The school and the shelf: what Fort Wayne kept

1888 - present

The school: Behind nearly every name in this section stands one institution. The Fort Wayne Art School began as a small painting class in 1888, occupied at one point the Hamilton family's carriage house, and in 1921 received Theodore Thieme's house at 1026 West Berry Street, the Wayne Knitting Mills president making two conditions that shaped the century: that a museum become a formal part of the institution, and that the school appoint a director. The Fort Wayne Museum of Art, founded in 1921 in that arrangement, is now Northeast Indiana's leading visual arts institution, and the school itself merged into the university in the 1970s and teaches on as Purdue Fort Wayne's fine arts department. Davisson taught in it, Burt studied and taught in it, Oettel ran it, Fishman presided over it, Altekruse and Enochs were formed in it. No other Fort Wayne institution touches as many lives in this record.

The traffic: Read as one story, the leg's pattern is a fair trade honestly recorded. Fort Wayne imported its teachers and its monuments: a Henry County painter became its dean, an Ohio potter became its ceramics professor, two Chicago and New York sculptors gave it its general and its Lincoln. It exported its births: Nauman to the world, Ken Scott to Milan, Collias to Boise, Tio to the universities, and it kept their first lines. And it kept, physically, the work of the ones who stayed, which is why the museum's vaults hold over forty Davissons, the Hanna family's portrait by its first professional painter, the Hamilton cousins' charcoals, etchings, and watercolors, and a Fort Wayne native's limestone standing permanently in its atrium.

The rule: The absences in this section are printed absences, not oversights. That is the house rule of this whole record, and the artists, who lived by looking carefully, would presumably have approved of it.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Museum of Art, press release, "The Tale of the Fort Wayne Art School Comes to Life at FWMoA" (14 November 2018) (the painting class of 1888; the museum founded in 1921; the merger of the 1970s and the present Purdue Fort Wayne department).
2. Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, Suzanne Slick, history series (Theodore Thieme's 1921 gift of the Berry Street house and its conditions, the museum made formal and a director appointed).
3. Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, treasures series (the forty-plus Davissons; the Enochs atrium installation), and History Center records (the Rockwell Hanna portrait in the museum's collection).