On April 24, 2026, the Kenyon community gathered to celebrate the life of visionary architect Graham Gund ’63 H’81. The following remarks were given by Gund Associate Delaney Marrs ’26.
I am Delaney Marrs, and throughout my four years at Kenyon, I have had the opportunity to work as a Gund Associate on the Curatorial Team, under the mentorship of Daisy Desrosiers.
On my first visit to The Gund, I climbed the stairs to the exhibition space and was welcomed by a docent with a question: do you want to step into art? She gestured to an installation of forty identical boxes arranged into rows. This was the visiting artwork “Reflejo” by Carlos Bunga. Several other visitors were already interacting with the piece, stepping from one box to the next. In the immense concentration required not to trip over these boxes, everyone was quiet. A quiet punctuated by a collaborative strategy session upon the discovery that you could step not just vertically but diagonally across the boxes. A quiet punctuated by shared laughter whenever anyone teetered in a step.
Of course I joined them.
And as I stepped out of Bunga’s boxes that first day at The Gund, I stepped into a space designed by Graham Gund. I soon came to understand that these boxes were not an isolated artwork but a reflection of the very space that hosted them, a space of shared quiet, attention, and care. Through his commitment to art on this campus, Mr. Gund shared not just a beautiful building or an enriching museum, but a way of moving through the world that will stay with me well beyond the walls of The Gund.
I didn’t know it at the time, but each step I took within The Gund and throughout Kenyon’s campus has been indelibly shaped by Mr. Gund himself. I step from that white-walled box of The Gund exhibition space that held Bunga’s boxes and into the curatorial classroom downstairs. In this room, my entire class has sat in complete quiet and “listened” to an artwork, an artwork that had been featured in our reading for the class. An artwork brought before us from the permanent collection Mr. Gund helped make possible and with the support of funds he provided. In this same room, I have picked up my Student Art Loan to come live with me for the year at my apartment in Winkler Hall. Every morning I leave my room to see the light from the stained glass windows of the building Mr. Gund designed cast rainbows across a painting he had been so dedicated to sharing with student spaces.
As I make my long, five-minute commute between my color-bathed Winkler apartment and the light-filled glass box of The Gund lobby, I step into Carl Milles’ “Five Angel Musicians” flying in a circle above the grassy lawn just off Middle Path and gifted by Mr. and Mrs. Graham Gund. From these angels, I have taken step after step. They are the topic of the first Art History paper I ever wrote. They are the sight at which I first found out that I had been hired to be a Gund Associate. They are the first artwork with which I worked when learning about museum accessibility as an associate. And this experience with museum accessibility offered me my first summer internship at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
From my experience at The Gund, I learned to make each step I took one of mindfulness, curiosity, and joy. As I took my first steps into the professional museum world, I quite fittingly found myself in the very museum that first inspired Mr. Gund’s love for art as a Cleveland native.
I only learned of this connection to Mr. Gund this past year in having the opportunity to talk to those who knew him as the curatorial associates prepared an exhibition in his memory. In these conversations, I found the strange pain of missing someone I never had the opportunity to meet. But with each step I take, I have found also the joy of knowing that through an attention to the world around us, we connect even to people we may never know. Through conversation with those around us, these connections come to life, and through the spaces that surround us, Mr. Gund has provided a foundation for both quiet contemplation and vibrant discussion.