|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
by Gerry Boyle '78 When Elizabeth Broun stepped to the lectern last fall to help dedicate the Lunder Wing of the Colby Museum of Art, she surveyed a hall filled with luminaries in the field of American art. The assembled, Broun noted, had come from Santa Fe and Orlando, New York and Washington, Seattle and Los Angeles. When Broun, director of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, explained that she also had come a long way to the event, she was referring not to her flight from Washington but to her own personal history.
"I was raised in a very small town in southeastern Kansas-- about ten thousand [people]," Broun said. "I didn't even know, nor had ever met, a collector of any type until I finally went to school." But then she arrived at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, which she says has one of the nation's finest university art museums. Broun soon became acquainted with curators and faculty members. She watched as they assembled and used the museum's art works. From that springboard, Broun vaulted to a position of eminence, directing one of the country's finest museums of American art. "I quickly found the path for my own life," she said. "So I am full of respect and awareness of the opportunity that a museum like this one [Colby's] creates for people. I feel secure in saying that I would not be here at all, nor would I have a lifetime of enjoyment, but for the impact of my experience with a university art museum. "Being in a place like this affords a student to acquire a new language. It is a language of art. Like music, it is a language that is non-verbal, but it is still totally capable of expressing every nuance of the human experience. It is a full and rich language with a vocabulary that is unique and one that, once you learn it and come to know other people who know it, it creates a lifetime of enjoyment." Broun, who has said her own museum's mandate is "to encompass culture as well as art," cited six of her personal favorites from the Colby collection: "Portrait of Mrs. Metcalf Bowler" by John Singleton Copley; anonymous portrait of the Rev. Silas Ilsley; "Still Life with Oranges" by William McClosky; "Shell and Feather" by Georgia O'Keeffe; "Barn, Brooksville, Maine" by Maurice Prendergast; and "Church at Head Tide, Maine" by Marsden Hartley. Hugh Gourley, director of the Colby Museum of Art, later said Broun's lecture set the perfect tone for the dedication of the Lunder Wing. He praised her selection of representative works from the collection, especially Broun's interpretation of "Still Life with Oranges," in which she compared the oranges to dancers on stage. "I don't think that anyone who heard her talk will ever look at the McClosky still life without remembering," Gourley said. Broun, a close friend of museum benefactors Paula and Peter Lunder '56, first came to the Colby museum in May 1997 for the opening of the exhibit "White House Collection of American Crafts." She will return in August for the opening of a new exhibit, "Modernism and Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art." That exhibit will be shown at the museum from August 1 to October 15. "There's never been anything like it in Maine," Gourley promised.
|
|
readers write | periscope | from the hill | student life | faculty file | books & authors mules on the move | gifts and grants | alumni at large | obituaries | final period
©1999 COLBY COLLEGE
|
