A memorial service for Marlyn Frizell Brown will be at 2:30 p.m. Sunday at the Lawrence Arts Center. Brown helped found the center, which initially opened in 1975.

When the Kansas University men’s basketball team won the national championship in 1988, Marlyn Frizell Brown and her family were watching the game at her son’s house. Afterward, they felt compelled to express their jubilation – along with the rest of the city – by hitting the streets.

They piled into a car with a sunroof and headed to campus.

“There’s my mom – she’s 60-something then – standing on the seat, glass of wine in her hand, whooping and hollering, going down Jayhawk Boulevard,” says Craig Brown, son of Marlyn Brown. “She thought that was the most marvelous thing.”

Craig Brown remembers his mother as someone who approached all facets of life with the same unbridled enthusiasm. Friends and family will celebrate that verve during a memorial service for Marlyn Brown at 2:30 p.m. Sunday at the Lawrence Arts Center, 940 N.H.

Brown, who had Alzheimer’s disease, died Feb. 11 at her home in Ozawkie. She was 80.

Of all the disciplines to which she devoted her time, art was dominant. Brown graduated in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Kansas University, where she also earned a master’s degree in textiles in 1973.

She loved to weave, and she had a particular interest in Southwest and Hopi textiles, which were the subject of her master’s thesis.

“A lot of family vacations, rather than Disney World, would be down to the Hopi Mesas or Four Corners – all the dusty parts of the earth,” Craig Brown recalls.

As the family was driving through the desert, Marlyn Brown suddenly would say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” and insist that her husband stop the car. She’d jump out and gather dried plant materials and stash them in the trunk of the Lincoln Continental for use later in her weavings.

“She could just find beauty in almost anything,” Craig Brown says. “I think artists can, you know.”

Marlyn Brown taught weaving at Kansas University and, later, at Ghost Ranch in Santa Fe, N.M. In 1972, she opened Valley West Galleries at the northwest corner of 27th and Iowa streets. The fireplace she designed for the exhibition space is now part of Paisano’s, Craig Brown says.

In what would become perhaps her most enduring Lawrence legacy, Marlyn Brown presided over the Lawrence Arts Commission during the creation of the Lawrence Arts Center, which opened in the former Carnegie Library building in 1975.

“She’s the reason we’re here,” says Ann Evans, who has been director of the arts center since its inception. “She really was the person who had the vision. There were no other arts centers in the area at the time.”

For her efforts, Marlyn Brown was honored by the Lawrence Jaycees as Woman of the Year in 1975.

Jed Davis, who served on the commission with Brown, says she took a leadership role in renovating the building to make it appropriate for exhibitions, classes and performances.

“She was very dedicated and very persistent,” Davis says. “I couldn’t imagine anyone doing a better job than she did.”

Despite her advancing Alzheimer’s disease, Marlyn Brown attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the new arts center in 2000, two years before it opened in the 900 block of New Hampshire Street.

She was a founding member of the Kansas Artists & Craftsman Association and a member of the Kansas Arts Commission, the Junior League of Kansas City, Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and the Santa Fe Trail Center advisory board.

In fact, she co-founded the Santa Fe Trail Center in Larned, the city where she was born and attended school. She married Robert Brown there in 1952. They lived in Kansas City before moving to Lawrence in 1967, and, since 1987, had made their home on Lake Perry, where Robert Brown still resides.

Among other survivors are her son, Craig Brown, and his wife, Rae Ann, of Lawrence; and her daughter, Cynthia Brown, of Santa Cruz, Calif.

“She was a neat gal,” Craig Brown says of his mother. “She had a lot of energy, and she was just super positive.”