‘I can’t believe they’re sitting in a basement’: Wellesley still seeking home for valued Kepes panels
Wellesley’s Kepes Panel Committee may be one of the town’s lesser known governmental bodies, but it’s not for lack of trying. The special committee, appointed by the Select Board to focus on the future of the unique enamel panels from influential artists György Kepes and Juliet Appleby Kepes, has met more than 80 times over the years.
The Committee recently had an audience with the Design Review Board, which gave committee members a chance to share an update on their efforts. Design Review Board members then offered ideas of their own about possible uses for the town-owned panels from the late Hungarian-born artist György Kepes, who was a leader in the New Bauhaus movement in Chicago before making his way east and making his mark at MIT. See the Wellesley Media recording of the Sept. 13 meeting.
The Committee’s Tory DeFazio started that session with a brief history of the panels, which originally were part of the Wellesley Free Library built in the late 1950s. Fifteen of these panels, marked by their muted and natural colors, were used on the exterior of the main library branch that stands today. A few others are located in a stairwell at Wellesley High School. (For more history, see an article by Committee member Sylvia Hahn-Griffiths from a 2012 edition of Wellesley Weston Magazine.)
The issue is that dozens more are being stored in the basement of the Wellesley Hills Library, and that’s no place for such historic art to be. “This stuff is major… I can’t believe they’re sitting in a basement,” said Juann Khoory, Design Review Board chair, during a brief discussion of the panels at an August meeting of this advisory group in advance of the longer conversation in September.
The Kepes Panel Committee was formed in 2005 to come up with a plan for them, with hopes of keeping the art in town and finding an appropriate public place or places to display them indoors or outdoors. There would be a cost associated with framing, restoring, and mounting them, though funding through organizations such as the Community Preservation Committee might be secured for such efforts.
While the committee was successful in getting panels incorporated into the 2012 high school building, it has not had such luck with the new elementary schools in progress (there was discussion at the meeting of revisiting this, as the schools are still in the process of going up and there would be a strong educational angle to incorporating the art). The railroad stations and Fuller Brook Park have been other locations considered for the panels by Kepes, whose work is included in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as well as a museum dedicated to Kepes in Hungary that opened in 2012.
There has been some debate on the committee about whether it’s OK to break up the panels rather than display them all in sequence. But committee member and one-time Kepes student George Roman said the most important thing is to find a place to expose them to the public.
“Getting them out of the basement is the priority,” Hahn-Griffiths agreed. “Finding a home for them here in Wellesley.”
DeFazio said the committee hasn’t really considered selling any panels, whose value he said is on the rise. Though this consideration was raised during the Design Review Board discussion, with the idea of using receipts to support possible installations in town.
Design Review Board members also raised ideas such as getting Babson College students to brainstorm about the art, or seeing if the local colleges might have a place for the panels themselves (the committee has regularly introduced the panels to new administrations at the colleges, Hahn-Griffiths said, without luck).
The Planning Department and Design Review Board said the September meeting could serve as the start of a more organized communication plan to renew public awareness of the Kepes panels and initiate or re-start conversations with various government bodies that might play a role in finally finding a better home than the library basement for these works of art.
