Karen and Kevin Kennedy ’70

By Amanda Ghiloni ’22

Being able to visit the Kennedy’s apartment granted so much context to all that we have learned about collecting, because for the first time I got to see collecting at that scale in person, and interact with collectors in a non-academic setting. The experience of casually discussing Hamilton College’s hockey team while casually standing in front of three paintings by Charles Burchfield in a dining room is something I still can’t wrap my head around. To see paintings that were in coffee table books in art galleries just on the wall while I was eating meatballs and brie is just baffling to be entirely honest. It really just contextualized the differences in how I think about art versus how people in the art world think about it. 

Something that stood out throughout the whole trip was how everyone we met with referred to art as objects, and while I did know that art pieces were things, I never really considered them as canvas with paint on it, but more as concepts.Seeing how casually the art seemed to exist in the Kennedy’s apartment, as just part of their day to day lives illuminated that difference in view. That isn’t to say that they think less of the art pieces, it’s just that in the Kennedys’ or Gerard Peters’ or Tony and Carol’s apartments, art itself is always present, a stark contrast to the prints of Monets on my childhood home’s walls or the collection of art postcards I’ve amassed to decorate the dorm. I don’t interact with art itself as decoration or part of my life outside of museums, so to be exposed to it existing outside of that context was jarring.

The visit also showed collectors as people, rather than concepts. I had briefly interacted with Kevin Kennedy once before, so I knew he was an actual human, but that was in the context of him being on the board of the Wellin, so still as an entity within the art world. To talk to him about his college experience, and his frat hijinks and the legacy of our hockey program made me reconsider how I view the people we learn about in class as the figures in art history, and how they all were multifaceted people who lived full lives, and art was just a part of their existence, even though in my mind it is all they are made up of. The visit altogether just opened my mind up a lot, and made me rethink how I think about art and the people of the art world.