John Pence, a frequent visitor at Meadowlark Hills, was in an antique mall in downtown Salina, Kan., last year when he uncovered buried treasure of sorts. A framed aquatint entitled “San Jose” by Ted Hawkins caught his eye, and he was fairly certain he had seen the image somewhere before.

Flipping the artwork over, he found a yellowed and fragile piece of paper lightly attached to the frame’s cardboard backing, which confirmed what he suspected. The etching was indeed a Friends of Art of Kansas State College “Gift Print” offered to Friends of Art members in 1949. But was the 1949 print one of the missing pieces from the collection at Meadowlark Hills? 

“When I was a guest at Bramlage, I would walk along the (Stamey Gallery) hall for exercise and look at all the art,” said Pence, associate director of Housing and Dining at Kansas State University. “I saw that the gallery was missing some of the gift prints.”

Pence said he thought “San Jose” was possibly one of the missing prints, but wasn’t sure. He drove back to Manhattan that Saturday, came to Meadowlark Hills and saw that, yes, the 1949 print by Hawkins was one of seven missing pieces. 

“I drove right back to Salina and bought it,” Pence recalled. However, months went by before Pence surprised Rae Stamey with the print on July 9. “I was waiting for a special occasion, and then learned that Rae and Bill were celebrating their 70^th wedding anniversary.” The couple were married June 25, 1945.

When Rae at the July 10, Art Committee meeting pulled the print from the gift bag Pence had given her, there were many excited oohs and ahs. The 1949 print is the oldest missing piece, so possibly one of the harder to obtain. 

“Now that we’re lacking so few prints, it really is an important addition,” Stamey said. “We’re that much closer to completing the collection.” 
K-State’s Beach Museum of Art has the entire collection, she added, but Stamey Gallery at Meadowlark Hills is the only place where most all of the prints are on display every day. 

In 1934, Friends of Art began the annual practice of inviting a regional artist to prepare an original work with a limited number of signed prints. In addition to helping to finance the purchase of works for K-State’s art collection, the gift prints promote Kansas and regional artists. Each donor to the Friends Fund received that year’s gift print. Except for the World War II years and some years in the 1970s, the tradition has continued to the present. 

Meadowlark’s gift print gallery, located in the Community Center’s west corridor between the KSU Classroom and Verna Belle’s, was named for Rae and Bill Stamey because of their donation of several gift prints to Meadowlark Hills after moving to a 3^rd floor apartment in 2008. Rae said they attended their first Friends of Art dinner and purchased their first gift print in the early 1950s when Bill was a new faculty member at Kansas State. They continued that tradition for several years.

Do you have a missing print you’d be willing to donate? Here’s a list:
   ~  1951, “New England Farm”, lithograph by Thomas Hart Benton
   ~  1963, Untitled, linoleum cut by Rex E. Hall
   ~  1964, “Sailboats”, screen print by Alex Boyle
   ~  1969, “Cottonwood Grove”, lithograph by William Dickerson
   ~  2014, “Jacob Shreiber - Root Cellar, Alma Township”, inkjet on paper by Tom Parish
  ~  2015, “Break Time”, etching paper by Dean Mitchell