MEMPHIS, TENN.- In the fall of 2016, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens will honor the late Martha R. Robinson, one of its most impressive donors. Throughout her life and beyond, Mrs. Robinson was a supporter of the museum's fine art acquisitions and curatorial projects. Beginning in September, the curator position at the Dixon, currently held by Julie N. Pierotti, will be known in perpetuity as the Martha R. Robinson Curator.

Martha Robinson was an exceptionally generous and enthusiastic supporter of the Dixon. A trustee in the 1980s and 1990s, she possessed a great love for art, and was an effective advocate of the museum’s nineteenth-century French paintings collection. Mrs. Robinson was frequently called upon to champion and fund new acquisitions, and she seems never to have rebuffed a request to contribute. When the Dixon Gallery and Gardens Endowment Fund was established in 1990, she immediately pledged a major contribution, and steadily added to the Robinson Fund for the rest of her life. It remains one of the largest funds in the Dixon endowment—in spite of having supported the purchase of Pierre-August Renoir’s The Wave (1882), the Gaston La Touche painting, Joyous Festival (c. 1906), and other significant works in the collection.

Mrs. Robinson passed away in 2003 at the age of 85, but this fall, upon the culmination of her long term plan of deferred giving, she will provide one final, major contribution to the Dixon’s endowment. Naming the curator position after this passionate and dedicated supporter is one of the most public and emphatic acknowledgments of a donor that can be made at the Dixon.

This will be the second endowed position at the Dixon. Between 2012 and 2016, the Dixon undertook a $5 million campaign to fund the directorship in honor of Linda W. and S. Herbert Rhea Director in 2011. That initiative benefited from a major matching grant from the Day Foundation.