Regina Shoolman Slatkin Art Collection Study Room
The Slatkin Study Room is located on the second floor of the Myers Fine Arts Building.
The Slatkin Study Room was dedicated on September 18, 1994 in recognition of Regina Shoolman Slatkin, art scholar of distinction, author, and collector. Mrs. Slatkin’s generous gifts of modern master tapestries, sculpture, decorative arts and other pieces of valuable artwork to the Plattsburgh State Art Museum transformed the environment of the college, allowing students, faculty, staff, and visitors to experience fine art in their daily lives.
Regina Shoolman was born in Austria-Hungary and raised in Québec, graduating from McGill University. She visited Paris on a French government fellowship to study at the Sorbonne and the École des Beaux-Arts, where she became interested in French art. She also studied at the University of Chicago.
When she returned to Canada, Shoolman worked as a journalist on the The Montreal Star and for the Jewish Welfare Board. She also published poetry and collaborated with the ethnologist Marius Barbeau on a government-sponsored project, later made into a book, to collect and translate the folk songs of Quebec.
In 1936, Shoolman married Charles E. Slatkin, a New York schoolteacher, and moved to Manhattan. Mr. Slatkin worked as a liaison between the public schools and the city museums from an office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mrs. Slatkin worked as an editor and for several years as executive director of the Iranian Institute of Art and Archaeology.
In 1959, the couple opened a gallery in their apartment on East 92nd Street, specializing in Old Master drawings and Impressionist painting and sculpture. Their exhibitions were often accompanied by scholarly publications: for example, their 1962 show of Rodin’s sculptures and watercolors was accompanied by a catalog that included essays by art historian Leo Steinberg and Rodin specialist Albert Elsen.
Mrs. Slatkin, who published numerous magazines and other journals, was instrumental in organizing the National Gallery of Art’s 1974 exhibition of Boucher drawings, the first major show of its kind in North America, for which she wrote the catalog introduction and entries. With her husband she wrote The Enjoyment of Art in America: A Survey of the Permanent Collections of Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics, & Decorative Arts in American and Canadian Museums (1942). Her last article, “A Note on a Boucher Drawing,” was published in Master Drawings magazine in 1996.
After her husband’s death in 1977, Mrs. Slatkin became interested in the decorative arts, building a collection of early-American glass that she donated to the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh. She also donated 19th- and 20th-century prints.
