While the past two and a half years have presented their share of challenges, as I look ahead to the new opportunities of the 2022-23 academic year I’m heartened that the Allen remains a strong support to its local communities. The exhibitions and programs the staff have organized this fall demonstrate this engagement, as does the museum’s current multi-year long-range planning effort. Being responsive to, and in dialogue with, our neighbors, visitors, and supporters – and planning events and installations that are of interest to both the Oberlin College community and to the broader public – are among our primary goals, and we welcome your feedback on all that we do. Among the ways to connect with us are through our website, email, phone, or a letter – and within the museum, both a comment book and a visitor experience form – as well as, of course, personal communications with staff or with our loyal Volunteer Guild members.

We continue to mourn the passing of the founder of the museum’s Guild, Mary Louise VanDyke (OC ’47), who contributed so much to our successful outreach, and are sorry that others important to the Allen’s history and collection have also recently died. David Gordon Mitten (OC ’57), a distinguished faculty member in the classics department at Harvard, who was influenced in his work teaching with objects by his undergraduate experience at the Allen, passed away in January 2022. And we are deeply saddened that artists Claes Oldenburg, Sam Gilliam, and Jennifer Bartlett, each of whom is represented by multiple significant works in the collection, passed away this summer. Bartlett’s systems-based practice helped transform postminimalism; her work first entered the Allen’s collection in 1977. A print and an installation by Sam Gilliam, who revolutionized color field painting by draping painted canvases in the mid-1960s, joined the permanent collection in 1973, following the 1970 acquisition of a work for the Art Rental collection. We also mourn Claes Oldenburg, whose long relationship with the Allen lasted from the early 1960s to his death. Ellen Johnson, who shared his Swedish heritage, showed his work at the Allen in 1963 along with that of Joan Mitchell and Robert Rauschenberg in that January’s Three Young Americans exhibition, with that year marking the museum’s acquisition of the first of more than fifty of his drawings, prints, and sculptures. In 1969 the museum commissioned his first permanent outdoor sculpture, Giant Three-Way Plug, which he sited just south of the entrance, re-siting it in 1976 due to the museum’s expansion designed by Robert Venturi – the genesis of Oldenburg’s whimsical “alternate proposal”: an envisioning of an Allen addition made up of mammoth connected plugs. He received an honorary degree from Oberlin College in 1970, and we were fortunate that in 2014 – when Case Western Reserve University awarded him one – he returned to the Allen with his close friend, Case professor and AMAM donor Edward Olszewski, to spend time discussing his works with us.

Long-term relationships such as these – that have helped form our diverse collection and shape our programming – are priceless. We treasure them, and our connections with you. Thank you for your support.

Andria Derstine, John G. W. Cowles Director