Distinguished Alumni: Ellen Goheen

On October 1 the department honored Ellen Goheen as the 2015 Murphy Distinguished Alumni Award recipient.

Ellen earned her BA in French and art history from KU, with honors, and went on to earn an MA in art history and do PhD coursework in art history at KU. She spent her entire career at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, progressing from assistant to the curator of painting and sculpture (1967-70) to assistant curator for history of art programs (1970-73); associate curator for painting and sculpture (1973-75); and curator of twentieth-century art (1975-81). Between 1974 and 1979 she organized seven exhibitions, including American Impressionism (1974) and Christo: Wrapped Walk Ways (1978), both accompanied by catalogues.

From 1981 to 1983 Ellen was senior lecturer and coordinator of adult programming at the Nelson-Atkins and between 1985 and 1989 she was the coordinator of the Thomas Hart Benton project, for which she secured a $100,000 grant from the NEA to support programming, and which culminated in the major Thomas Hart Benton retrospective of 1989. During that interval she also wrote The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988). Finally, between 1989 and 1999 Ellen served as the Nelson-Atkins’s director of collections and special exhibitions, carrying out numerous activities in the areas of administration, program planning, and research, and attending to major personnel and fiscal responsibilities, including supervising and overseeing the budgets of five independent departments.

In addition to her professional activities Ellen has served on numerous important boards and committees, including the Visual Arts Advisory Committee, Missouri State Arts Council (1977-83); the Redevelopment Authority of Kansas City, Missouri (1979-84); the Kansas Arts Commission Advisory Council (1986-91); the Acquisitions Committee, Kansas City Union Station Museums (2007-14); and the Advisory Board of KU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2006-15). She was a founding board member of Missouri Citizens for the Arts and served as president of the Kansas City Chapter of the Archeological Institute of America, the Historic Kansas City Foundation (1989-91) and Kansas City Young Audiences (2000-3).

In her October 1 lecture in our department entitled “From Temples of Art to Venues of Entertainment: The Evolution of the Art Museum,” Ellen reflected on her career at the Nelson-Atkins and that institution’s remarkable growth over her thirty-two years on its staff. She commented on major works she acquired for the Nelson-Atkins by such artists as Richard Estes, Joseph Cornell, Donald Judd, Robert Arneson, and Duane Hanson; memorable speakers she helped to bring to the museum including Helen Frankenthaler, George Segal, Charles Gwathmey, Leo Castelli, Hilton Kramer, and Jack Lenor Larsen; her work to facilitate Christo and Jeanne- Claude’s Wrapped Walk Ways in Kansas City’s Loose Park in October 1978; her successful effort in 1979 to place a 17.5-ton Mark di Suvero sculpture on the Nelson-Atkins’s lawn as a long-term loan; and her several years of effort helping to organize major exhibitions of Thomas Hart Benton (1989) and the sixteenth-century Chinese painter Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1992).

As promised by her lecture title, Ellen noted the dramatic change in the nature of art museums, which have morphed physically from Neo-classical temples for art like the original William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts (opened 1933) into ultramodern architectural statements like the Nelson-Atkins’s Stephen Holl-designed Bloch Building (opened 2007). Accompanying these physical changes, in

Ellen’s view, is a new conception of the museum less as a place for connoisseurship and contemplation than for entertainment and social events. But she is hopeful that visitors attracted by the latter will return the museum to look at the art.

Ellen Goheen concluded her lecture with these inspiring words about the field of study that launched her into her rewarding career: “In my mind, there is no better pure liberal arts discipline than art history. . . . A background in art history – and I believe this unequivocally – enriches your life in untold ways, both large and small, whether you go into medicine or law or teaching or banking or marketing or art history or museums or parenting. It develops analytical thinking and observation; it demonstrates the importance of context, of seeing the big picture, and it sharpens the ability to draw conclusions – and all are indispensable skills in life.”

– David Cateforis