Leslie Cheek, Jr. Personal Papers (SC-02)

Leslie Cheek, Jr. was the second and longest-tenured Director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. During his 20 year Directorship (1948-1968), he transformed the museum from a regional gem to a museum that operated on the international stage.

Born in Nashville, Cheek was the son of Mabel Wood and Leslie Cheek, Sr., who became rich by investing in the family formula for Maxwell House Coffee. Cheek studied art at Harvard University before taking up architecture at Yale University and Columbia. After graduation, he headed to William and Mary College where he founded and headed up the Department of Fine Arts from 1937-1939. In 1939, he married Richmonder Mary Tyler Freeman, daughter of Pulitzer Prize winning author Douglas Southall Freeman. From 1939-1942, Cheek served in his first Directorship at the Baltimore Museum of Fine Art. He left the museum in 1942 to join the Army Corps of Engineers in WWII.

After the war, he was hired as the Associate Editor of Architectural Forum Magazine and lived in New York City for three years. In 1948, he came to the VMFA as Director, spending 20 years building the collections, endowments, and reputation of the museum. He was known for the Artmobile, a mobile art program which brought the museum's collections all over the state of Virginia, and the Virginia Museum Theatre which opened in 1955 and successfully integrated the performing and visual arts.

After retiring in 1968, Cheek stayed active in the arts, and two books were published about his life and career, "Living by Design" and "Designing for the Arts." In 1967, the Cheeks purchased a mountaintop home named Skylark Farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which they donated to Washington and Lee University in 1977.

Source: The Dictionary of Art Historians

Source: Virginia Commonwealth University's Guide to the Mary Tyler Freeman Cheek McClenahan Papers