As a child, Edie Kellar Mahaney ’52 never imagined that her love of painting, which began in her junior high art club in Springfield, Ohio, would lead to an art gallery named in her honor.

“I was absolutely and truly very honored,” Mahaney recalled following the dedication of the gallery located in the Munce Art Center, May 9, 2003, in Zionsville, Ind., which she founded in 1981 and served as its executive director from 1984 until her retirement in 2000. During that time, Mahaney managed to secure six-figure donations and hunt down the painting of Zionsville founder William Zion for the center.

She also served as the director of the Patrick Henry Sullivan Foundation and became widely known as Zionville’s patron of the arts after she and her husband and their two children moved to the town in 1970. Even now, Mahaney consistently displays a contagious enthusiasm for her craft, encouraging those she meets to “pursue the fine arts to the fullest, grow with them, even if not in interest then in pleasure because they give you so much.”

She credits her love for the arts to her Wittenberg experience and the $100 art scholarship that allowed her to attend the college. “It catapulted me,” said Mahaney, reflecting on her four years and her mentor, Ralston Thompson, former art department chair. Thompson has a riveting personality, she remembered, and he always went the extra mile, including introducing a group of arts students to the M.F.A. program at The Ohio State University, where Mahaney earned her master’s degree.

“Wittenberg prepared me so much,” Mahaney said.

Today, her self-portrait titled Carrot Top, above, along with portraits of her parents inspired by 1920s photographs and various abstract images, including one that pays tribute to Sept. 11 and one that captures Recitation Hall, fill her second-floor studio above her garage in Zionsville.

“I’m so lucky,”she recently told the Indianapolis Star. “I’m doing what I love.”

— Karen Alzner ’04