Mary McCord/Edyth Renshaw Collection on the Performing Arts

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About the Collection

The McCord/Renshaw Collection originated as the McCord Theatre Museum at Southern Methodist University in 1933 and was first located in Dallas Hall. It was founded by Department of Speech faculty members, including David Russell and Edyth Renshaw, and named in honor of Mary McCord, the first speech professor at SMU.

This digital collection includes samples from the extensive physical collection, which encompasses a diverse cross-section of performing arts and represents the wide-ranging forms of theater, music, dance, and film. The collection includes catalogs, clipping files, correspondence, photographs, playbills, posters, programs, scrapbooks, scripts, set designs, and works of art on paper.

Within the digital collection are significant subsets of items from the Little Theatre of Dallas Collection and the Southern Methodist University Arden Club Collection.

The Little Theatre of Dallas was founded in Dallas in 1920 to provide the city with quality theatre performed by non-professional actors from the community and reflects the many facets and stages of the organization from its inception to its final demise in the late 1950s. Of particular interest are a set of theater programs, 1925-1941, from the Little Theatre of Dallas Collection. The programs include cover art by Gordon Conway, Dorothy Sutton, O'Neil Ford, Lynn Ford, David R. Williams, Alexander Hogue, and Jerry Bywaters. A finding aid for the Little Theatre collection is available.

The Southern Methodist University Arden Club was the student dramatic group on campus from 1916 to 1969. The collection documents the activities of the club from its first production in 1916 and throughout its 53-year history and includes artwork, clippings, correspondence, documents, ephemera, manuscripts, posters, programs, props, publicity, published works, scripts, scrapbooks, photographs and club pins. A finding aid for the Arden Club materials is available.