I recently learned that the artist Igor Galanin passed away this fall on Saturday, November 16. I was so sorry to hear of his passing and know that there are many who will miss him dearly. Although I was not part of the team that traveled to New York to collect or return the paintings Igor loaned to the Stark Center in 2022, his life and his art still had a significant impact on me and my work at the Stark Center. I like to picture Igor as I knew him, at 85 years old, still eagerly painting in his second-story studio in Millwood, New York while classical music or Russian opera fill the space with sound.

Local readers will shiver and recount their stories of survival if you ask them about the historically severe winter weather incident of February 2021—a tremendous freeze and storm that engulfed the state of Texas, causing disastrous power outages and over a billion dollars in damages. The Stark Center, like many other buildings on the University of Texas campus, suffered the storm, the freeze, and their effects. Our location in the North End Zone of DKR-Texas Memorial Football Stadium is directly below open-air concession areas where exposed pipes—i.e. water fountains, bathroom sinks, etc.—froze and burst in the extreme cold. The frozen pipes then began to thaw as temperatures rose above freezing for the first time in eight days. The water released in the thaw then found its way through the thick concrete floor and rained down on our lobby and exhibit spaces, flooding the Stark Center. Fortunately, no artifacts or resources were lost or harmed, but our beautiful floor was ultimately damaged beyond repair. If you’ve ever visited our space, you’ll know that our floor is a one-of-a-kind piece due to the custom air-brush application of different color stains that results in a nice, fluid burnt orange hue. The floor is also a singular entity, void of any seams, which meant that we couldn’t replace or repair damaged sections; we had to replace the entire floor in a massive construction project that required a full de-installation of our lobby and exhibit spaces. When the new floor was finally complete and the Stark Center was able to re-open its galleries to the public, we took advantage of the opportunities a restart provided us and looked to change up our lobby.

The curved back wall, centered on large, double doors vinyl-wrapped with a cover of the magazine Physical Culture, was previously populated with what had been called the “Wall of Honor.” It included large photo panels featuring significant figures in the history of physical culture—from Eugen Sandow and Katie Sandwina to Joe Weider and Jack Lalanne, John Davis and Tommy Kono to Boyd Epley and Kenneth Cooper. I decided to relocate this Wall of Honor to the main hallway of our galleries, the aorta through the heart of our exhibit space so to speak, and renamed it the “Hall of Honor.” This shift gave Stark Center Director Jan Todd and me a fresh blank space to work with. We didn’t have to brainstorm for a terribly long time. Jan had just purchased a painting from an online auction site which featured a woman, whose large and rounded figure dominated the foreground as she held a significant barbell overhead, seemingly with little effort. A small dog stands by the woman’s right foot and while the entirety of the piece seems to have a subdued color palette, the globe ends of the woman’s barbell are distinctive red, her necklace is remarkable for its bright green accents, and her small shoes are a bold shade of blue. The new piece was a novel addition to our already unique collections, and it delighted the entire Stark Center staff. Jan had spent time doing some online searches with the artist’s name, “Igor Galanin,” and found his website. Perusing the portfolio of work on his site, Jan saw more of this playful and imaginative style along with striking color choices and, amongst animals and other fanciful imagery, a significant number of paintings had women engaging in sport, athletics, or other physical activities. Jan sent me a link and we wondered how difficult it might be to contact Igor and if he would agree to loan us his female athlete paintings for an art show in the Stark Center lobby while we came up with an idea for a more permanent lobby installation.

We learned that Igor Galanin was already an established artist in the Soviet Union when he, his wife, and two children immigrated to America in 1972. He had his first American show in 1974 in New York City and his breakthrough exhibition in 1975 at the Rose Art Museum in Boston. Galanin’s arrival in America coincided with the passage of Title IX in 1972. Over the next decade or so, magazines and television programs were filled with stories about the rise of women’s sport and the new generation of female athletes. It’s possible that this new world of strong, skillful women inspired Galanin to begin painting female athletes, a highly unusual subject for the world of art at the time. Throughout the 1980s, Galanin kept painting women athletes—tennis players, horsewomen, cyclists, skaters, boxers, and swimmers. In the 1990s, his focus seemed to pivot to women of the circus world.

Connecting with Igor was not difficult. He was a kind and charming man, still very much in love with his work, and he was delighted to loan us a significant number of paintings for display. Jan, Kim Beckwith, our assistant director, and Kim’s sister, Kathy Robinson, made the trip to Millwood to meet Igor and collect the paintings. They wrapped each one safely and in accordance with industry standards before loading them into a rented truck that Kim and Kathy then drove back to Austin. While there in his studio, Jan asked Igor about the women in his paintings. None were based on real people, he assured Jan (and his wife). They were women from his imagination, painted in vivid colors as a celebration of his ideal of athletic beauty. While in his studio, Igor proudly presented an original drawing to each of the women carefully wrapping his paintings. Each was of a mermaid. Before the team left, Igor, Natalia, and their daughter Masha invited Jan, Kim, and Kathy to have tea and cake while chatting about Texas and becoming fast friends.  

For eight months Igor’s paintings adorned the Stark Center lobby. We titled the exhibit, “Igor Galanin’s Women of Strength and Skill.” The art show brought a fresh new aspect of physical culture to our museum. But more importantly to me, it brought a new world of color. It would probably be over-dramatic to compare the effect to Dorothy’s transition from her black-and-white home in Kansas to the technicolor land of Oz, but the burst of color, the size of the paintings, especially the later circus-themed pieces which were very large and the most brightly hued, seemed to pull people into our space from the elevators. The Galanin paintings seemed to be a draw, a welcome sign, an invitation to visitors to move, inspect, and explore.

I didn’t miss the lesson that Igor and his paintings taught me. When it was time to close the exhibit, we packed up the loaned paintings, then Kim and Kathy drove them back to Millwood, leaving Jan and me to begin working on our new grand vision of an orientation point for first-time visitors that would cover the full stretch of the curved, lobby wall. The result of that project is the new vinyl wrap on the double doors that presents (in gigantic text) the question, “What is the Stark Center?” And, of course, we try to answer that question with eight new text/photo panels along the curved wall, each of which highlight a different aspect of our large and ever-expanding collection. But it was distinctly Igor’s influence that inspired my choice to overlay all the images on these panels with eye-catching shades of Southwestern blue, red, and orange. It was important to me that the curved, lobby wall maintained the same vibrant, welcoming effect that Igor’s colorful world once brought to the Stark Center. In doing so, it would seem, that there’s a small piece of him still here with us today.

To learn more about Igor Galanin, his life and his work, please visit his website: igorgalanin.com.