Exhibition explores female influence on Mark Arts’ first 100 years

An exhibition honoring the role women have played in the first 100 years of Wichita’s oldest cultural institution opens Friday.

Mark Arts, the regional arts hub that started in November 1920 as the Wichita Art Association, opens in June after mandatory COVID-19 closure so the curator of the exhibition will launch the show with a virtual tour. You can watch live on Facebook at 5 p.m. Friday or find the recorded tour on Mark Arts’ Facebook page to watch later.

It opens by appointment to members on Monday, June 1 and to the public on June 8.

“Study Collection Exhibition: Women in the Arts” will be on display in the School of Creativity Commons through July 18. There is no cost to visit the galleries at Mark Arts, 1307 N. Rock, where gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The first hour is reserved for senior citizens and those who are immunocompromised. Initially, the number of visitors will be limited to 25 percent of capacity.

The exhibition, comprised of 40 to 50 selections from the Mark Arts Study Collection, is the first in what program director Chloe Gutmann hopes is a regular series making the 5,000-piece collection more accessible to the public. Where a museum has a permanent collection, a school or arts center has a study collection meant to be used by instructors and students.

The first item in the collection was acquired in March 1921 when the association purchased John Noble’s “Toilers of the Sea” for $3,500 following their first exhibition, which featured the Wichita-born post-impressionist painter of cowboys, sunrises and seascapes. Over the years works, ranging from Bruce Moore sculptures to a near-complete collection from the Prairie Printmakers, were added through patron gifts, artist gifts or purchases made by the nonprofit.

In an effort to highlight Mark Arts’ centennial and the study collection, Gutmann said it made sense to start with an exhibition focused on women.

“Women are a major part of the backbone of Mark Arts,” she said. “I wanted to pull out different nods to our history and the women who have made our space what it is today.”

The works she selected highlight a range of female roles at Mark Arts: artists, patrons, collectors, educators and subjects.

“Women in the Arts” begins with a painting of some of the most instrumental women in the nonprofit’s long history. That work portrays Maude Gowen Schollenberger, an arts supporter and long-time president of the Wichita Art Association from the 1930s into the 1960s, socializing with Olive Ann Beech, Gladys Wiedemann and Mary Robinson Koch, three philanthropists who were influential to the organization beginning in the 1960s.

Gutmann chose selections for the exhibition that she felt would show the public engaging, interesting threads across the works. One example is a series of works connected to Beech. There’s a formal photograph of Beech taken at the time when she was chairwoman of Beech Aircraft Corporation. Included in the background of the image by female photographer Lou Charno is what Beech considered one of her favorite paintings, “Winter Scene – New England” by John Henry Twachtman. In the exhibition, that painting is hanging to the right of Beech’s portrait and to the left is a painting by another artist Beech collected: “Field Flowers” by Polly Parks Lambe.

“These were all in Olive Ann Beech’s collection that was gifted to Mark Arts by her family,” Gutmann said. “It shows her as a subject, as a supporter of the arts and as a female collector acquiring women artists’ work. I’m excited to show interesting thread lines like that to the public, and to give the public a better understanding of our study collection.”

Works included in the exhibition span decades, from a landscape painting by Betty Dickerson, who started teaching at the school in the 1930s, to a portrait painting by current instructor Melinda Weis. While not all the works are by women, they are connected to women.

“I wanted to shape a well-rounded show even if that meant including a male artist who was furthering women artists in their careers or highlighting them as subjects,” Gutmann said.

Other female artists included in the show: Pegasus Martin Nichols, Mary Kretsinger, Rose Cabat, Edris Eckhardt and the building’s namesake, Mary Koch.

“There’s a general misconception when people see the name on our building – the Mary R. Koch Arts Center – that we are a part of Koch Industries rather than a nonprofit with a building named after Mary Koch,” Gutmann said. “She was actually a student at Mark Arts and I wanted to show that she was a very talented and skilled enamellist.”

The Wichita Art Association formed in November 1920 and as early as 1922 the organization offered classes. The Wichita Art Association became the Wichita Center for the Arts in 1990 and Mark Arts in 2016. In January 2018, the organization moved into its 40,000-square-foot Mary R. Koch Arts Center.

“This is the first of what I hope to be many exhibitions that pull works from the study collection and give the public an opportunity to engage with the works further,” Gutmann said. “Our collection is a hidden gem and I aim to make it more accessible academically and leisurely.”

This story was originally published May 29, 2020 at 9:19 AM.