Mary Louise Beren

The recent passing of Louise Beren is very sad. My wife and I send our sympathy to her family for their loss. As a former executive director, I must add that she is also a loss to the Wichita Art Museum where she alone and earlier with her husband S.O. Beren a.k.a. “Bud”, made enormous contributions of volunteer hours, works of art, money, and interestingly, “philosophy”. In my closing years at the Museum, Louise was an active Trustee on its governance board, Wichita Art Museum, Inc. Throughout my eleven year tenure and beyond, she and her husband (through their Foundation and other ways) generously supported the Museum financially and especially during the construction of the 2003 new wing & building renovation. Most importantly in some ways, in the late 1970s, before my time at the Museum, she and Bud Beren along with Haig and Rima Kurdian were among the first in Wichita and elsewhere across the country to encourage a re-definition of “American Art” to include art from beyond the borders of the continental U.S. with their gift to the Museum of pre-Columbian Art. This redefinition of the term “American Art” has only come to be generally accepted by the art world in recent years, to wit the publicity around the “art inclusiveness” of the current Whitney Biennial.