Meadows Museum Celebrates Fifty-Year Anniversary with New Exhibits
Friday, January 16th, Centenary’s Meadows Museum had a preview reception for the opening of its fiftieth anniversary exhibits. There were three new exhibits displayed, all of which center around the Meadows’ mission statement that says they are “an educational unit of the College charged with the collection, conservation, preservation, and interpretation of visual works of art of museum quality from the College Collection inclusive of the Indochina collection of Jean Depujols.” Each exhibit works to highlight a specific part of the statement, as each gallery has the theme on the wall outside of it with the part they wanted to focus on colored in purple.
The exhibits were curated by museum director Alissa Klaus and collections manager Kristin Sorensen. In the downstairs gallery, they chose all of the fifty pieces displayed and wrote out all of the text panels for each work. They did the same in the Depujols gallery and in the third gallery they reached out to different faculty members on campus to pick pieces for them to interpret from their discipline.
The downstairs gallery showcases fifty pieces, all from the museum’s personal collection and wanting to show the full breadth of the museum’s over 1,600 pieces. The part of the theme that the exhibit wants to highlight is the “interpretation of visual works of museum quality.” Klaus states that they first picked the Andy Warhol Polaroid of Dolly Parton, “just because we really wanted to include that one,” and then built the rest of the collection around that, matching pieces in an order based on subject matter, theme, color scheme, or the artists’ relationships to each other. During the process of making connections one by one from each piece, Klaus and Sorensen decided that the exhibit should make a loop that “doesn’t necessarily have a start and end point.” They originally had 47 pieces picked out but chose to add three more to make the total 50 pieces for fifty years of Meadows.
The faculty gallery is lined with pieces from the museum’s collection that were chosen by different professors from all different departments across campus. They each have a written interpretation from a professor that relates the work to their discipline and subject of interest, with the only guideline being that the text panel should “teach the museum visitors something about their discipline.” The part of the mission statement that this gallery wants to focus on is the Meadows Museum as an “educational unit of the College” and an academic museum. Meadows holds to this principle, as the museum work-study students and interns were involved in the creation of the galleries by conducting some of the early research and identifying pieces for the faculty to pick from.
The “Indochina Collection of Jean Depujols” room is filled exclusively with his work and reflects the history of the museum as the “original gift of artwork from Depujols to the museum.” The pieces made their way to Meadows by way of Don Brown, a former art professor at Centenary, who knew Depujols in 1925. Depujols was a French artist who was hired to paint in the former French colonies of Southeast Asia, which are present-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. He moved to the United States with his American wife after the outbreak of World War II, and then specifically to Shreveport on the invitation of Brown and a former student of his. Depujols was then introduced to Algur H. Meadows, who facilitated the gift of 360 of Depujols’ works to the museum in 1969.
The Meadows Museum is having its fiftieth birthday party celebration on February 26th from 10am to 3pm with a full schedule of events planned. Meadows has free admission and free membership for students to earn museum swag. Centenary students are always encouraged to come by and learn more about their on-campus museum.