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When Joyce Sommers was in the third grade, her class did an art exercise in which they put together complementary colors. She paired orange and brown, which, she realized years later, was an attempt to duplicate something she had seen in a National Geographic magazine-orange lipstick on a Jamaican woman.
Her teacher gave her a failing grade. "I decided then and there I wasn't an artist," Sommers recalled.
The experience had a black-and-blue effect on her self-esteem, so she steered clear of artistic attempts for nearly 30 years. Then in 1972, a friend pushed her into taking classes at the Indianapolis Art League. "It opened up a whole new world for me," Sommers said.
Now, another 30 years later, the Art League has morphed into the Indianapolis Art Center, a 40,000-square-foot community facility where art is created and displayed. And the primary craftswoman behind the success of the Art Center is Sommers, who serves as its president and executive director.
How she got there is a case study in following one's passion. "My career is total serendipity," Sommers said, "or, as they say, 'If you see the door open, walk through it.' Each step led to the rest."
Sommers, 67, said she didn't have any career direction in mind when she got her liberal arts degree from Indiana University. She married young and started having babies right away. She worked off and on as a dental assistant, then later as a secretary for UNICEF in
Indianapolis, her hometown.
A couple of years after she began taking classes at the Art League, Sommers felt she should give something back to the organization, so she joined its board. The league was outgrowing its space at 31st and Pennsylvania streets at the time, so the board started a fund-raising campaign.
Sommers said she knew nothing about fund raising, but one of her mentors wanted her to take on a major part of the campaign, so she did because of her passion for the organization. They raised $300,000 and built the first Art League facility at the Art Center's current site at the north end of Broad Ripple.
"As we moved in, I became president of the board, and six months later, I became the first executive director part...