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By Julie Rausch

David Dinell

Anna Castillo, education curator with the Ulrich museum, left, Wanda Hughes, office specialist, College of Education, and Mike McMillen, electrical shop supervisor, Physical Plant, check out the latest addition to the Martin H. Bush Outdoor Sculpture Collection after it was installed Nov. 11. "Münster Benches of 1986" was dedicated Nov. 17 as the kickoff event to the Ulrich Museum’s 25th anniversary celebrations. The sculpture is located on the south lawn of the Corbin Education Center.

If the names Ulrich and Bush seem familiar they should. They are two namesakes associated with the art of WSU.

The Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art — with its 7,500-object permanent collection, a series of eclectic traveling exhibitions each year and the 65-piece outdoor sculpture collection — has undergone extraordinary development in 25 years.

The Ulrich Museum, named for a retired New York businessman, art collector and university benefactor, was built as part of WSU’s McKnight Art Center and dedicated in December 1974.

Ulrich made occasional visits to WSU. During an interview for the WSU Parnassus yearbook, he said, "Whenever I am here I feel as if I am part of the university."

The Martin H. Bush Outdoor Sculpture Collection, named for the museum’s founding director, was established in 1972 with the first sculpture Chaim Gross’s "Happy Mother" (1958). Bush was vice president for academic resource development and museum director during the ’70s and ’80s.

Through his longstanding friendship with Bush, Ulrich decided to give WSU 300 works by noted marine painter Frederick Judd Waugh. Ulrich had begun collecting Waugh paintings following retirement from his New York-based oil distribution company. Ulrich died at age 97 in June 1995 at his Hyde Park, N.Y., home.

The opening celebration for "25 Years of Collecting: Celebrating Classic and Contemporary Art" was the Nov. 17 dedication of the "Münster Benches" by Scott Burton on the south lawn of the Corbin Education Center. There will be several anniversary-related events through May.

The opening for the "25 Years of Collecting" exhibition will be 1-4 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 4, with a family day filled with live music, arts and crafts, a holiday gift sale, Stubbles the Clown, storytelling and refreshments.

Mark White, curator of exhibitions, said selecting works from the permanent collection wasn’t easy.

"I wanted to maintain a balance between historically significant and the aesthetically important works," said White. As a result, viewers will see both new Frederick and Samuel Waugh acquisitions as well as some that were given to the Endowment Association by Ulrich 25 years ago.

There will be Buckminster-Fuller prints of the "Dymaxion House," which has local significance as a round, prefabricated house constructed in the early days of Wichita.

The exhibition also will feature the first work of art accepted into the collection, the 1931 painting "Administration Building" by Clayton Staples, which depicts Jardine Hall. Staples was a longtime art professor at WSU.

From abstracts to realism to retrospectives and from pop art to portraits, the Ulrich Museum has enjoyed an active, educational and avant-garde history the last quarter of a century.

Exhibitions have included art covered in cheese puffs, life-sized human sculptures, a neon exhibition, women’s shoes arranged behind stretched cow bladders, and the recent retrospective of the works of Kansas native Gordon Parks, which attracted 14,500 visitors in 11 weeks.

In addition to visiting art shows, the considerable combined talents of WSU’s art and design faculty have been featured 12 times since 1975 during the "Faculty Biennial" exhibition showing a wide range of media and styles.

The museum has had its challenges. From time to time sculptures have been vandalized or even taken. The most recent piece, which was torn from its pedestal, was a 4-foot-6-inch tall sculpture "Standing Woman" by Doris Caesar. It was returned after a few days.

Other sculptures are damaged by natural elements.

"Night Tree" (1971) by Louise Nevelson had rust damage. Resourceful WSU engineering students in 1998 helped restore the steel work, in part, by using an application commonly used on underground piping systems.

Education curator Anna Castillo said she is proud of the way the campus community takes care of the sculptures. She said they get phone calls whenever someone believes a sculpture is not being treated properly by such acts as hanging posters on them.

"When we rotate a sculpture to another location, people will call to inquire whether ‘their’ sculpture has been stolen," Castillo said. "People get very attached to the sculptures."

In 1994, a museum renovation began that lasted more than a year and cost about $1.5 million. Much of the funding came from private donations; the rest came from WSU’s mill levy funds and the Board of Regents.

Among the improvements, two galleries were added and existing galleries were refurbished. New lighting and security systems were installed.

The renovation also created a ground-level plaza entrance underneath the museum’s signature piece, Joan Miró’s "Personnages Oiseaux," the glass and marble mosaic installed in 1977.

The sculpture plaza features a water wall commissioned from artist Jesus Moroles.

At the 1996 dedication for the museum reopening, former President Gene Hughes said, "The American university is becoming as much a patron of the arts as the church was during the Renaissance."

The original museum collections had beginnings in the 1920s. Elizabeth Sprague, who developed the art department at Fairmount College, donated some works. Staples also made significant contributions to the collection. A fire that destroyed the Morrison Library in the 1960s claimed some of those early works.

At any given time there are public tours going through the museum or taking a walking tour of the outdoor sculpture collection. About 200 formal tours are given annually by museum staff, but hundreds more people take their own tours.

The Ulrich Museum holds many public events in addition to its free public exhibitions, in which people have the opportunity to be surrounded by art.

"WSU has an obligation to give its students a sense of the major accomplishments in world art if it is to provide a truly ‘universal’ education," said Bush in a previously published interview.

"This will enable students to learn the language of art and develop discriminating tastes to enrich their knowledge of our cultural heritage through the heritage of others and to heighten their perception of the world in which we live."