Art is their adventure: Graduate students will benefit from Peter and Sheri Weller’s beautiful vision

Jonathan Riggs | August 31, 2023

When he was working on his master’s degree at the highly selective program at Syracuse University’s campus in Florence, Italy, Peter Weller experienced firsthand the challenges of graduate work in art history: hours of archival research, hours in front of the art itself, fluency in multiple languages and, of course, the expenses of travel, school and life.

“It was extraordinarily arduous, and I wanted to quit after a month,” he said with a laugh.

An Oscar-nominated filmmaker and acclaimed actor of stage and screen, Peter persevered and even went on to earn his doctorate in art history from UCLA in 2014. However, he never forgot how challenging the journey was, even though he had many more resources at his disposal than the typical graduate student.

Peter elucidated: “I noticed that undergraduate students had many avenues of subsistence; they could apply for scholarships based upon need, academics and athletics as well as many other venues. But for graduate students, the access is much more limited — and the graduate students with whom I have worked — both at Syracuse and UCLA — were, for the most part, in need of loot. I am not super rich, but I am a man of some means; thus, I wanted to help.”

Sheri Weller added, “We quickly saw how graduate students have to scrounge out endowments and funding to afford to go abroad to study, which is already a challenge if you have a family and other commitments. Peter and I agreed that it would be a real tragedy for these remarkable students not to be able to go all the way after putting so much effort, time and money into their work to get this far.”

Consequently, the couple has begun with a $150,000 endowment to establish UCLA’s Weller Family Graduate Art History Research Fund in the department of art history in the division of humanities. Their gift will support travel and research for graduate students focusing on early modern European art (from the 13th to 19th centuries) and colonial art (from the 16th to 19th centuries). In addition, recipients will pay their experience forward on their graduate resume by delivering a formal presentation and scholarly paper describing their funded research.

“Peter and Sheri’s thoughtful generosity will make a monumental impact in our students’ lives as well as in the field of art history itself,” said Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of humanities. “We are especially proud this gift is guided both by Peter’s invaluable insight as an alumnus as well as his and Sheri’s deeply shared love of art.”

Peter, who began his film career in the early 1970s and achieved global cinematic fame for, among other films, creating the role of “RoboCop,” was first inspired to explore the world of art due to the influence of his longtime friend, actress Ali MacGraw (“Love Story,” “The Getaway”) who introduced him to modern and contemporary painting. Subsequently three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (“Apocalypse Now,” “Reds,” “The Last Emperor”) introduced Peter to Padua and the work of Giotto, the seminal Italian master, now considered the father of European painting.

This link fired Peter’s imagination and still informs his teaching, his writing, his filmmaking and beyond. Meanwhile, Sheri, who grew up in a small town in Georgia, decided to seek out the world of art when a charismatic middle school teacher taught a lesson on the art of Pompeii that was so vivid it made her determined to see it for herself one day. It’s a goal that she and her husband have made come true many times, not just for themselves, but for countless students, friends and family, whom they have shepherded throughout Italy.

Peter asserted, “Whether it’s the book I’m writing on Leon Battista Alberti for Cambridge University Press or a class I’m teaching or connecting with like-minded students, or film or television projects in which I am acting or directing, I am continually inspired by our shared, evolving understanding of the work that these artists created centuries ago. Their art changed the visual and aesthetic world and continues to do so.”

Sheri added, “For Peter and me and our son, Teddy, art leads us everywhere in life. Art is our adventure, and we hope that whoever receives our gifts at UCLA shares the same excitement, verve and enthusiasm we do.”