Art has a special value at College of the Atlantic. The college studies the relationships between humans and the environment, the interactions of the natural world, the social and cultural worlds, and the worlds of creation and imagination. At College of the Atlantic, art is not a special course of study oriented to a few and imposed on many; it is a fundamental element of our educational philosophy and our lives. The creation of the Allan Stone Chair underscores our belief that the creative is essential to understanding, and is an endless source of insight and joy.

ABOUT ALLAN STONE (1932 - 2006): A warm, passionate, funny man with an unerring eye, Allan Stone embodied the ideas of a fully integrated approach to collecting, education and life.

Allan went to law school at Boston University but even as an undergraduate at Harvard, his passion was art. He bought his first work for $250 - a de Kooning sketch called "Pink Angels" during his (sophomore) year at Harvard - a purchase that cost him his father's financial support for some time.

In the late 50's while working as an attorney, he became active in the art world - first, by dispensing free legal advice to artists. He then became friendly with Ivan Karp, director of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Mr. Stone became part of Karp's and Gil Shapiro's Anonymous Art Reclamation Society, which staged middle-of-the-night raids on demolition sites, "liberating" sculptures, balustrades and other decorative pieces from the dump heap.

In The Collector, a documentary by his daughter Olympia Stone, Allan said of the art business, "I couldn't say that I intellectually decided to go into it. I sort of got sucked into it, sort of the way a junkie gets sucked into a heroin parlor."

He became an expert on the Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Eva Hesse, among others. His gallery was known for staging exhibitions of emerging artists, often accompanied by catalogs with personal reminiscences and unusual insights Allan wrote himself.

Exhuberant, irreverant, down to earth, Allan never saw works of art as commodities, but rather as lovely, evocative mysteries. His legendary collecting invaded his life and home - literally: every inch of the gallery, his office, and his and his wife, Clare's, home was crammed with priceless paintings by Thiebaud, Kline, Estes as well as African masks, cigar store Indians, fetishes, and totems.

The Allan Stone Gallery continues to be committed to showing a broad range of work across many disciplines and media. According to Claudia Stone who now operates her father's gallery: The unifying theme of all the work shown is a profound formal soundness and the achievement of an aesthetic level of excellence.

EXPECTATIONS OF THE CHAIR. COA seeks to honor the legacy of Allan Stone by establishing the Allan Stone Chair in the Visual Arts. The Stone Chair will be filled by incumbents who have demonstrated in their work as teachers and artists the understanding of the centrality of art to the sustainable relationship among humans and the worlds they inhabit. It will emphasize a background in the history of art within a broad multicultural and interdisciplinary context. The appointed chair will be a an art historian with a studio practice, an established body of work, and have a track record of teaching excellence.

Teaching responsibilities include a sequence of art history courses, contemporary art, visual analysis/visual studies, the history of culture/ideas, and studio arts courses in one or more of the following: painting, drawing, photography/multimedia or sculpture. This position entails teaching five undergraduate courses a year, overseeing independent studies, and supervising senior projects.

The successful candidate will be expected to provide academic leadership and play a central role in defining the future direction of art history within the college's curriculum, and offer courses that connect to other areas of our interdisciplinary curriculum.

This position includes the responsibility for academic coordination of the Blum Gallery during the academic year.

The Stone Chair will be nominated by the academic deans and a subcommittee of the faculty for appointment by the president.

Strategy and Timeline

The Allan Stone Chair in the Visual Arts represents one component of the college's strategy to strengthen the academic program and financial base through endowed faculty positions. Since 1997, the college has successfully established eight faculty chairs:

• The Steven K. Katona Chair in Marine Studies
• The William H. Drury, Jr. Chair in Evolution, Ecology and Natural History
• The Charles Eliot Chair in Ecological Planning, Policy and Design
• The Elizabeth Battles Newlin Chair in Botany
• The Sharpe-McNally Chair in Green and Socially Responsible Business
• The James Russell Wiggins Chair in Government and Polity
• The Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology
• The Sustainable Food Systems Chair
  

The establishment of the Allan Stone Chair in the Visual Arts will further increase the capacity of COA's endowment to support the academic program in perpetuity. The Stone Chair will provide budgetary relief to the College's annual salary expense.