The Morris–Raclin line: three generations of giving

1948 – 2024 · one family's patronage across the whole system

The Indiana Room: The best-documented patronage line in the city's arts runs through a single family across three generations and touches nearly every part of the system. It opens in March 1948, when Mr. and Mrs. E. M. Morris — Ernest M. and Ella L. Morris — sponsored the Indiana Room at the young South Bend Art Center, a gallery reserved for Hoosier artists, and donated the collection's first six artworks, in their words, to encourage the art and artists of Indiana. Four years later the same couple's gift built the Morris Inn on the Notre Dame campus, opened in 1952. In 1959 Ella Morris performed the single most consequential act of private rescue in the city's arts history: when the Palace Theatre's board voted to demolish the building, she bought it herself and sold it to the city for one dollar. The theater's own record stands in Theaters and Famous Locations; the act belongs here, because it was patronage in its purest form — a private citizen spending her own money so that a public room would survive.

The second and third generations: Ernestine Morris Carmichael Raclin, the Morrises' daughter, carried the line into the next century. A South Bend native, a Notre Dame trustee — Trustee Emerita from 1998 and a Hesburgh Trustee from 2019 — and a collector of French, Italian and British painting, she made gifts of European paintings to the university's museum across her life; in 2011 she, the Carmichael Foundation and her family made the lead gift for the renovation of the Morris Inn, the hotel her parents' gift had built; and in 2017 she announced, with her daughter Carmi Murphy and son-in-law Christopher Murphy, the lead gift for a new university art museum. The Raclin Murphy Museum of Art — 70,000 square feet, built at a cost of 66 million dollars — opened at the south edge of the Notre Dame campus in late November and December 2023; the building and its collection stand in Museums, and the gift stands here as the largest single act of arts patronage in the region's documented record. Her giving crossed the city as well as the campus: Indiana University South Bend's school of the arts bears her name, the Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts, and she was a founding member of the public television station WNIT. She died in South Bend on July 13, 2023, at ninety-five, months before the museum opened; in 2024 her estate's bequest of paintings, sculpture and decorative art — fifteenth- to early-twentieth-century works, strongest in the eighteenth century — came to the museum that carries her name, as the cornerstone gift of its 150-for-150 sesquicentennial collecting campaign.

Sources:

1. South Bend Museum of Art, "About" and "Becoming SBMA" (southbendart.org) — the March 1948 Indiana Room, sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. E. M. Morris, and their gift of the collection's first six artworks.
2. Morris Performing Arts Center, "Morris 100" history (morris100.org) and the Clio entry for the theatre — Ella Morris's 1959 purchase of the Palace and its resale to the city for one dollar.
3. University of Notre Dame, "In memoriam: Notre Dame Hesburgh Trustee Ernestine Raclin" (news.nd.edu, July 14, 2023) — her trusteeships, the 2017 museum gift with Carmen and Chris Murphy, the IUSB school bearing her name, her founding membership of WNIT, and her death on July 13, 2023.
4. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, "The Raclin Murphy Family" (raclinmurphymuseum.nd.edu) — the lead gift, the museum's 70,000 square feet and 66 million dollar cost, its place in the campus arts district, and the Snite Museum's 1980 opening on Fred B. Snite Sr.'s two million dollar gift.
5. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, estate announcement (2024) — the Raclin Bequest's scope and its place in the 150-for-150 campaign.