By Coral Gables Gazette staff
More than seven decades after 50 women strung a clothesline across the grounds of the Joe and Emily Lowe Art Gallery and hung paintings for the public to browse, the volunteer organization that grew from that first Clothesline Sale has announced its largest single gift to the Lowe Art Museum.
Beaux Arts has committed $1.57 million to create the Endowment for the Beaux Arts Visitor Experience, a fund intended to expand public access to the Lowe, including extended operating hours. The gift pushes the organization’s cumulative support for the museum past $10 million.
The announcement connects the group’s founding purpose to a practical question that still shapes museum access: whether the doors are open when visitors are able to come.
“Guided by our enduring commitment to expanding access to the arts and arts education, we recognized an opportunity to make a transformational investment in the future,” said Francesca Valdes, Beaux Arts’ immediate past president. “The Endowment for the Beaux Arts Visitor Experience embodies that vision — ensuring that countless visitors will be connected to the arts for generations to come.”
An endowment built around access
The new endowment continues a pattern of long-term giving by Beaux Arts, a women-led, all-volunteer organization founded in 1952 under the direction of Anne Atkinson, then assistant director of the Lowe.
Beaux Arts has previously funded named spaces inside the museum and, in 2014, endowed the position of the Lowe’s director with a $1.5 million commitment. Since 2021, the organization’s funding has helped make admission to the museum free for all visitors.
University of Miami leaders recognized the latest gift as both a milestone for the Lowe and a continuation of the group’s sustained role in the museum’s development. Joel Samuels, the university’s executive vice president for academic affairs and provost, described Beaux Arts’ record as an example of sustained, community-driven philanthropy and said the endowment would broaden access to the museum.
Ansley Campbell, Beaux Arts president, framed the gift as a way to honor the generations of women who built the organization while extending its work to future visitors.
A volunteer organization with a long reach
Beaux Arts now counts more than 100 active members and roughly 350 associates, while remaining entirely volunteer-run.
Its programs extend beyond the museum’s walls. The original Clothesline Sale evolved into the Beaux Arts Festival of Art, a juried outdoor show that draws tens of thousands of visitors each January and features more than 200 artists. The Annual Costume Ball has become a long-standing fall tradition.
The organization’s education programs include the Student Artist Showcase, which invites middle and high school students to exhibit alongside professional artists, with winners shown at the Lowe; the Beaux Arts Summer Art Camp, which brings children ages 5 through 12 onto the University of Miami campus each summer; and HandsOn! A Children’s Celebration of Art, which provides free busing, guided museum tours and supervised artmaking for children across South Florida.
Jill Deupi, Beaux Arts executive director and the Lowe’s chief curator, pointed to that educational reach as central to the organization’s impact.
“Thanks to them, thousands of schoolchildren have toured our galleries and created their own masterpieces, learning about history, culture, and perhaps most importantly, themselves and others along the way,” Deupi said. “For three-quarters of a century, they have touched lives and built community in Coral Gables and greater Miami-Dade County by broadening access to education and enrichment through the arts.”
A through-line from 1952
The organization’s earliest contributions are still visible in the museum’s daily operation. Beaux Arts built the Children’s Pavilion in 1953, launched the docent program that still guides visitors through the galleries, opened a museum store, produced cookbooks and organized student art competitions.
Its latest gift is larger, but the logic is familiar. The first Clothesline Sale brought art outside and invited the public in. The visitor experience endowment is meant to make it easier for more people to walk through the Lowe’s doors.
For Beaux Arts, the $10 million milestone is not only a measure of money raised. It is a measure of what steady volunteer work can build over time — a museum with deeper community roots and a wider public reach.
