Caretaker of 9,000 works of art

Growing up in Northeast Philadelphia, Lynn Smith Dolby had no idea that looking around church during mass would lead her to where she is today. “I remember being so distracted by the stained-glass windows and all of the artwork,” she says.

As a Diocesan Scholar at Chestnut Hill College while a senior at Little Flower High School, she took her first art history class. “It totally blew my mind. I was taking an art history survey and looking at all of this medieval art and it reminded me of what I loved about being in church,” she says. “I realized, this is a career.”

This year Dolby took on the new title of director of the Penn Art Collection, becoming the steward of nearly 9,000 artworks acquired during the past 250 years through donations. Diverse in scope, the collection includes painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, and decorative arts. “We’ve got some really important artworks here,” she says. “The collection is filled with significant works from well-known artists.”

Dolby manages the conservation, registration, and display of all University-owned art, both indoors and outdoors across campus. She takes care of all the collection’s needs, making sure artworks are properly catalogued, insured, stored, framed, and installed, she says, “keeping track of the life of the objects.” She also manages the sharing of the artworks through tours, exhibitions, and a campus loan program. And she makes the collection available to Penn students and faculty through academic coursework.

“Stewarding cultural property is one of the most important things that we can do,” Dolby says. “It connects us with our past.”

Finding a career in art

The first in her working-class family to go to college, Dolby says she fielded many questions when she decided on an art history major at Chestnut Hill College. But she kept at it, starting as an intern at the Germantown Historical Society and the Wyck Historic House and Garden in Philadelphia and then at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the conservation department.

At the museum she was part of a specialized cleaning crew that attended to the artworks, like dusting the frames and tops of sculptures. Once she climbed scaffolding to clean the terracotta tiles on the roof of the Japanese tea house. She also helped with the arms and armor collection, working with a conservator to clean corrosion from breastplates and swords and helmets. It was solitary work, sitting in a lab, wearing a respirator, working on an area three inches square that would take all day.

“That’s when I realized that I wanted to continue working in the field, but conservation wasn’t for me. It felt a little too isolated,” she says, so she decided to go to graduate school.

She earned a master’s degree in art history at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, going on to a job at the National Constitution Center exhibits department working with American artifacts and ephemera. Then it was the Atelier Fine Art Services; the first project she worked on was the move of the Barnes Foundation museum to Philadelphia from suburban Merion.

Through Atelier she met Lynn Marsden-Atlass, curator of the Penn Art Collection and executive director of the Arthur Ross Gallery, and “jumped at the chance” when there was a staff opening. Dolby started in 2017 as collections manager and became registrar, assistant curator, and interim curator, before taking up her current position after Marsden-Atlass retired.

The Gallery, established in 1983, was conceived as a space to showcase the University’s art collection, says Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Gallery faculty director, and Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Professor of History of Art. “We continue to partner with the collection on programs and installations because Lynn Dolby makes these collaborations exciting, excellent, and innovative,” Shaw says. “She is so much fun to work with, always up for a challenge and an adventure; always ready to help faculty and students to learn more about Penn’s history through the objects it owns; and eager to share these resources with the broader community.”

Managing the artworks

The Art Collection office and on-site storage is in a building on Market Street, in the same suite at the University Archives and Records Center. In the storage area are thousands of pieces, mostly works on paper, including photography portfolios, hundreds of images in flat files, separated by acid-free archival materials. Everything is labeled and numbered and catalogued by location, organized by size. Some framed artworks hang on metal grids. Other works are in offsite storage; a survey of those facilities and an inventory is underway.

And many works are on view in public spaces and in private offices. “As you walk around campus and see artwork hung on walls, it’s probably something from our collection,” Dolby says.

She manages an art loan program for faculty and staff. Typically, Dolby says, she’ll receive an email inquiry and then will share a password-protected website that shows artworks available for loan.

“I work with people individually to figure out what their style is and what they’d like to see on their walls, and then I’ll look to see if there are pieces available,” Dolby says. “That’s really fun, being able to connect people with the collection in a really personal way. I just really love seeing how happy people are when I show up with artwork for their office.”

Dolby says she want to consider ways to make pieces more accessible to student.

Penn classes—history of art, photography, fine arts—come to view pieces she pulls together a few times each semester. “To be able to look at these bodies of works together I think is really important for students,” Dolby says.

Exhibitions and tours

One of Dolby’s new efforts is to identify more locations for exhibitions of works from the collection, she says. A fifth-floor alcove in the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center has become a new space for rotating exhibitions of photography, first Civil Rights photos by Bruce Davidson, and now boxing photos by Larry Fink. And there is a new exhibition in the lobby of Penn Live Arts, “We are Nature.”

The Arthur Ross Gallery continues to feature Penn’s artworks in its exhibitions. Dolby was the lead curator of “From Studio to Doorstep: Associated American Artists Prints 1934-2000” in 2022. In another collaboration, Emily Zimmerman, the Gallery’s director of exhibitions and curatorial affairs, partnered with Dolby to create the podcast Big Art Energy to spotlight the stories of art at Penn, and they are planning future episodes.

Dolby gives art tours at Homecoming and during Alumni Weekend which include the dozen sculptures in and around College Green. She also gives custom art tours, like for Penn staff retreats. Now in her first semester as a master’s student at Penn Carey Law, Dolby, recently conducted a tour, Sandwiches and Sculptures, for her class at lunchtime.

“We talked about the different legal challenges that come about with outdoor sculptures, like whether we can relocate them according to what we agreed to, so contract law,” she says. “I’m interested in focusing on the intersection of art and the law, especially as it relates to intellectual property and copyright issues. That comes up a lot in my work.”

Finding a favorite

While she loves many of Penn’s artworks, she says her favorite is “Pan with Sundial,” a “quiet little sculpture,” made in 1938 by Beatrice Fenton, located in front of the library. It was donated in memory of Penn alum William Stansfield by his widow. The sundial has a quote, “Such harmony is in immortal souls” by William Shakespeare.

“I just love this sense of the passing of time and how artworks are brought into the collection when someone has this relationship with the University and has passed on. But then this part lives on,” Dolby says. “The students still have that connection with the University through the artworks that they donate.”