Brenda Tucker (M.A.’92)
When Brenda Tucker arrived at VCU for her graduate education, she was excited to study on a campus full of diverse viewpoints in a city full of character. She lived in Richmond as a child and was eager to return, but it was a big change from her small undergraduate program at Lynchburg College (now the University of Lynchburg). She found VCU’s culture to be a perfect fit and reveled in the community of creatives she met.
“I ended up having a great experience at VCU,” Tucker says. “It had a large creative population, and they really inspired me. Richmond and VCU are wonderful places to create.”
After graduating in 1992, Tucker continued to feed her passion for art wherever her career led her. She first worked at Smithsonian Press in Washington, D.C., before a position at Chronicle Books took her to San Francisco in 1998. Tucker’s move to California is one she’s forever grateful for. Since then, she has gotten to work with many of the hundreds of arts organizations San Francisco has to offer.
Through these experiences, Tucker has built her own community of artists, and they inspire her just as her community of creatives at VCU did. “The arts are meaningful. I spent all of my career in the arts, and my grandmother was a painter. Supporting the creative act for people is important to me. I want students to have the support they need to be able to create and take risks.”
In 2021, Tucker established the Diversity and Political Art Scholarship in the VCU School of the Arts to support undergraduate visual arts students, with preference given to those with an interest in equity, diversity or social justice.
A few years later, Tucker was making some financial decisions before a medical procedure, and decided to include a planned gift in her will to provide future support for her scholarship. She contacted the team at VCU, who helped make it easy for her to set up her gift.
“I got things in order because I’d much rather any resources I have go to an interesting purpose than be lost out in the world,” Tucker says. “I’ve spent my career trying to make it easier for artists to make a living, and I was afforded a lot of opportunities because people took a chance on me. I wanted to create that opportunity for young artists at VCU.”
As her scholarship at VCU continues to grow, she can’t wait to return to campus and see the work that talented arts students can achieve with her support. “I’m really excited to have a stronger relationship with VCU and to see what these artists do.”
