>newground
Conservator Margaret Contompasis with students
Gayl and Beverly Doster knew they wanted to make a major philanthropic gift. They did not know yet what the gift would be, but they wanted it to have both immediate and long lasting impact. Then the couple met IU Art Museum Director Heidi Gealt.
Now the Dosters are making a monumental difference at the IU Art Museum. Soon after meeting Director Gealt, IU alumnus Gayl and Beverly decided to endow a conservator of paintings at the museum. It is a position that the Dosters believe forms the bedrock of every great museum.
Margaret Contompasis, the museum's conservator, is the first Gayl W. and Beverly Doster Conservator of Paintings. In addition to preserving the museum's artwork, Contompasis, who is nationally recognized in her field, will teach conservation techniques to IU students from the Department of Chemistry and School of Fine Arts. Her work will also extend to caring for artworks at every IU campus and consulting for museums across the country.
"With this new gift to IU," says Gealt, "the Dosters have raised the bar nationally in an area in which individual donors are rare." For the Dosters, though, the impact and importance of this gift, for the present and the future, is as visible as the artwork it serves to restore.
But the Dosters' gift to the museum is not their first to IU. They have already established two scholarships. One of them, in the IU Jacobs School of Music, supports a baritone player in the Marching Hundred. Gayl played this instrument himself when he marched with the band as an undergraduate. The other scholarship assists students in the Kelley School of Business, where Gayl earned his degree in accounting. The Dosters have also given to IU Athletics for decades.
The Dosters' involvement in the arts is longstanding, too. Gayl's focus is on music. Beverly's had been evolving since the art history course she took at the Rhode Island School of Design, when the couple lived near Providence in East Greenwich. There she participated in a program that brought art to the public schools, volunteered as a docent in the museum, and traveled widely with her husband to see the world's great museums. When the couple moved back to Indianapolis, she became a docent at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
"If you don't have conservation," says Gayl, "you don't have a museum."
Liz Rosdeitcher
Visit the IU Art Museum at www.indiana.edu/~iuam.