History
Julian de Cordova, a Boston businessman, had a personal collection of visual arts that he often opened to the public. He donated his property to the town of Lincoln in 1930 with the condition that it become a public museum of art after his death. De Cordova died in 1945. The trustees he appointed determined that the museum should focus on living regional artists and art education, and it established the DeCordova and Dana Museum and Park in 1948. It opened to the public in 1950. The founding director of the museum was Frederick P. Walkey, whose innovative concepts for a regional museum of living art combined with art festivals, camps, and classes helped establish a new model for small regional museums in the United States. It was popularly known as the DeCordova Museum, and it officially changed its name to the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in 2009.
Read more about this topic: De Cordova Museum And Sculpture Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)