John Carter Brown

John Carter Brown was born in Providence, Rhode Island. His family had been prominent since before the Revolution, providing the initial endowment for what is today known as Brown University. His parents shared a passion for the arts and public service. His father, John Nicholas Brown, served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Truman. While living with his family in Washington, the young J. Carter Brown fell in love with the National Gallery of Art and first conceived of a career that would allow him to pursue his love for all the arts and to share them with a larger public.



Although he was already committed to a career in arts administration, Brown spent his undergraduate years studying history and literature, and acquired a master's degree from Harvard Business School. With this preparation, he immersed himself in the study of art history in Europe, including studies with the renowned art historian Bernard Berenson, and completed a second master's degree in art history at New York University.



In 1961, Brown joined the National Gallery as an assistant to the Director, John Walker. He was appointed assistant director in 1964, and in 1969, at the age of 34, he was appointed Director. He was only the third person to hold this position, and would become the longest serving director in the Gallery's history.



Carter Brown was the first American museum director with a business degree. When he set out to raise $50 million for a new acquisitions fund, he overshot the target and raised $56 million. Even as public funding from the arts came under intense political attack, he induced Congress to increase the Gallery's operating budget year after year, from $3 million in 1969 to $52 million when he retired in 1992. During his tenure, the Gallery's endowment grew from $34 million to $186 million.





Having enjoyed an incomparable exposure to the world of art, and a thorough professional and academic training, Brown set himself a goal of bringing the joys of culture to a larger audience than the hermetic world of connoisseurs and art historians. In addressing the public, the Director always referred to the institution he headed as "your Gallery."



With his special gift for diplomacy, Carter Brown persuaded foreign governments to loan priceless works for visiting exhibitions, and led American collectors to donate their treasures to the nation, including works by Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso and Veronese. In his 23 years at the helm of the Gallery, he increased the collection by 20,000 works of art, including pieces by old masters and modern giants, from Leonardo da Vinci to Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, and Jackson Pollock.



Combining rigorous scholarship with a unique theatrical flair, Brown instituted a series of dazzling special exhibitions. 1977's "Treasures of Tutankhamen," inaugurated a new era of "blockbuster" museum shows. In 1985, one exhibition alone, "Treasure Houses of Britain," attracted almost a million visitors. He also broadened the scope of the gallery beyond its traditional emphasis on European and North American art, with exhibitions of African sculpture, Chinese archaeological discoveries and the historic riches of Japan. Under Brown's leadership, the Gallery's annual attendance rose from 1.3 million in 1969 to almost 7 million visitors a year.





Brown greatly expanded the Gallery's exhibition space, doubling its square footage. Perhaps his greatest triumph was the construction of the Gallery's East Building in 1978. I.M. Pei's angular modern design encountered fierce opposition from traditionalists and preservationists who feared it would spoil the view of the Capitol, but the finished building has become one of Washington's most popular cultural attractions, and one of the most admired buildings in America. Selected as one of the ten best building in America, it ignited an international trend of new museum buildings as innovative works of art. He ended his service to the Gallery on a high note, with "Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration," an unprecedented extravaganza of art from five continents, marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the New World.



After retiring from the National Gallery in 1992, he continued his crusade to bring the splendors of art to the mass public. He founded the cable television arts network Ovation and served as its chairman. During the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, he mounted a magnificent display of works from every continent and period of human history: "Rings: Five Emotions in World Art."





His service to his adopted city continued until the end of his life. He served for 30 years as Chairman the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, an independent agency that advises the Federal and District of Columbia governments on matters of art and architecture that affect the appearance of the nation's capital. In this capacity, Brown was a leading advocate of the controversial Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by 21-year-old Maya Lin. As with the East Building of the National Gallery, Carter Brown's judgment was vindicated by the American people, who have made the Vietnam Memorial the most-visited site in the nation's capital. Brown also played a crucial advisory role in the creation of the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the memorial to President Franklin Roosevelt.



In August, 2000, Brown was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a terminal blood cancer. He confronted his illness with the same dignity and courage that had characterized his entire life and career. Six months before being interviewed by the Academy of Achievement, he received an autologous stem cell transplant and enjoyed an active life for the following year-and-a-half, before succumbing to a lung ailment in June 2002.



In his last years, he participated in a host of new building projects in Washington, including the American Indian Museum, a modern wing for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the National World War II Memorial. Through these works and the National Gallery of Art, the generous spirit of J. Carter Brown will contribute to the life of his country for many years to come.

John Carter Brown interview

. Carter Brown Interview

Director Emeritus

National Gallery of Art



May 5, 2001

San Antonio, Texas

What was your life like when you were growing up in the '30s and '40s?



J. Carter Brown: Well, I had a fabulous opportunity of having two parents who each was very interested in the arts, my mother particularly in music. She'd been a music critic before marriage. She played in the Johns Hopkins Orchestra -- the violin. My father took up the cello, and we had chamber music during my childhood, and on. I mean they were passionate about making music. They also had record collections. My father collected orchestral works, and my mother collected opera, and when they merged their two collections there was hardly a single overlap. My father was very visual, and he was into collecting drawings. He was into architecture, he had a drafting board in his study all his life, into the history of architecture. He'd been a patron of architecture, both a gothic chapel at St. George's, on which he worked very closely with Ralph Adams Cram, and then later a very pioneering building. In 1936 he hired Richard Neutra, a revolutionary modernist, to build the first modern house of any size and importance in the East. And so, I grew up in the summers in that house, and it had a big effect on me. But, one absorbed through the pores a sense of the arts from this wonderful atmosphere. And, there was travel, and they could take us to museums, and they really knew what they were looking at. So, it was a pretty exciting way to grow up.



What kinds of things did you like to do when you were a boy?



J. Carter Brown: Well, I was a passionate sailor. I just loved everything about "messing about in boats." I loved racing, because it's such an intellectual challenge as well as a physical challenge. You have to know about nature and weather and the physics of it, and a psychological challenge, because it's what your opponent is thinking and what you think he or she's going to do. So that was a great passion.





I'd been very lucky to be sent off to school -- a lot of people don't think it's so lucky -- boarding school at nine. I went to the Arizona Desert School in Tucson where we all had our own horses. We learned camping, we played polo, we had the most wonderful life because it was so beautiful. We'd get up and do chores at dawn, and we'd see these incredible Arizona sunrises. The tough part was that because they didn't have air-conditioning and it gets so hot, the season -- the academic year -- was squeezed, so you didn't start till mid-October, and you got out early May, which meant there was only room for one vacation in the middle of the year, which meant we were there at Christmas. When you're nine years old and you're away from home at Christmas; it's a little bit of a strain. But, I think that's maturing, and I loved being in the outdoors and being in that gorgeous natural environment. I mean the desert is as beautiful as anything that exists. I go back. I was there just a few weeks ago out of nostalgia. I just love it.



Where in Arizona is this school?



J. Carter Brown: It was in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains near Tucson. It doesn't exist any more. It burned down, and I had a Proustian experience at one point, by renting a horse and going out to see if I could find any archeological remains. Finally I did. I found some tile that didn't burn in the fire, and I could get it fixed back in my memory as to exactly where I was between nine and twelve.



Then I went to school in Massachusetts. They couldn't believe that any school way out there could prepare you, but I only lasted two weeks in the grade they put me in, and they bumped me up. I was there for five years there. That was pretty challenging, because one got a darned good education. But I had trouble with my knee. I had to give up football. I became manager of the football team. It gave me time to practice the piano, and I learned I was never going to be a pianist. It was an exciting time from every point of view except socially.



What went wrong socially? What kind of kid were you?

J. Carter Brown: Oh, I was hopeless. I was very unathletic, and when I was in school I was two years younger than everybody in my class, so I got beaten up all the time, and I got laughed at for being interested in studying and doing stupid things like that. And, it's been so rewarding. I'm going to my 50th anniversary of my high school, and so rewarding that now they feel... I'm the guy that sort of "made it" in the class, having been the Class Joke. Never completely "joke," because I was president of the Dramatic Society, and I did manage to graduate first in my class, but that wasn't the value system of that particular group of boys. They had an undefeated football season. They were really good at athletics, and the atmosphere at school was pretty anti-intellectual in those days.




http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bro1int-1

Bob Williamson's

Bob Williamson fled a broken home in Mississippi at age 17 to hitchhike around the country. He landed in Atlanta in 1970 at 24, homeless, broke, and addicted to heroin and methamphetamine. When he got a job there cleaning bricks for $15 a week, no one would have guessed that he would start a $26 million software company someday.

Successful businesses often spring from a combination of hard work and dumb luck, and Williamson credits both. Not long after arriving in Atlanta, he was injured in a car wreck and spent months recovering in the hospital. While there, he read the Bible, converted to Christianity, and decided to straighten up his life. It wasn't easy: He had a criminal record, no college degree, and few job prospects.



"I was either going to commit suicide, which several of my friends had done, or I was going turn my life around," says Williamson, now chairman and chief executive officer of Horizon Software International, a 180-employee maker of software for food service systems used in schools, hospitals, and other institutions.

The Element of Chance




Williamson, now 61, presides over Horizon's 44,000-square-foot headquarters in Atlanta. The company had $26 million in revenue in 2007, and he's projecting $32 million this year. Still, Williamson says, "I'm the first one there and the last one to leave." And he ascribes his business success to his conversion. "I have always tried to run my business according to the way that God would want me to…I've always tried to be honest and straightforward, and not lie and not cheat, and not try to take an easy way out."



Hard work was certainly part of Williamson's improbable personal turnaround: He recalls years of working 20-hour days and says he still only sleeps four or five hours a night. But chance guided his entrepreneurial success as well: a car accident that jolted him out of a destructive life, a paint recipe that became a hit, and early exposure to the burgeoning software industry.



And in some ways, Williamson's arrival in Atlanta at the nadir of his life set the foundation for his rise. "I'd been through so much in my life, I don't get discouraged," he says. "The trials I've had in business are mild compared to what my life was like."