Roanoke woman endows Longwood's first chair

A Roanoke woman has created Longwood College's first endowed chair through her will, in memory of her daughter, an alumna who taught there for 25 years.

Mary H. Bishop, a longtime Longwood supporter who died May 15 last year, left $1.3 million in her estate establishing the Barbara Lee Bishop Eminent Scholar Endowment, which will fund the Barbara Lee Bishop Chair and the Bishop Scholarship. Some $1 million is set aside for the chair, in the art department, and approximately $300,000 is going to the renewable scholarships, which will be awarded annually to junior art majors. The endowed chair and the scholarship honor her only child, Barbara, a 1960 Longwood graduate who taught at the college from 1965 until retiring due to ill health in 1990, some 14 of those years as art department chairman. A former president of the Virginia Art Education Association, she was the driving force behind the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts and was its first executive director. She died in 1991 at the age of 52.

The art faculty is "putting together the particulars of the endowed chair," said Dr. David Cordle, dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "The search should begin this fall, and, if all goes well, that person should begin in fall 2002."

Several years ago Mrs. Bishop created the Scholarship, which is now endowed, and supported it with an annual gift. She and friends of her late daughter also established the Barbara L. Bishop Distinguished Lecture Series in the Visual Arts, which began in 1992.

Mary Harris Bishop, a native and lifelong resident of Roanoke who lived to be 89, was herself an artist. She also was active in the Rosalind Hills Garden Club, at Green Memorial Methodist Church, and as a volunteer at Roanoke Community Hospital, mainly in the gift shop, where she put in nearly 14,000 hours from 1974 until just a few months before her death. She made more than 5,500 artificial arrangements that were sold there, and at one time was a buyer for the gift shop.

"Mary Bishop was the influence who created the artist in Barbara," said Homer Springer, chair of Longwood's art department and a longtime friend of both women. "She was very creative and very skilled at crafts and painting. She and I exchanged handmade ornaments every Christmas. One year she called me and said 'I need ideas. I've done this so many years and I'm running out of ideas.' I laughed and said I was also running out of ideas. But that year, as always, unique, creative ornaments were exchanged."

Dr. Nancy Andrews, a retired Longwood physical education professor who was close to both Mary and Barbara Bishop, agreed. "Mary was a talented artist. She just had a lot of natural talent. I have one of her oil paintings over the mantle in my family room."

Dr. Andrews's life was remarkably intertwined with Barbara's life. "At one time, my mother and Mary Bishop lived across the street from each other in Roanoke, and Barbara and I were friends since junior high. Then she was a year behind me at Longwood, where we were in the same sorority. As faculty members, we shared the advisership of Chi (a student spirit organization)."

Mrs. Bishop was the widow of Robert G. Bishop, a purchasing agent for Norfolk & Western Railroad. "She and her husband were very dignified, but also very friendly," said Springer.

The main gallery at the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts is the Barbara L. Bishop Gallery; Mary attended the dedication ceremony in 1996. At a luncheon in Mary's honor in 1998, Longwood President Patricia Cormier lauded her and Barbara Bishop as "women of talent, strength, dedication and grace."