Nancy DeLaurier was born Nancy Jane Gibbon in Kansas City on January 11, 1924. She died at her daughter Jane’s home in Yuma, Arizona on May 29, 2019.
During World War II, Nancy earned her B.A. in History at Northwestern University in Chicago. She pursued graduate studies on full scholarship at New York University, studying Art History with the foremost authority on European Gothic art, Dr. Irwin Panofsky, a German Jewish refugee. While at NYU, she shared a basement apartment for $6 a week, working first at Macy’s in the “pitchas and mirrahs” department, and then in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Education Department.
Nancy married her beau, Jacques DeLaurier, just days after he stepped off his troop ship at the war’s end. They loved each other for the next 67 years, raising four children along the way. Jacques died in 2012.
In 1962, Nancy became a tour guide at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. She was soon recommended for a position as Slide and Photographs Curator in the Art & Art History Department at UMKC, where she worked for the next 27 years.
At the time a clerical position, her job required the combined strengths of art historian – one with an encyclopedic knowledge from Neolithic carvings to present-day SoHo galleries – and archivist. She led efforts at international conferences to gain professional status for Slide & Photograph Curators. By the late 1970s, the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art officially recognized her visual resources subgroup. In 1982, members formalized an independent organization, the Visual Resources Association (VRA). The VRA now confers its annual Nancy DeLaurier Award on distinguished members. Nancy remained a UMKC Instructor Emeritus in Visual Resources until the end of her life.
After retiring, Nancy used her professional skills to organize the archives of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Main Street, and eventually became the archivist for the Diocese of West Missouri, travelling to parishes, collecting and preserving their histories.
Nancy and Jacques were both dedicated “FDR” Democrats, and never missed a campaign season of volunteering. Nancy’s fierce sense of justice moved her beyond party politics into community activism. She wore as a badge of honor being kicked out of the Raytown PTA in the late 1960s for inviting an esteemed African American assistant superintendent of the Kansas City schools to speak and engage in a dialogue on racial integration. (The meeting was broken up in pandemonium by a group of determined bigots.)
In the early 1970s, Nancy and Jacques fought white flight and redlining in their Eastwood Hills neighborhood, initially by inviting the entire community, including the newer African-American neighbors, to a picnic at their house. Old neighbors met new neighbors, bonds were formed, word spread, and white flight slackened. To this day, Eastwood Hills, on Kansas City’s east side, is a racially balanced neighborhood.
Despite her accomplishments, Nancy will be best remembered for her inherent kindness, her caring generosity, and most of all, her nurturing love.
Our mother and grandmother taught us to see, piercingly; to appreciate what we saw in museums, but more importantly, beyond museum walls. She taught us to recognize the grandeur and beauty of an Oklahoma plain dotted with oil wells, a congested cityscape, as well as mountains and oceans. We learned to see stunning, complex patterns in a piece of driftwood or a beach pebble; to look at a scaffolded building covered with netting and grasp that modern artists have allowed us to re-see what we thought we knew. She shared this with us passionately, but privately, absent any ostentation. On more than one occasion, in a museum when she was quietly explaining a piece of art, strangers would lean in to hear.
Nancy is survived by her sister, Gail Gibbon, her four children, Bruce, Peter, Jane, and Julie, 12 grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be scheduled in Kansas City.
Donations to Phoenix Legal Action Network (PLAN – planphx.org) or VoteRunLead.org, in lieu of flowers, will be in keeping with Nancy’s spirit.
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