July 28, 2004
Leu Art Gallery Gets New Director
Belmont University has selected Victoria Boone as the new director of the Leu Art Gallery. She also will be an adjunct professor in the Department of Art. Boone comes to Belmont from the Watkins College of Art & Design, where she was director of the Community Education and Enrichment Program until the end of 2003. Boone earned a bachelor's in fine art in 1977 from the University of Alabama, where she majored in painting and sculpture, and a Master's of Liberal Studies for Museum Administration in 1990 from the University of Oklahoma.
In addition to working at Watkins, Boone owns and operates Boone Visual Arts, a visual arts consulting firm. She has taught at Watkins College of Art and Design, Austin Peay State University and Middle Tennessee State University, and served as Director of Visual Arts, Crafts and Multi-Media for the Tennessee Arts Commission from October 1984 through May 1997. Her works have been included in a number of regional exhibitions and galleries.
"I am very excited to accept the opportunity to serve Belmont University as the Gallery Director of the Leu Gallery and to teach a course, Business Fundamentals for Artists, Boone said. "A college's reputation is inextricably linked to its students' talents and education. Few art colleges offer a business course as this. The Leu Gallery will become a lab in which the best and brightest students prepare to be savvy artists. It will prepare our students to be practicing artists who are educated in gallery contracts, negotiations, commissions, fellowships, art in public spaces and grants."
Boone says the Leu Gallery under her direction will offer of contemporary, historical, and cutting-edge exhibitions of "local, regional and national merit."
Boone has been a consultant, juror or panelist for the National Assembly of State Art Agencies, the National Endowment for the Arts Urban Design Program, the American Craft Council Conference and the International Ceramic Symposium and has served as a juror for the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Alabama's Festival in the Park, the National Pen Women's Art Competition at the Walton Center for the Arts in Arkansas, the Anderson Art Center's Regional Art Competition in South Carolina and the Capital Arts Alliance in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
In May, 1997, she started Boone Visual Arts, a consulting firm, in Nashville, through which she has helped develop or extend careers for more than a dozen artists. She also has traveled extensively across the Southeast teaching, serving as a juror and designing galleries and programs for museums and art councils.
In the past year, the Leu Art Gallery has hosted several exhibitions including works by various Russian Impressionist painters and the sculptures of noted sculptor Frederick Hart.
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