engaged just prior to their super-stardom.