Lane Art Collection

About the Event

Cost: Free

With this event, the History Center unveils a selection of remarkable Lakeshore art treasures seen for the first time in a quarter century!

More than two dozen artworks collected by celebrated local historian and author Kit Lane recently came to the History Center, thanks to the support of SDHC members Herb and Karen Tews. This program offers a first look at the collection, which includes watercolors by women artists Victoria Littna, Jane Van Dis, Martha Hartmann, and Emily Parks, as well as landscapes by early Ox-Bow painters Frederick Frary Fursman and Albert Krehbiel, not to mention some of the earliest known artworks created in Saugatuck.

Kathryn ‘Kit’ Lane and her husband Art owned and edited the Commercial Record and Fennville Herald newspapers from 1967 to 1988. A prolific author, Kit Lane also founded the first Saugatuck Historical Museum in 1980 and was widely recognized as the region’s resident historian for three decades. Many of the artworks from the Lane collection appeared in the 1997 SDHC exhibition “Painting the Town,” and Kit’s published catalog of the show remains a favorite starting point for understanding the area’s art history.

Refreshments and appetizers will be provided. At 5:30 PM SDHC executive director Eric Gollannek will give a presentation explaining the history of a selection of artworks, highlighting their artistic significance and importance to the history of the Lakeshore then and now.