- James H. Semans, the founding chairman of the N.C. School of the Arts and a leader in arts support from the national to the grass-roots levels, died Thursday. He was 94. A retired Duke University physician, he championed the arts school in Winston-Salem and many other artistic and humanitarian causes. Most often, he did so in concert with his wife, Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, the great-granddaughter of university namesake Washington Duke.
Dr. Semans had been in declining health and died at the family's home in Durham's Forest Hills neighborhood. A funeral is planned for 11 a.m. Tuesday in Duke Chapel.
"He was a physician who was a wonderful clinician and teacher whose passion extended to the arts and human relations," said Duke President Richard Brodhead in a Duke news release. "He will be missed at Duke and across North Carolina, where his rich legacy will be felt for decades to come."
Dr. and Mrs. Semans also donated time, money and energy to many university priorities and initiatives, including faculty chairs and the new Nasher Museum of Art to open in October. In 1999, Dr. Semans received an honorary degree from Duke.
As the first chairman in 1964 of the board of trustees of the School of the Arts, Dr. Semans played a pivotal role in training future professionals in the performing arts.
The school, which subsequently became part of the UNC system, now enrolls 1,000 students in middle school through graduate programs that range across dance, music, theater and other disciplines, the only state-supported school of its kind in the nation. The campus library is named for Dr. and Mrs. Semans, who both served many years on the school's board of trustees and on the board of the school's foundation.
Soon after Gov. Terry Sanford persuaded state legislators in 1963 to appropriate money for what was initially envisioned as a music conservatory, a Sanford aide spearheading the project, John Ehle, put forward Dr. Semans' name to Gov. Sanford for its chairmanship. Gov. Sanford subsequently noted Dr. Semans' success in drawing the board together and his deft touch with the sometimes mercurial temperaments of the school's artist-administrators, Mr. Ehle said this week from his home in Winston-Salem and in an oral history of the school. Dr. Semans also was influential with legislators, Mr. Ehle said.
"We couldn't have invented a man who could have done the job as well," Mr. Ehle recalled hearing Gov. Sanford say. "He was solid; he was a good man," Mr. Ehle added.
James Hustead Semans was born in 1910, in Uniontown, Pa. His father was a banker. After attending high school in New Jersey, he graduated from Princeton University in 1932 and Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore in 1936. He completed a residency at Johns Hopkins in 1943, then spent 21/2 years as a medical officer in the U.S. Army during World War II, serving as chief of urologic surgery at McGuire General Hospital in Richmond, Va., and at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
Dr. Semans was in private practice in Atlanta in 1953 when, as a 43-year-old bachelor, he married Mrs. Semans, a widow with four young daughters. Mrs. Semans' first husband, Josiah Charles Trent, also a Duke physician, had died nearly five years earlier. The Semanses had three more children.
Joining Duke's medical faculty that year, Dr. Semans was promoted to full professor in 1961. He became a professor emeritus in 1981.
He developed a surgical procedure to treat a nerve-related bladder malfunction and was among the first urologists to advise patients on sexual dysfunction, said Saul Boyarsky, who was chief resident in urology in the 1950s.
"Jim probably saved many marriages with his wise counseling decades ago when these issues were difficult to discuss in our society," Dr. Boyarsky said in a Duke news release.
He served organizations and blue-ribbon panels for people with disabilities, including the N.C. Society for Crippled Children and Adults, the National Paraplegia Foundation and the Governor's Committee for Employment of the Handicapped.
At the School of the Arts, Dr. Semans engaged with the students, applauding their performances and encouraging their ambitions. He was particularly eager that the school's lore be preserved in archives and the oral history project, said Sarah Turner, the school's director of donor communications.
"His love for students was just exemplary," Ms. Turner said. "I've never seen that kind of rapport with the students."
He and Mrs. Semans were instrumental in starting the school's International Music Program, in which they accompanied students to Europe to perform each summer for 30 years.
Ransom Wilson, now an internationally acclaimed flutist and conductor, was in the School of the Arts' first class and first summer trip abroad, to Siena, Italy. For a 14-year-old from Tuscaloosa, Ala., the six weeks in Siena were a heady cultural immersion, not the least of which was Dr. Semans' treating the young ensemble to gelato, the Italian frozen dessert.
"He used to take the students out in the afternoon," Mr. Wilson said in a phone interview from Yale University, where he teaches flute. "There was no air conditioning and very little ice available. We were living in paradise, but it was hot.
"Jim just gave all his money away. He'd say, 'Let's all go out for ice cream.' We'd never had gelato."
Dr. and Mrs. Semans continued to encourage the school's students as they went on to musical careers, which for Mr. Wilson has been as a major performer, recording artist and orchestra conductor. When Mr. Wilson was named assistant conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, "within a week of the announcement, I received this huge, beautiful plant from them," he said.
Besides serving 17 years on the School of the Arts board, Dr. Semans was a member of the board of the N.C. Arts Council, where he introduced the idea of the Emerging Artist Grant program. He was a new member of the council's board about 20 years ago when he proposed direct grants to promising artists, funded by the state Arts Council and administered by local arts councils. The idea was soon adopted by the Durham Arts Council and, largely though Dr. Semans' travels and advocacy, spread to cover nearly all 100 North Carolina counties and beyond.
In Durham, the grants pay up to $1,500 to artists in their formative years or those taking an established career in a new direction.
"One of his reasons for doing this was to encourage private foundations to match those grants," said Nancy Trovillion, deputy director of the N.C. Arts Council.
Among national arts organizations he served are the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Institute of Music, the American Council for the Arts and the School of American Ballet.
In 1997, the Semanses were awarded the N.C. Philanthropy Award. In recognition of their leadership in human relations, they received the first Humanitarian Freedom Award from the Durham chapter of Hadassah in 1960, and in 1969, the National Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
In addition to his wife, Dr. Semans is survived by seven children: Mary Trent Jones of Abingdon, Va.; Sally Trent Harris of Charlotte; Rebecca Trent Kirkland of Houston; Barbara Trent Kimbrell of Sullivan Island, S.C.; Jenny Semans Koortbojian of Durham; James Duke Biddle Trent Semans of Chapel Hill; and Beth Semans Hubbard of Los Angeles; also 16 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren.
Memorials may be made to the Semans Art Fund at the N.C. School of the Arts, 1533 S. Main St., Winston-Salem, NC 27127-2188 or the James H. Semans Fund, Duke University Medical Center, Division of Urology, Box 3707, Durham, NC 27710.
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1910 - 2005 (94 years)
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