Wendy Bidstrup

It is our great pleasure to present the 2024 Sippican Historical Society Annual Award for Distinguished Service to Marion to this year’s recipient – Wendy Bidstrup.

Wendy is a community builder. Of her work producing theater at the Marion Art Center, Wendy said, “I’m not really a director – I consider myself more of an organizer – getting outstanding talent to come in and perform. I always tried to involve as many townspeople as I could.”

Wendy arrived in Marion in the late 1960s along with her husband Larry, who had accepted a teaching position at Tabor. They fell in love with Marion, and Wendy dutifully took on the volunteer responsibilities of a “faculty wife.” Needing a creative outlet for herself, Wendy enrolled in an art class at the newly established Marion Art Center – and was hooked. She became a volunteer at the MAC, served on the exhibition committee, and soon became president. In 1985, Wendy became its first Executive Director, a position she held for the next 25 years.

Wendy credits her college years at Wells College in Aurora, New York with helping to foster and deepen her passion for the creative arts, as well as developing in her the ability to do whatever she set her mind to. At Wells, a women’s college, Wendy says that “there were no men around, so we did everything ourselves: we wrote plays, acted in them, made costumes, and built the sets.” Even to this day, Wendy describes herself: “I’m a backstage person – hammer and nails. I could take apart a floodlight and fix it.”

This “can-do” attitude plus her love of the arts led Wendy to develop countless music programs, creative projects, activities for children, youth, and adults, art exhibitions, and theatrical presentations at the Marion Art Center that have enhanced the cultural life of Marion for more than three decades. She created a summer program for children and called it Art Camp, (but changed it to Art Start – you can ask her to explain why), which offered Arts and Crafts, Singing and Dancing, and Theater. It is still going strong today. Wendy shared her artistic skills helping design floats in Marion’s July 4th parades. She and Trudy Kingery became the Marion Art Center liaisons to the Buzzards Bay MusicFest; the two friends also conceived of a Halloween Parade for the town’s children under the auspices of the Marion Art Center. As Wendy tells it, the costume parades became so popular with town children and adults that eventually there was no one to watch the parade – they were all in it!

An Art History major in college, Wendy has become the leading expert on the work of Marion summer resident Cecil Clark Davis, whose paintings once hung at Tabor Academy, and currently grace the walls of the Marion Art Center, several private homes, the Sippican Historical Society, and here, all around you, at the Marion Music Hall. You may recognize several of the portraits, but Wendy is responsible for the fact that we can now identify ALL the people in these paintings, through her meticulous and years-long research into the memorabilia of Cecil Clark Davis. She is also responsible for donating these valuable research materials to the SHS for preservation. And she literally “wrote the book” on Cecil Clark Davis.

After retiring from the Marion Art Center, Wendy has continued to engage with the community in creative ways. She has volunteered as a docent at the Sippican Historical Society, greeting visitors and sharing her knowledge of and enthusiasm for Marion. Working with the SHS and former Marion resident Anne von Rosenberg, Wendy is advocating for an exhibit of Cecil Clark Davis’s portraits at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. She joined the Marion Garden Group and enjoys beautifying her assigned corner of Marion. Combining her love of Marion history with her gift for storytelling, Wendy has written and presented a lecture about Elizabeth Taber for several Marion organizations, and in 2020 contributed her knowledge about Marion’s premier philanthropist to the Elizabeth Taber Statue project.

Of her time at the Marion Art Center, Wendy says,
“It was magic – I loved it. Good things happened all the time.” Well, they didn’t just “happen,” Wendy. Your vision, enthusiasm, can-do spirit, and your love of this community made them happen.

Congratulations to Wendy Bidstrup, the 2024 Sippican Historical Society Annual Award recipient for Distinguished Service to Marion.