Tyler Museum of Art Begins Planning for New Facility
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A place where the community and artists converge, the Tyler Museum of Art has been a cultural East Texas mainstay since it opened in 1971. With the 2007 purchase of 13 acres on which to build a much larger structure, the museum promises to continue its role as a prominent Tyler asset.
“The museum has really risen to its challenges as far as being a positive impact for the city,” says Director Kimberley Tomio.
Tomio moved to Tyler in 2000 for a six-month stint at the museum while she and her new husband, Ken, explored art-related career options in larger cities. The couple met in Dallas, where they worked together at the Crow Collection of Asian Art.
Today, he is the TMA’s curator and education department head. “When we got here, we fell so in love with Tyler, and we both got so involved at the art museum,” Kimberley Tomio recalls. “We just think Tyler is our place for the rest of our lives.”
When Tomio arrived on the scene, the museum boasted about 600 pieces of mostly contemporary Texas art, and another 150 pieces of early Texas art from the 19th century through the early 20th century have been added since.
A gift of contemporary photography rounds out the collection.
A promised gift of 400 to 600 pieces of Mexican and Latin American folk art makes construction of the new facility a more urgent need.
“That’s a huge leap for us for the collection,” Tomio says.
The folk-art collection is a 20-year labor of love by Dan and Laura Boeckman of Dallas and is considered one of the nation’s premier collections of modern and contemporary art of its type. It includes carved wooden pieces, ceramics, textiles and clothes, paper maché objects, and even sugar skulls, traditional art from Mexico used to celebrate the Day of the Dead.
“It’s an incredible, comprehensive collection,” Tomio says. “The Boeckmans always felt like they wanted to have this collection stay together and be given in one group to a museum that would preserve it and explain it. Some of these artists have since passed away and some of the family members did not continue the tradition, so these things are ephemeral in many ways.”
Even before the Boeckman largess, museum officials were laying the groundwork for a new facility. After more than two years of study, the museum’s board of directors decided on property at the corner of University Boulevard and Lazy Creek Drive, a heavily wooded parcel that promises a scenic landscape for the 42,000-square-foot museum. While a timetable for construction isn’t set, museum officials already are working with a Dallas architect, Tomio says.
In 2006, the TMA received accreditation from the American Association of Museums, which is a recognition that fewer than 17 percent of all U.S. museums achieve.
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
Photo by Todd Bennett
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