Katherine Solender's Mission: Art for All Acting AMAM Director Wants to Increase Museum's Campus Connections by Anne C. Paine | photos by John Seyfried April 21, 2003 Katie Solender must truly love her alma mater. She just keeps coming back. It makes you wonder why. In the 26 years since she first left campus—she's a Class of 1977 graduate in art history—she's returned to Oberlin numerous times to work on committees related to the Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) and the current capital campaign. In her most recent comeback in February, she finally became an employee, joining the AMAM staff as acting director. "This is a kind of homecoming for me," Solender says. "This is where I first learned about art history as a discipline and about what the museum experience can do for people." After graduating from Oberlin, Solender earned the MA degree in art history from Johns Hopkins University and went on to a 23-year career of increasingly responsible positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her approach to art is succinctly stated by the motto inscribed on the AMAM's facade—"The cause of art is the cause of the people"—taken from "Art and Socialism," an 1884 essay by William Morris, a British craftsman, designer, writer, and typographer. "That quote has always resonated for me," Solender says. "William Morris was concerned that with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, art had become something only for the elite. In our time, people have tended to think of museums as sacred, special places, and they are. Yet we have to guard against being so removed from the world that we William Morris' bold statement, inscribed on the museum facade, "has always resonated for me," says Solender.   neglect our responsibility to society. We don't just do this for ourselves. The idea is to inspire, instruct, and excite anyone who wants to come in. It's important that we respect people and have concern for their needs." In addition to bringing a decidedly unpretentious attitude about art to the job, Solender carries a quiet sense of mirth that seems always to be bubbling just below the surface. She's quick to show visitors her College I.D. collage—a photocopy of her current employee I.D. card lined up with the four I.D. cards from her undergraduate years, in which she sports a head of wildly curly, long brown locks. When asked about interests other than art, she mentions fiction, describing herself as a "avid reader" of novels both on her own and as a member of a book group. She also says she studies piano, then laughs and quickly adds, "I practice piano the way you brush your teeth before you go to the dentist. I practice just before my lesson." Solender grew up in Dallas and attended public schools there. Her interest in art was sparked by a high school art-appreciation course. "The teacher introduced us to looking at and thinking about art. That experience literally changed the way I thought about the world," she says. At Oberlin, she was in the lucky generation that studied with the legendary Professor Ellen Johnson. "I took several classes with Ellen," Solender says. "Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. And a fabulous course named Art Now. It was a six-week course, as I recall. Every week, Ellen went to New York, went to galleries, and took pictures. Then she came back and showed us the slides. I've never been as current in my knowledge of contemporary art as I was during those six weeks." Johnson was a major influence on Solender's approach to art. "In that course, she was so open to everything. She presented art without judgment, letting students form their own ideas and opinions. She helped me to be very wide-ranging in my own interests, so that now, when someone asks me, 'Who's your favorite artist?' I can't answer. I may not always want to have a piece in my living room, but on some level, I can appreciate everything." The mother of two children—her son is 15 and her daughter is 12—Solender was one of the first professional staff members at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) to be a working mother. "I felt like a pioneer, which seemed ridiculous because it was 1988," she says. During her tenure at the CMA, Solender organized several exhibitions, including Dreadful Fire! Burning of the Houses of Parliament, The American Way in Sculpture 1890-1930, American Arts and Crafts 1890-1920, The Camera, and "Real Life": Genre Prints by Winslow Homer and George Bellows. In the mid-1990s Solender was tapped to create the CMA's exhibitions department. In her new position, she was responsible for scheduling, budgeting, and coordinating the museum's special exhibitions and gallery installations—some 25 projects annually—work that allowed her to perfect her managerial and administrative skills. She was promoted to exhibitions manager in 2000 and to exhibitions director in 2001. The bulk of her career at CMA, however, was in the education department, an area that Solender believes is essential to making art "the cause of the people." "Art is a doorway into understanding the past and the present, a way to connect with ideas and people in other times and places. It's a way to make connections across the continuum of human experience," Solender says. "At Oberlin, the disciplines are so interrelated," she continues. "I was encouraged by my art history professors to take religion classes and physics classes—I took the most basic physics course offered, don't get me wrong! But I hope that professors today in disciplines other than art encourage this same kind of inquiry the other way. My husband was a chemistry major, and he says he benefited from taking a course with Ellen Johnson." (Incidentally, Solender's husband—William Katzin '74, a pathologist at Cleveland's Deaconess Hospital—is one of eight other Oberlinians in the Solender-Katzin clan.) In December 2001, after more than two decades at the CMA, Solender decided to move on. "I'd spent most of my working life at the CMA, and though I truly loved working there, I thought, 'There's another world out there. I'd like to find another context in which to use my skills.' I'd literally grown up at the CMA, and I needed to find out what would happen if I left the nest," she says. She took on several freelance writing and editing jobs, and in early 2003, when AMAM Director Sharon Patton announced that she'd taken a position at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Solender answered yet another call from Oberlin, filling in as acting director. Her administrative mission at the museum is to prepare the way for a new director. Her personal mission, however, is to make sure that everyone on campus knows they're welcome at the AMAM. "Those of us who enter this field do so almost as a calling, because it's been so life-enhancing for us," she says. "So the question becomes, how do we make it life-enhancing for others?" From her elegant office, she looks out the window at Lorain Street. "I think about the passage of time, and about Oberlin students, quite often. Every day, I'm reminded of where I came from," she says reflectively. And then comes the irrepressible mirth. "See that house across the street, with the red sign out front? I lived there in my junior and senior years." She becomes serious again, talking about current students. "If there's any advice I'd give them, it would be 'don't burn your bridges.' If you feel like you've had a worthwhile experience here, don't let go of it, because it will continue to benefit you for the rest of your life." That's why Katie Solender keeps coming back to Oberlin.