History
True to the liberal arts’ tradition of promoting independent thinking the first art exhibition ever held at Davidson College was organized by a student. Freshman Gordon Horton organized the Annual Student Exhibition in 1938, and in 1941 he donated money to renovate a room in Eumenean Hall (one of the four oldest buildings on campus). The renovated space was to house Davidson’s first art gallery and potentially, a home for a permanent art collection. In connection with his gift, Horton proposed that the ten best paintings from the previous three student exhibitions be framed and permanently placed in this new gallery. Perhaps due to the onset of the Second World War, the trail of records about the gallery and the collection grows cold. Evidence of Horton’s collection of student paintings was lost, and it is unclear whether the proposed art gallery was ever completed.
In April of 1948 faculty created the Fine Arts Committee and one month later they sponsored the first of twenty annual Fine Arts Festivals. That inaugural Fine Arts Festival was so successful that Davidson decided to offer one course in the visual arts and employed Joseph Hutchison, then director of Charlotte’s Mint Museum of Art, to teach it.
Philip Moose replaced Hutchison in the fall of 1951. In his first two years as part-time visual arts instructor, Moose curated a number of popular exhibitions that primarily focused on artists in North Carolina. He left in 1953 to accept a Fulbright Scholarship to study painting at the Munich Academy of Art in Germany. Prior to his departure, Moose sent a note to President Cunningham about the future of the visual arts at Davidson. He wrote that the next professor of art should be a “younger person with a very liberal outlook . . . who is an exhibiting artist as well as an authority on Art History.” As it turns out, President Cunningham was paying attention.
In 1953 Doug Houchens was appointed as Davidson College’s first full-time art professor. When Houchens arrived, the Davidson College Permanent Art Collection was little more than a set of etchings by Louis Orr. When he retired twenty-five years later, Davidson was well on its way to assembling a notable collection. Houchens broadened the scope of exhibitions and, in the process, created a more contemporary dialogue—vital steps for the continued development of the visual arts program at Davidson and recognition in the art world.
Houchens joined The Fine Arts Committee upon his arrival at Davidson, and under his guidance the next fourteen Fine Arts Festivals were successful in creating “a more sensitive awareness and a deeper appreciation of the place of art in our contemporary society.” Houchens and the Committee understood that in order to create this ‘sensitive awareness’ and to instill a higher level of visual literacy in the student body, more than just transient art exhibitions were required. Only one year after Houchens’ arrival on campus, he and the committee were hard at work seeking funds to purchase work for a collection. In 1954 the committee sent a letter to President Cunningham that outlined:
“… a plan to allot a portion of each year’s budget to the purchase of a work or the commissioning of a new work of art…The publicity value of such an event is obvious. But the greatest value would be to those in the college who would come to appreciate a beautiful piece of art by seeing it often. We feel that our temporary exhibitions, as worthwhile as they have been and will continue to be, cannot take the place of art objects with which one can become really familiar. [We are] sure that either the library or the college union, or perhaps other buildings, would provide suitable space for the permanent display of the objects …”
While his first request for funding was turned down, Houchens was not deterred from his belief that a collection of art was essential to the pedagogical mission of Davidson College. Without direct funding, Houchens resorted to a “scrimp and save” plan for acquisitions. Each year he was thrifty enough to have a little money left over in his budget to buy a work or two for Davidson’s growing Permanent Art Collection.
In 1963, a sum of two hundred dollars was finally added to Houchens’ budget. Houchens was able to save another three hundred dollars from his existing budget, but even with the extra money, he realized that a noteworthy painting or sculpture was out of reach. Acting on his philosophy that “a good drawing is better than a mediocre painting,” Houchens purchased Lovis Corinth’s, Study for Portrait of Admiral Alfred Von Tirpitz, 1917 for the permanent art collection. This turned out to be one of his most important acquisitions. Houchens’ efforts laid the foundation for a collection of art and an exhibitions program that would thrive in the early 1970s under the guidance of a young artist and Davidson alumnus, Herb Jackson.
Doug Houchens’ 1969 sabbatical opened the door for Herb Jackson, Davidson Class of 1967. Jackson’s talents were quickly recognized, and he moved from temporary faculty to Associate Professor of Art in 1971.
The first exhibitions organized by Jackson were displayed in the Stowe Gallery of the Cunningham Fine Arts building. In 1977, the gallery moved to the lobby of Chambers Building. The new Chambers Gallery in Davidson’s main academic building put the visual arts in the center of campus life and resulted not only in greater gallery square footage, but also storage facilities for the permanent art collection. The move was a significant upgrade from the Cunningham coat closet, where the collection was previously stored.
In 1972 Jackson premiered the first of five Davidson National Print and Drawing Competitions. Jackson describes two motivations for taking on such an ambitious project: “…to let the nation know that we were serious about art now that we had an art major and… to try to build on this little core collection of a few pieces that we had when I first got here to the point where we could actually justify saying we had a collection – for years I didn’t use those terms – we just had some pieces.”
As an artist, Jackson had already figured prominently in numerous national art competitions. Based on those experiences he believed that the Davidson National should do all the things right that he had observed as deficient in other shows. He wanted it to be “the supreme show and set the standard for all the others.” In short, it did. Jackson sent 10,000 mailings and 2,000 posters to every state and placed ads in the top national art periodicals. His efforts resulted in the largest response in the history of national art competitions, with 2,523 submissions from forty-nine states. Jackson recalls: “They came in crates at the rate of one hundred fifty a day by every possible carrier, and each was carefully unpacked and stacked in huge towers to await the judging.” The competition’s entry fee of five dollars per artist generated revenue for numerous purchase awards. Between 1972 and 1976 the competition added more than fifty works to the permanent art collection. At the time he oversaw these national competitions Jackson was teaching a full course load and had no departmental assistant. He did, however, have his spouse, Laura Grosch who is an accomplished artist and woman who spent countless hours along side Jackson helping to receive submissions, cooking for the visiting jurors and numerous other undertakings. Even with Laura’s tireless help, his labor of love consumed more than 1,200 hours of his time each year.
The juror for the 1973 Davidson National was Clement Greenberg, who is considered one of the most influential American art critics of the twentieth century. The jurors for the 1972, 1974, 1975, and 1976 competitions were also impressive artists and critics: Frank Getlein, Walter Darby Bannard, Judith Goldman, and Marcia Tucker. With the exception of Mr. Getlein and Ms. Goldman, the judges acknowledged a certain naïveté about prints and drawings. Their fresh eyes resulted in innovative exhibitions where the work had to stand on its own merit, without the established reputation of the artist.
In the 1970s Jackson’s career as an artist began to flourish, and as a result of his own exhibitions, he met collectors and dealers interested in donating works to Davidson College. One of Davidson’s greatest benefactors was The Martin Ackerman Foundation, which regularly acquired art from commercial galleries or dealers in financial straits and then gifted those works to non-profit institutions. Among the most important works donated to the Permanent Art Collection were works by Josef Albers, Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers, Beverly Pepper, Dieter Roth, Berenice Abbott, and Todd Webb. Lakeside Studio in Michigan was another significant donor, gifting over two hundred and fifty works to Davidson between 1970 and 1980. Jackson’s career as a painter and his resulting influence among important collectors demonstrated the wisdom of Philip Moose’s advice to President Cunningham two decades earlier.
Jackson also developed the permanent art collection the old-fashioned way. Like Houchens, he was careful to save a little money from his budget each year to purchase work for the collection from various sources. Sotheby’s auction house was a favorite. Jackson recalls that a funny thing often happened on his way through the auction at Sotheby’s. Specific works he desired usually became to expensive for his limited budget once the bidding began, but “…then something else would come up and nobody was particularly interested in it for some reason, and I would grab it. The prices on some of those things were incredibly low.” For example, it was Jackson’s keen eye at Sotheby’s that netted an etching by Rembrandt for under $150.
Of all his extraordinary accomplishments, Jackson considers the close relationship he developed with Charlotte native and Harlem Renaissance artist, Romare Bearden to be one of the highlights of his twenty-year tenure as gallery director. Jackson was introduced to Bearden’s work in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After realizing the local connection Bearden had with the Charlotte area, Jackson proposed that Davidson award him with an honorary degree and organize an exhibition of his work. Jackson was the first in the region to recognize and celebrate the talents of this local native. Jackson and Bearden were not just professional acquaintances, but considered each other dear friends, “Over the years, I got to know Bearden. I would see him when I went to New York. He would visit me when he came to Charlotte. I loved the man very much. He was warm, generous and embracing. He was also verbally eloquent, quite the poet. It was easy to be mesmerized by his voice, his stories.”
To inaugurate the opening of the new Katherine and Tom Belk Visual Arts Center in 1993, Jackson organized a retrospective of another North Carolina native, Kenneth Noland. Herb Jackson and Davidson College celebrated the achievements of Noland with an honorary degree and hosted the first retrospective of his work in North Carolina. To commemorate the event, Noland donated a large painting to Davidson that now hangs in the atrium of the Katherine and Tom Belk Visual Arts Center.
By 1999 Herb Jackson had collected over 2,600 works of art and with a new Visual Arts Center with two pristine galleries and museum quality storage facilities, Davidson could now mount exhibitions in a place central to the entire community. Brad Thomas was hired as the first full-time gallery director (1999-2012), followed by Lia Newman (2013-present).
– History written by Jessica Cooley ’05