Dialogue with the Director Archives Dialogue with the Director

Director Saralyn Reece Hardy speaks with Beth Schultz, Ted Johnson, and Joan Stone on their creative insights resulting from the Spencer collection.

In anticipation of Art into Art: Inspired Responses, Director Saralyn Reece Hardy turned to three of the Spencer's most ardent and enduring friends, all of whom have retired from the KU faculty after distinguished careers, and all of whom will be participating deeply in programming this fall at the museum. Her questions: You have had long acquaintance with the Spencer and have responded creatively to many objects within our collections. Could you share a creative insight that you have had as a result of your engagement with a specific object? What did you see that caused you to write, dance, speak?

Beth Schultz
Professor Emerita, English

Often standing before Sanford Robinson Gifford's Morning in the Adirondacks painting, I have pondered my sense that although every painting is a still life (literally both silent and motionless), no painting is still. No painting is still insofar as the viewer's eye moves over the canvas, deepening her mind and heart and senses each time she looks. Looking at and looking into Gifford's painting, my eye begins at the top, taking in the peach-colored dawn coming over mountains, painted almost abstractly and creating in me a sense of awe. My eye moves, then, to the very realistic scene of minuscule human activity on the shores of a forest lake below the mountains. My senses and personal memories are fully engaged as I hear human voices, a dog bark, the splash of a paddle, smell smoke rising from a cabin and the scent of pine. But dismayed to see the forest being clear cut here to make way for this human development, I look again to the mountains and discover that Gifford's painting, like other works of art, is full of active life, evolving and changing in its implications and providing diverse and complex perceptions simultaneously.

Ted Johnson
Professor Emeritus, French & Italian

My first creative insight into an object in the Spencer Museum of Art dates back to 1978 and the days just prior to the opening of the museum, when I participated in the "Humanist in the Art Museum" program. As we looked at an 18th century marble sculpture of a recumbent Magdalene as part of our introduction to the inquiry method of articulating ideas in art, Dolo Brooking asked us: "Is she comfortable?" The powerful ideas I articulated in response to the question and the work were of such a nature that afterwards, one of my colleagues remarked, "Wow, you really got into that piece!" The experience of being a student experiencing an epiphanic moment brought about through maieutic pedagogy has informed my teaching since that insightful morning.

Joan Stone
Choreographer & Dance Historian

The moment I saw Lisa Grossman's 86 Bends of the Kaw, I started bending sideways, spiraling my arms, and tiptoeing a serpentine pathway. In six long narrow panels, composed of multiple images, she presents the old river, lit by the setting sun - gracefully bending, exploring, and changing. I've walked along the Kaw and seen it from airplanes, but it was Lisa's simultaneously mimetic and abstract realization of its shapes and movements that inspired a new dance for an old dancer.