For the Love of Art
By Molly Jenkins

“My wife, our children, and I are all graduates of the Randolph-Macon Nursery School,” explained retired Lynchburg judge Paul Whitehead, “so we all have a love for the College. And we love and appreciate good art.”

Such is the explanation for why as many as 70 members of the College and greater community donate their time to serve as docents at the Maier Museum of Art. Many, like Paul and Sandra Whitehead, come simply to share a love of art.

Lynn Hume Stuart ’70 is among several alumnae who have been volunteering at the Museum since 1977, when (former) Alumnae Director Muriel Zimmerman Casey ’53 called together a group of 28 local alumnae and proposed the program. Nearly 100 per cent showed up – and continue to show up. Lynn focuses her time on the tours for school children, she said, but, like many of the volunteers, she gets calls to come in when a special group is scheduled to visit the Museum. Others work on a regular schedule.

Gallery tours have several purposes – to draw visitors in to engage with the art and to provide information to help them understand and appreciate what they see. Art experiences provided to more than 1,500 second and fifth grade students each year are designed to urge students to react and respond to art, to direct them to that “ah-ha!” experience, as well as to connect with the Standards of Learning guidelines.

In addition, college students are given the opportunity each year to respond to a particular piece of art – one of their own choosing – through poetry. When this exercise was offered as an activity in a summer program, one young participant independently chose to write about the same painting her alumna mother had chosen while a student at the College.

These are the connections – to the community, alumnae, and future students – that make the College a living, ever-changing work of art.

This article first appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of the College's Alumnae Bulletin and is reprinted with permission.