Sherry Maurer said she sees a bright future for the Tarble Arts Center and wants students along with the community to be a part of Tarble and what it does.

Maurer visited Eastern Monday and Tuesday as the third person to be interviewed for the Tarble’s director position.

Her past jobs were at Black Hawk College in Moline where she was an art instructor for the fall 2014 semester.

She taught two art appreciation classes.

Maurer was the coordinator for the MidCoast Fine Arts Bucktown Center for the Arts in Davenport, Iowa.

She worked there in mid-June of 2014 and her jobs included helping board members with the building operations.

In 1983 she was the director/curator at Augustana College Art Museum.

Maurer said she is interested in the position because of the potential the Tarble has to be greater in its educational significance.

“With many years of museum expertise, I have worked with campus and community constituencies as a trusted, collaborative and organized administrator,” she said.

She said if she were to get the job, her main priority would be to form partnerships with the communities surrounding the school by creating challenging projects that encourage critical thinking with others.

She said with her experience as a curator, artist and art historian, she does well in providing lively art exhibits.

“I particularly enjoy engaging college students who are at such a transformative time of their lives,” she said.

Maurer said she studies new collections that are significant around the world and are a benefit for research and education.

“My biggest research and fundraising endeavor was the production of an exhibition of 300 gifted works, along with a coordinated 336-page book that compiled contributions from 50 students, seven experts in the field, faculty, alumni and administrators,” she said.

Maurer said at her past job, where there was an art museum located on campus, she turned the museum into a central part of campus life.

“Faculty and student exhibitions regularly were presented and acclaimed,” she said.

“I coordinated an art museum cross-campus visit program for first-year undergraduates in multiple disciplines, and faculty increasingly made use of museum resources for class visits and research to the point where nearly half the student body was counted as annual student-visit contacts.”

Maurer said she has skills and knowledge in art handling, exhibition research and interpretation, art and humanities education, and recordkeeping.

“I can see successes in expanding audiences by increasing collaborations with students and scholars, which will strengthen the community connection,” she said.

Stephanie White can be reached at 581-2812 or at sewhite2@eiu.edu.