Board News At its meetings during the weekend of October 20, Mount Holyoke’s board of trustees voted in unanimous support of the Academic Affairs Committee’s recommendation that Lilian Hsu, professor of biochemistry, be awarded the new Elizabeth Page Greenawalt Chair in Physical Sciences. Consultant architect Jennifer Jones of Carol R. Johnson Associates, Inc. met with the board’s Master Planning Committee to review site drawings and preliminary landscape master-planning goals. The board also met with architect Will Spears of Miller Dyer Spears and then unanimously endorsed the continuation of planning to renovate Blanchard Campus Center.

Lyon on Loan In February, the call came from Beacon Hill. Now it has been answered. As of this week an 1844 portrait of Mary Lyon, part of the collection of the College’s art museum, is hanging in the governor’s executive offices in the Massachusetts State House. Painted by South Hadley artist Joseph Goodhue Chandler, the portrait will be the only painting representing a distinguished woman from the Commonwealth among the portraits hung in the executive suite. According to a February letter from the governor’s office, “Governor Cellucci has long expressed a desire to display, among the other works of art hanging in his office, a portrait of a prominent Massachusetts woman. Mary Lyon, founder of Mount Holyoke College and early champion of education for women, is precisely the type of historical figure the governor hopes to showcase.” The loan comes at a fitting time for MHC’s art museum, which is now closed for expansion and renovation. Although the image of Mount Holyoke’s founder was so well known in the early nineteenth century that her image was represented on popular rag dolls, the College possesses only one oil portrait of the educational pioneer.

Image courtesy of the MHC Art Museum.

What’s new with you? Send news for “New & Notable” to Janet Tobin, Office of Communications, or email jtobin@mtholyoke.edu.