Art department to host memorial for Gelsy Verna

The art department will host a public memorial service at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, May 2, in honor of art professor Gelsy Verna (1961-2008), who died in Madison on March 11. The memorial will be held in the banquet room of the University Club.

Verna was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1961, the second of six children. Her father was a radiologist and her mother, a teacher. She lived in Haiti and then Zaire until age 7; her family moved to Montreal in 1968. She received a B.F.A. in 1988 and an M.F.A. in 1990, both from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She came to the art department in 2001 after teaching painting and drawing at the University of Iowa for six years.

Verna’s work has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the country and across the globe, including Austria, German and Japan. Some of her pieces are in the collections of the Kohler Art Library at UW–Madison, the Southern Graphics collection at the University of Mississippi, the Princeton University Art Museum and Citibank headquarters in Chicago.

In lieu of flowers, donations are being accepted for the Clara Alicia Verna College Fund, 4509 Ames St., Madison, WI 53711-1421, and the Creative Legacy fund #12904339 in Honor of Gelsy Verna via the University of Wisconsin Foundation, U.S. Bank Lockbox , P.O. Box 78807, Milwaukee, WI 53278.

To read and submit memories of Verna, visit http://gelsy-verna.memory-of.com.