By Elizabeth T. Burr
pop writer
An exhibition of photographs has just opened at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and will continue through Jan. 3, 2010. These photographs are a portion of a large gift to the museum made by Carol Beesley.
Beesley has had a close relationship with Norman. From 1973 through 1997, she taught drawing and painting at the University of Oklahoma. She also is an artist in her own right. When she retired in 1997, she moved to Santa Fe, N.M., with her husband Michael Hennagin. While there, she not only continued to actively paint, she also taught for OU's Summer in Santa Fe.
Running parallel to this "public life" of the artist, was her growing activity as a collector. The focus of her collecting, and the engine that drove it, was photography. Her passion for photography began early, and her academic and visual involvement in the medium led her to teach classes on its history while at OU.
But the desire to actually purchase photographs developed for her while a graduate student at the University of California in Los Angeles in the '70s.
By the '80s, she and her husband, who also is a professor and music composer at OU, had committed themselves to collecting. When they moved to Santa Fe, she decided to build a collection of photographs that would be a systematic reflection of the city's history and beauty.
Norman's museum is now the benefactor of this infatuation. Her bequest will come to more than 100 images, a small portion of which forms this current exhibition.
What also is striking in this "teachable moment," is her overall philosophy toward collecting.
"I think of myself as only a caretaker," she once said.
Beesley will teach a course on the history of photography in fall 2010 for the OU Department of Art.
For more information on this exhibit, call the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at 325-4938 or visit www.ou.edu/fjma.
