Abstract: The purpose of this St. Mary’s Project is to thoroughly develop an exhibition based on artworks in the St. Mary’s College of Maryland Teaching Collection, which was established by founding director of Boyden Gallery, Jonathan Ingersoll. I photographed and conducted a complete inventory of artworks donated to the college by New York City paint manufacturer Leonard Bocour between November 1975 and December 1991. These 176 works comprise the Bocour-Ingersoll Collection of Modern American Art.
Sincerely Yours: Leonard Bocour and the American Modernists explores the visual and conceptual principles of American Modernism represented by the Bocour-Ingersoll Collection. Bocour’s personal friendships with artists, revealed through archival documentation, provide a window into the professional and personal networks that informed and promoted modern art in mid-twentieth century New York City. The donations he made to St. Mary’s provided the opportunity for the work of these artists, largely ignored by encyclopedic art history texts, to be put into historical context and expand the scope of modern art. Sincerely Yours allows us to see the inner workings of the New York art scene and recognize those modern artists on the edge of art history.