De Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park - History

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:

    Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.
    Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)

    For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)