Images testify in Norman
BY RICK ROGERS
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Published: November 2, 2009
NORMAN — Carol Beesley, emeritus professor of art at the University of Oklahoma, recently donated a collection of photos to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. An exhibit titled "The Creative Eye: Selections From the Carol Beesley Collection of Photographs, in Honor of Michael Hennagin" will open with a 7 to 9 p.m. reception Friday.
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"The Creative Eye: Selections From the Carol Beesley Collection of Photographs, in Honor of Michael Hennagin"
"Photography is an important medium to which students and all generations can relate," museum director Ghislain d'Humieres said. "The museum, President (David) Boren and the university as a whole are grateful to Mrs. Beesley for this opportunity to grow our collection of photography. Her gift furthers our mission to provide excellent photography to our visitors, a mission which will culminate with a new gallery specifically for photography as part of our current construction project."
Beesley taught drawing and painting at OU from 1973 until her retirement in 1997. She continues to teach classes in OU's Summer in Santa Fe program and will be offering courses on the history of photography in the art department in fall 2010.
Beginning with her days as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studied with the late Robert Heinecken in the early 1970s, and continuing with her turn to serious collecting in the 1980s, she has zealously pursued her love of photography.
"These are all images I have loved and cherished and for which I think of myself as only a caretaker," Beesley said in a printed release. The collection is dedicated to her late husband, Michael Hennagin (1936-93), a composer and music professor at OU.
More than a dozen of the 100 donated images were selected for the museum's current display, which will remain on view through Jan. 3. Included in the collection are Laura Gilpin's portrait of painter Georgia O'Keeffe and Mary Ellen Mark's striking image of Mother Teresa. Other photographers represented in the collection are Edward Weston, Paul Caponigro, Laura Gilpin and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
"I've never really been terribly concerned with whether or not I'm acquiring a work by a famous photographer," Beesley said. "I've always been much more interested in whether or not it was a good photograph. The camera augments our experience of the world, and what we see is not more true, but we see it more clearly, more deeply, more precisely. And if you look hard enough, you can find your own truths in that experience of the photograph."
In addition to collecting photography and teaching art, Beesley is an accomplished painter. She recently completed a series of four panels depicting the landscape through the four seasons around Quartz Mountain in southwestern Oklahoma. Commissioned for the new Schusterman Learning Center at OU-Tulsa, the series will be unveiled at 6 p.m. Thursday.
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