Campus Dedications

To commemorate a gift from Barbara Manfrey Vogelstein ’76 and her husband John L. Vogelstein, one of the most generous in the college’s history, the Center for Drama and Film has been renamed the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film. The funds will be directed toward the purposes of general construction and renewal across the campus.

Artist Jenny Holzer’s work with text has received recognition all over the world, and is held in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Tate Gallery in London, as well as in the lobby of the new 7 World Trade Center building, where she has installed a 65-foot wall of scrolling text. Now, after a commission from the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Holzer has made a contribution to the Vassar campus.

Her installation is a series of black Laurentian granite benches that line the wooded path from the All Campus Dining Center to Main Building. The seat of each bench is inscribed with lines from the poetry of Pulitzer-Prize winner Elizabeth Bishop ’34.

Kenyon Hall has undergone a $21-million renovation. The building has been upgraded in all of its previous capacities, and new ones have been added. The squash team now has six International Rules courts, new locker rooms, and a new coach’s office. A new volleyball gymnasium is 10,000 square feet, and includes a main court, two practice courts, and bleachers. Where the swimming hall once stood, there is now a fully modern theater for the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre; three dance studios have also been added as rehearsal spaces.

Finally, six “smart classrooms” have been built. The classrooms have two horseshoe-shaped rows of seats, with the second row elevated above the first. Each classroom contains a touch-screen controller on which the professor will be able to manipulate a ceiling-mounted projector, various audio and video components, and a computer. The classrooms are also wired so that each student can connect to the Internet on a laptop.

Though a short man, it appears that Matthew Vassar’s ego was a size commensurate with his endowment to the college. After naming Vassar after himself, he publicized its opening by commissioning a trustee, Benson Lossing, to write his biography. Vassar also commissioned the portrait that now hangs in the lobby of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. But Vassar’s proclivity for self-promotion did not stop there.

In 1868 he asked the Board of Trustees to build a statue of himself that would have stood in Main Circle. The Board tabled Vassar’s motion over and over again until it was all but forgotten.

Forgotten, but not lost, because recently a model of a prospective statue (called a maquette) of Vassar made by area sculptor Laura Hoffman in the 19th century was found in the basement of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Joanne Potter, registrar and collections manager of the center, became aware of the mock-up, and she enlisted College Historian Elizabeth Adams Daniels ’41 to help her research its mysterious presence. When Frances Fergusson heard of Potter’s and Daniels’ work, she asked the class of ’69 to help fund the statue and realize the outsized ambitions of our founder.

Finally, on June 9, some 139 years after Vassar’s initial request, a bronze caste by Beacon, New York, sculptor David Frech—based on the Laura Hoffman original—went up on the lawn in front of the south side of Main Building.