PRESQUE ISLE – A fine-arts student from the University of Maine at Presque Isle has received an important honor that she can add to her resume after being presented with the University’s very first art purchase award. Nichole Smith, of Presque Isle, received the Robert C. Wanbaugh Memorial Art Purchase Award at the end of the spring 2008 semester for a painting she created as part of her Senior Art Show, “”Nostalgia of the Past.” Dr. Rebecca Herrick Wanbaugh, professor emerita of history at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, presented the award.
Wanbaugh established the endowment this year in memory of her husband, an artist and bachelor of fine arts graduate from the University, to allow for the annual purchase of an outstanding work of student art for the University’s collection.
Robert C. Wanbaugh earned his bachelor of fine arts degree from the University in 1988. As a senior art student, he received the Joel Dana Senior Art Scholarship Award and, in 1986, he earned the Photography Award of Excellence from the Photographers Forum of Santa Barbara, Calif. Wanbaugh was born in 1936 in Saginaw, Mich. He went on to serve in the U.S. Air Force, as a lieutenant with the Presque Isle Police Department, as purchasing agent/personnel director for the city of Presque Isle, as acting executive director of the Presque Urban Renewal Authority, and later as director of safety and security at the University of Maine at Presque Isle.
Dr. Rebecca Herrick Wanbaugh taught at the University for 34 years. Upon retirement, the two moved to Blue Hill. Robert Wanbaugh passed away in 2006.
“I think Bob would have been absolutely delighted with this,” Wanbaugh said. “I’m very, very pleased with the first award and I’m proud of Nichole. She’s certainly a superior student academically as well as artistically.”
With the endowment in place, students have a major incentive – the knowledge that they could sell a piece of art before they graduate – as they prepare for their culminating senior art projects. It is expected that the work of art selected for the award will be a piece from the annual Senior Shows by fine arts majors. The piece selected by Pres. Don Zillman and the art faculty for this first year of the award was displayed as part of Smith’s senior show, which recreated advertisements from the 1930s to the 1950s to show past stereotypes in the context of today’s society. The work is now on display in the Reed Art Gallery along with other selected senior works.