Sara Stewart
WHO SHE IS: Gallery Coordinator for the Arthur Ross Gallery
TIME AT PENN: 6 1/2 years
HER JOB: Stewart reaches out to the community and media to establish relationships and promote shows. She also coordinates the educational outreach program, where an artist-educator develops a program around a show for elementary-aged children. She works on fundraising and even gets together the labels for exhibition pieces.
ART LOVER: Stewart calls herself an art lover and studied art history in school. In her early days at Penn, she took advantage of the tuition benefit to take courses in art history and photography.
MEMORABLE SHOWS: “A lot of my favorites are the photography shows. In particular, Steve McCurry and ‘The Mennonites’ by Larry Towell.” Stewart has a special tie with the spring 2004 exhibit of drawings and etchings from the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. At the time, she was in a seminar studying those pieces, and traveled to England to closely study the drawings. Stewart even wrote essays that were included in the exhibition book.
AN 'IMPORTANT' PLACE: “I think it’s a really important gallery,” she says. “We really try to reach out to all the different departments. ... The shows are always changing. We don’t have a permanent collection. We’re always working on a show in the future.”
For Arthur Ross Gallery hours and information, go to www.upenn.edu/ARG.