Hutchins Galleries History

One of the lesser known features of The Lawrenceville campus is the Hutchins Galleries. Perhaps, as one of the many parts of campus named after the Hutchins family, it has faded into obscurity in the eyes of many Lawrentians. However, its purpose to celebrate campus and local artists should not be disregarded, and its history is quite interesting.

The galleries program was created with the generous donation of the Hutchins Family Foundation Center and Glenn H. Hutchins ’73 in honor of his parents, Marguerite and James Hutchins, who passed away in 2016 and 2002 respectively. When constructed, the Hutchins Galleries took over the space the John Dixon Library had once occupied., The only areas preserved were the Rotunda and the Carpenter Wing, which contained the majority of books and research materials available to students up until 1996. The John Dixon Library, which was built in 1934, quickly reached its storage capacity in the early 1990s due to the expansion of the student population with the admission of female students in 1988, and an increase of student-driven research with  the new teaching methods in the late 1980s. Thus, the Lawrenceville Board of Trustees decided to construct an entirely new building, the Bunn Library, in 1996 to replace the Dixon Library, allowing for the previous library’s space to be occupied by the incoming arts facilities.  

The Hutchins Galleries subsequently opened in the fall of 1998 along with the Gruss Center for Visual Arts and Design (GCAD), primarily aiming to expand the visual arts department. Prior to the construction of GCAD and the Galleries, the visual arts department had been located in the back of the Kirby Arts Center, and faculty instructors’ studio offices had been located in the basement of Fathers Building, making both teaching and learning the arts difficult to coordinate. When GCAD was built, the space combined the original John Dixon Library building with a new building space that contained art studios, which was thereafter tacked onto the end of the Carpenter Wing, creating one large makerspace that housed the entire visual arts department. According to former Master of Art History Penny Foss, the inclusion of the Hutchins Galleries principally functioned to “get people — students above all—involved in curatorial work and partly to make the space itself a great tool for teaching.” 

Glenn Hutchins ’73, a trustee of the Lawrenceville School, founded the Hutchins Foundation along with his wife. Through the foundation,  they previously supported the construction of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at The Brookings Institution, and the Hutchins Center for Social Justice at Lawrenceville. Glenn Hutchins’s mother, Marguerite, expressed the importance of giving back to one’s roots in a 2015 interview for the Southern Oral History Program, stating that her family was “taught to be honest, and work hard, and appreciate others, and help the community.” Thus, the Hutchins Galleries were created with the same principles in mind, passed down through generations of the Hutchins family. 

Now, the galleries’ current goal, according to their page on Lawrenceville’s website, is to build art, reflection, and awareness in the Lawrenceville community. In carrying this goal out, Hutchins Galleries Director and Curator Melina Guarino organizes multiple exhibits throughout the year, putting the work of local artists on display for the community. In the words of Guarino, “as the museum world is moving toward shared authority and shared ownership, there are so many more opportunities in museums when audiences get to have their part.” The first-ever exhibit in the Hutchins Galleries, named “The Power of Story” was curated by Bunn Library Outreach Librarian Laura Cunningham and featured approximately 50 pieces, ranging from books to manuscript pages. In a statement by Cunningham, the extensive collection of the Hutchins Galleries allowed her to choose from many different works specific to what she wished to convey in the exhibit, which primarily was to showcase the impacts of storytelling within the Lawrenceville community. 

In the most recent of these exhibits, the work of artist Susan Hoenig was on display. Her art exhibit, a mixture of paintings, forest compositions, leaf sculptures, cross sections of trees, and wildlife reliefs, entitled “Rhythms of the Land,” was on display this December and January. It has since been replaced by the Hutchins Galleries’s annual Student Exhibition, featuring the recreational and class work of Lawrentians and faculty. 

Beyond the rotating exhibits, the Hutchins Galleries also hosts exhibitions curated by students and faculty from the organization’s extensive permanent collection. Made up of over 700 works, this collection includes photography, sculpture, paintings, works on paper, ancient artifacts and textiles. Some pieces are even the work of Lawrenceville alumni who might have gone through the same foundations classes current Lawrentians take. 

Regardless of what is being exhibited at the moment, a quick walk through the galleries is always a good use of a moment of free time both for artists and other curious Lawrentians. And even if you don’t have a desire to look through Lawrenceville’s collection, or design an exhibit of your own, you should at least stop by for Gallery openings. After all, the cookies there each time aren’t going to eat themselves!