True to the liberal arts’ tradition of promoting independent thinking the first art exhibition ever held at Davidson College was organized by a student. Freshman Gordon Horton organized the Annual Student Exhibition in 1938, and in 1941 he donated money to renovate a room in Eumenean Hall (one of the four oldest buildings on campus). The renovated space was to house Davidson’s first art gallery and potentially, a home for a permanent art collection. In connection with his gift, Horton proposed that the ten best paintings from the previous three student exhibitions be framed and permanently placed in this new gallery. Perhaps due to the onset of the Second World War, the trail of records about the gallery and the collection grows cold. Evidence of Horton’s collection of student paintings was lost, and it is unclear whether the proposed art gallery was ever completed.

In April of 1948 faculty created the Fine Arts Committee and one month later they sponsored the first of twenty annual Fine Arts Festivals. That inaugural Fine Arts Festival was so successful that Davidson decided to offer one course in the visual arts and employed Joseph Hutchison, then director of Charlotte’s Mint Museum of Art, to teach it.

Philip Moose replaced Hutchison in the fall of 1951. In his first two years as part-time visual arts instructor, Moose curated a number of popular exhibitions that primarily focused on artists in North Carolina. He left in 1953 to accept a Fulbright Scholarship to study painting at the Munich Academy of Art in Germany. Prior to his departure, Moose sent a note to President Cunningham about the future of the visual arts at Davidson. He wrote that the next professor of art should be a “younger person with a very liberal outlook . . . who is an exhibiting artist as well as an authority on Art History.” As it turns out, President Cunningham was paying attention.