Spencer museum taps KU alumna

A national expert in the visual arts with deep roots in Kansas and at KU has been named the new director of KU’s Spencer Museum of Art.

Saralyn Reece Hardy, director of the Salina Art Center and former director of museums and visual arts at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., will begin her new position March 14. She will succeed interim director Fred Pawlicki.

It is a homecoming for Hardy, who earned a bachelor’s degree in integrated arts in 1976 and a master’s degree in American studies in 1994 at KU, and who worked as a project coordinator at the Spencer from 1977 to 1979. The Reece family also has a long relationship with KU dating back to her grandmother Nelle Taylor Dyatt, who graduated in 1909 with the first class of KU nursing students, and includes her parents, her husband, three sisters and three sons.

“ I look forward to being part of the university and the Spencer Museum of Art,” Hardy said. “Engagement with art and artists transforms individuals, communities and societies. I believe this museum and its collections can be a creative connective force across this campus and among diverse disciplines. I am eager to collaborate with the extraordinary ensemble of scholars resident on this campus.”

Except for the three-year appointment at the NEA, from 1999 to 2002, Hardy has led the nationally known Salina Art Center since 1986, overseeing the growth of the center from a small community gallery to a contemporary art center with a national and international exhibition schedule, an education program, a youth art interactive area and a film program.

Hardy received the NEA’s 2001 Distinguished Service Award, the 1995 Kansas Governor’s Art Award for arts advocate and the Women of Achievement award for nonprofit leadership from the Salina YWCA.