Newcomers to Colby hear bits and pieces about Schupf. That he is an avid and erudite collector of contemporary art. True.

That he works in an office in a home in Hamilton, monitoring financial markets via a bank of computer screens. True.

That he supports liberal arts colleges--and not just Colgate, his alma mater. True.

That he followed the Grateful Dead and also can talk authoritatively about Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington and other musical masters. True, true, true.

Somehow all of this adds up to an image of a freewheeling financier, a tie-dyed stock trader who navigates the wine-in-hand world of New York art openings. False.

"I just like to read my books," Schupf said. "I'm not a person who likes to go to dinner parties, cocktail parties. I find those kind of things death."

But not nearly as deadly as talking about himself. The CliffsNotes summary is that Schupf is a New Yorker who grew up in New Rochelle, went to summer camp in southern Maine and didn't set foot in Maine again for nearly 50 years.

Schupf attended Colgate, where he earned a bachelor's degree in history and lettered in tennis. He lived in Europe after college but eventually returned to work on Wall Street. In New York he began collecting contemporary art. He was introduced to Serra's work by Hugh Gourley, then director of the Colby College Museum of Art, who one day led Schupf to a Serra drawing, Out of Round, then in the Colby museum's basement racks. For Schupf the reaction was immediate and intense, an artistic out-of-body experience. "I hadn't seen a work of art that impacted me like that--ever," he said.

Since then Schupf has amassed all of the famed sculptor's prints and drawings (and one sculpture), 125 works that fill both of the Schupf homes (one an office/gallery, the other a residence/gallery) in Hamilton, N.Y., hang in several Colgate administrative offices and are loaned to museums around the world, including Colby's.

It's Schupf's modus operandi to immerse himself deeply in the work of an artist he feels is vitally important. In the late '80s and early '90s he focused on the music of the Grateful Dead, taking in 150 shows after being turned on to the iconic band by a Colgate student and Deadhead known on campus as Grateful John. Schupf once excused himself from a trustees' committee meeting at Colby by saying he had to catch a Dead show, a likely first in the history of the College.