Select pieces by Kansas artists from the extensive collection of Kansas University professors Bill Tsutsui and his wife, Marjorie Swann, are part of a current exhibit at the Beach Museum in Manhattan. The couple found collecting art as a way to appreciate Kansas culture when they moved to the state.

It’s a fairly innocuous woodcut print. A woman sits in a front-porch rocking chair, her laundry hanging on the line.

Bill Tsutsui and Marjorie Swann could have easily overlooked the woodcut, made by Herschel Logan. But then they might not have fallen in love with Kansas, and they might not have stayed here.

But that print, somehow, caught their eye in 1999, and they had to buy it from a local framing shop.

That purchase has led to eight years of serious collecting of art by Kansas artists. The couple now have a collection of some 1,500 pieces and an appreciation for their state they never expected to develop.

“To understand what the art is about,” Tsutsui says, “you actually have to pay attention to the landscape of Kansas and Kansas history.”

The couple’s art collection is highlighted this summer in “Making Kansas Home,” an exhibit at the Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University. Nearly 50 of their favorite pieces are on display through Aug. 26 in the exhibition, which focuses on the thrill of the hunt when it comes to art collecting.

“Museums do a lot of exhibitions drawn from private collections,” says Liz Seaton, associate curator at the Beach Museum. “Sometimes we don’t offer much information about what the donor’s motives are. In this case, it’s nice to have something different, to allow them to tell the story of their collecting.”

Closer look

For Tsutsui and Swann, that story started when they moved to Kansas in 1993. She’s from Canada, and he’s from New York and Texas.

Neither saw Lawrence as more than a stepping stone in their careers. She’s an associate professor of English at Kansas University, and he’s chairman of the history department and director of KU’s Confucius Institute.

“We came here because we could both get jobs,” Swann says. “This was a practical, career-motivated move.”

For the first several years, they say, they spent their time at the office and didn’t get too involved in Kansas culture.

It wasn’t until they bought that Logan print in 1999 that their attitudes started to change. Neither knew much about art – and Kansas art in particular – so the gateway to the state’s geography, culture and history was an unlikely one.

“It was like eating peanuts – you eat one and you have to eat more,” Swann says. “It’s made us look at Kansas more deeply.”

Little-known names

That’s partly for practical reasons.

If you’re going to collect Kansas art, you have to scour the state’s estate sales, flea markets and – sometimes – the homes of the artists themselves.

Online auction house eBay is another good resource, though Tsutsui and Swann say art is getting more expensive on there as time goes on.

Most of the artists in their collection aren’t household names, even to Kansans. They’re artists like:

¢ Edmund Davison, a Wichita banker and painter.

¢ Albert Bloch, a KU painting and drawing instructor from the 1920s to the 1940s.

¢ Raymond Eastwood, another KU professor and painter who died in 1987.

¢ Edmund Kopietz, a native of Everest who studied at Wichita State University and is known for his watercolors.

The couple generally focus on art made before the 1970s. Though they originally started collecting only Kansas artists, their collection now has grown to include artists throughout the Great Plains. And, now, they’ve started collecting Kansas pottery.

Bringing art home

The couple’s drive to collect Kansas art is a fairly unique one, says the Beach Museum’s Seaton.

“There are a few (collectors),” Seaton says, “but I suppose they differ in the way in which they’ve decided to look deeply at certain areas and write about them.”

Swann and Tsutsui have had several articles on Kansas artists published in books and journals.

They already moved out of one house – and to another just west of campus where basketball inventor James Naismith once lived – to have more wall and storage space for art.

“It’s hard to sell anything,” Tsutsui says. “It’s like you’re cutting off a finger.”

That’s partly because they love the pieces they’ve selected. It’s also because the pieces often had been stored in less-than-ideal conditions, and they feel they can provide a better home for them.

Another factor is they feel like they’re repatriating many pieces that had been sold to collectors on the coasts.

“We’re bringing them back to Kansas,” Tsutsui says. “It seems like the right thing to do.”

The couple has no plans to stop collecting, unless they run out of storage space.

And now the stepping stone of Lawrence has become home base, even as other opportunities have beckoned.

“The times we had offers to leave,” Swann says, “we couldn’t, because we knew we couldn’t collect Kansas art.”