There are just two more weekends left of my exhibit at the Berkeley Historical Society. The official closing day is Saturday, April 2, but it will also be open on Sunday, the 3rd, 2-4 p.m., for a talk by Aleta George about her biography of poet Ina Coolbrith (who, by the way, was one of Albert Bender’s many friends; the Bender Papers at Mills College contain 85 letters she wrote him beginning in 1917).

An exciting and serendipitous discovery during my research for the exhibit was a 1929 Sanborn map of the Cal campus, with the building that was the University Art Gallery from 1934 to 1970 labeled “Bender Art Museum.” I think the map was tweeted by someone at the Bancroft Library. According to the Centennial Record of the University of California (1967) list of buildings, it was in 1931 that the power and steam plant operations moved out of John Galen Howard’s 1904 brick building, but this map shows that its future use as an art gallery was already contemplated in 1929, and that the university was proposing to name it the Bender Art Museum. Art professor Eugen Neuhaus is credited with the idea of converting the building to an art gallery. At the building dedication, Provost Monroe Deutsch gave Albert Bender most of the credit for making it happen:

. . . though the University of California had no art gallery, with faith in the future and an eagerness to provide the material for a great art gallery, which he saw one day coming, he gave us paintings, marbles, and other works of art, even though he realized that for a time some would have to be stored and others serve merely to embellish the previously austere offices of the President and myself.

The Class of 1933 made a monetary gift that covered part of the cost of the renovation, and Albert “proceeded at once in characteristic fashion to go out and tell his friends how important the enterprise was and to secure the necessary additional funds to supplement the gift of the class. But he did not stop with this. He threw himself into the whole process of converting the Power House into a suitable place for works of art.”

Deutsch wrote in a letter to Albert,

I feel confident we are now laying the foundations of what will some day be a magnificent art gallery, something of which the State will have a right to be proud. Neither you nor I will be here to see it but in spirit at least we can frequent its halls and rejoice in the accomplishment of a dream. And when that day comes I shall pat you on your immaterial back and say, “Albert, you see what you have accomplished.”

The latest incarnation of that dream opened as the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive where the campus meets downtown Berkeley on January 31, 2016.