Maurice Burrison W’32, says than when he first got the idea of mounting an art exhibition on the ground floor of the Faculty Club back in 1978, he got some advice from Fred Shabel, then Penn’s vice president for operational services. “He said, ‘Don’t do it just once,'” recalls Burrison. “‘If you start it, keep it up.'”
As
the modest sampling here indicates, there have been a lot of highlights
over the years — this month, for example, is a father-and-son show
featuring the “abstract figurative” paintings of Dr. Samuel Yankell, DH’81, research professor of periodontics, and Stuart Yankell, FA’85, GFA’88
— and Burrison admits to a few sentimental favorites during his
nineteen-year tenure as curator. One was called “Patterns of
Creativity,” which combined casual illustrations of physics formulas by
the late Dr. Henry Primakoff, professor of physics, with the “strange
and artistic” musical scores of Dr. George Crumb, the Annenberg
Professor of Music.
“Offbeat
subjects always appealed to me,” says the beady-eyed Burrison. “I’m not
interested in just the conventional art shows. The screwiest one I ever
did brought me a lot of flack from some members of the faculty. It was a
re-creation of a diner put together by students of the Miquon School.
They recreated in cardboard an actual full-scale corner of a diner, with
stools and a counter and all kinds of artificial food. It was all done
in fun, but it took up so much room that some of the faculty who liked
to take an afternoon snooze in the lounge got annoyed.”
Burrison, whose family had a commercial art gallery in Center City Philadelphia, says he derives an odd kind of satisfaction from displaying “things I couldn’t do myself,” adding: “I don’t know what psychologists call it — ‘transference,’ ‘sublimation,’ or whatever — but it makes up for my own lack of [artistic ability]. One of the missions I have to this University is to raise the consciousness of people on this campus to the art around them.”
