Stern Gallery, Allen Memorial Art Museum

This drawing is part of a group of five watercolors of interior spaces at the Allen Memorial Art Museum made by Paul Arnold, Oberlin Professor Emeritus of printmaking and current Oberlin resident. They show the Stern gallery, with its characteristic angled corners; one depicts the luminous laylights that formerly allowed in natural light. The Museum is currently seeking to raise funds to restore and re-open these laylights as part of its on-going building renovation. Arnold has here lovingly captured a moment in the museum's formative years, in which the installation is similar to that of today but at a time when galleries were bathed in the day's changing light, enhancing the visitor's experience of the works on view.