Alumna Lindy Harris Bruggink ’72 gifts Maryville College with official portrait of its current president
Feb. 7, 2025
After graduating from Maryville College, Lindy Harris Bruggink ’72 felt as if she owed a debt.
During her senior year, she was the recipient of a cash award, and to earn the money, the Art major was required to share her gifts with the College. What she produced, she said, wasn’t exactly something she was thrilled with.
“I did some pen and ink drawings, and I wasn’t very happy with them,” she said. “For years, I felt as if I needed to do something else to give back to the College and make up for that.”
Make up for it she has: Now an award-winning portrait artist who lives in South Alabama, Bruggink recently gifted the College with the official portrait of Maryville College President Bryan Coker, and on Thursday, a ceremony was held to unveil the likeness of the school’s 12th president.
“While I admittedly struggle with the idea of a portrait of myself, I am immensely grateful to Lindy for this remarkable contribution to the College’s history,” Coker said. “I am honored to be memorialized amongst the leaders who have led this venerable institution for over 200 years.”
A later-in-life love
The unveiling took place as part of the spring semester meeting of the Maryville College Board of Directors, and the painting is now on display in the La Dolce Vita Gallery of the Clayton Center for the Arts, alongside other presidential portraits, through Sunday. It’s not the first time an alum has gifted a sitting president with an official portrait: Dr. Samuel Tyndale Wilson (18)78, who served as MC president from 1901 to 1930, received his official portrait from the president of the MC Alumni Association at the time.
After the art display closes, the portrait will be moved to the Lamar Memorial Library inside Thaw Hall, where it will remain alongside those of Coker’s predecessors — including two painted by Dr. Carl Gombert, art professor emeritus who retired at the end of the 2023-24 academic year and whose three decades of service to the College included the portraiture paintings of the 10th (Dr. Gerald Gibson in 2010) and 11th (Dr. Tom Bogart in 2020) presidents.
While Gombert was formally trained as an artist and worked as an active painter and art educator for his entire adult life, Bruggink came to embrace her extraordinary talent later on. Yes, she majored in art, but she followed her sister — Mary Sue Harris Kunz ’70 — to Maryville College, and she initially considered pursuing a career in interior design. After graduation, she was hired as a recruiter for the College, a position she held for two years.
“I went from one thing to another, and it wasn’t until I was 40 and married and our two boys were in school that I actually started painting,” she said. “I’m a Christian, and I felt like the Lord spoke to me and said, ‘I’ve given you a gift, and you’ve wasted it.’ And that made me think, I’d better do something about that! Now, I sort of feel like if I’m not painting, I’m not living. Painting kind of completes me.”
At the time, she and her husband, Eric, lived in Washington, D.C., a city where art courses, classes and schools are plentiful. She began taking classes at the Art League School in Alexandria, Virginia, and she found herself drawn to portraiture more than any other style, she said.
“I like to do landscapes as well, but I’ve always been interested in looking at people’s faces, and especially the color in their faces,” she said. “When I get involved in a painting, I tend to see beauty in every kind of face.”
A career in portraiture
As she grew more experienced as a portrait artist, she also began to fine-tune the process through which she does them. She starts with photographs of the individual, she said, and a friend who worked at the Smithsonian while she lived in Washington taught her the intricacies of proper lighting to best illuminate her subjects. Other connections in the D.C. art scene grew to recognize her talent, and when a representative from the National War College asked around for an artist to paint a portrait of Gen. Colin Powell, who was serving as Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration, Bruggink’s name came up.
“I went with another retired general who knew him from the National War College to meet with Gen. Powell briefly,” Bruggink said. “He thought that I would be taking pictures of him signing books, that it would be more casual, but I told him I really needed to have him standing up. I was only able to take 12 pictures of him, and he was wearing a double-breasted suit, but the National War College (which commissioned the painting) wanted him painted in his uniform to represent the way he looked as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so I had to use my imagination.”
Like many men, Bruggink added, Powell seemed uncomfortable being the subject of a piece of art, but as the painting progressed — the process takes anywhere from two to eight months, she said — he became more invested in the final result. As his likeness began to take shape and Bruggink began working on the more intricate details, he asked for several changes along the way, she added, to capture the exact likeness of a certain medal on his uniform and to change the placement of his hand from inside a pocket to outside.
Other high-profile subjects that Bruggink was commissioned to paint include Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch (“He was a very nice man, very interesting and very powerful,” she said) and Hugh Culverhouse Jr., a former U.S. attorney for the Department of Justice and philanthropist. And in 2022, when she attended her 50th reunion as a Maryville College alumna, she mentioned to Coker that she would be honored to include his among her lengthy list of works. A classmate and friend, Dr. Ward Brooks ’72, helped lobby for her as well, and a couple of years later, the phone rang, and College administrators told Bruggink that they would be honored to accept a presidential portrait of Coker as a gift from her to her alma mater in order to memorialize him alongside his predecessors.
“When I came to do Dr. Coker’s portrait, he wanted it to be outside, in front of Thaw Hall, so we went over there so I could take some photos,” she said. “I don’t usually do paintings outside, and I don’t usually paint buildings, so it was a little more difficult adding Thaw Hall in the background. Plus, there was not enough contrast between the building and his skin tones, so it was a little tricky to have his face stand out with the building behind him.”
“For me, there was no question that I would be outside for the portrait and in front of an older building. I absolutely love our beautiful, historic campus and I love being outside in East Tennessee,” Coker added. “Thaw Hall’s architecture presents a striking backdrop, and I have an affinity for the building’s original donor, William Thaw, a strong proponent of racial integration.”
And in deciding on what to wear for the painting, Coker didn’t hesitate: the garnet president’s gown with orange trim, created for his virtual installation ceremony at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the fall of 2020, was the only choice, he added.
“The College had not traditionally had a designated president’s gown, as many colleges and universities do,” he said. “For me, it was important to have a president’s gown, as there is a special symbolism to setting aside my own doctoral gown from the University of Tennessee and wearing just the colors of Maryville College, to demonstrate that a college president must go completely ‘all in’ for the place you are serving.”
‘Something that will last’
On Thursday, the Maryville College Board of Directors gathered in the William Baxter Lee III Grand Foyer of the Clayton Center for the Arts, alongside Maryville College faculty, staff and students, for the portrait’s unveiling. Wayne Kramer ’74, current board member and former board chair, as well as the grandson of sixth MC President Dr. Ralph Waldo Lloyd (19)15, began with opening remarks, noting that the painting will hang alongside those of the College’s other 11 presidents in the Clayton Center’s La Dolce Vida Gallery through Sunday, Feb. 9, as part of the Maryville College Presidential Portrait exhibit.
With historical context provided by College Archivist Amy Lundell ’06, the exhibit is a collection of which Coker told the crowd he was honored to be a part, noting that the College’s leaders and stewards throughout its 206-year history were a distinguished group all driven by the charge of Rev. Isaac Anderson, the institution’s first president, who urged all who wear the Scots mantle to “do good on the largest possible scale.”
Bruggink, who attended with her husband, was also recognized, and her remarks reflected both her love of painting and of the institution to which she’s maintained a lifelong connection.
“I loved going to Maryville. It was nice to feel like you knew just about everybody on campus, and I had very good friends,” she said. “In fact, one of my friends — Sarah Miller Owens ’72, with whom I worked as a recruiter after graduation — came for the dinner and the unveiling, and just a year or so ago, I went to Cody, Wyoming, to visit Debbie Branch Trotter ’72, another classmate from Maryville that I hadn’t seen in 50 years.
“One of the reasons I started painting was because I was interested in my ancestors, and when I discovered a family tree and saw all those names, I realized that I didn’t know a thing about them. And then I thought, what difference would it make if someone saw my name and there was nothing to connect me with the time in which I lived? But then I realized that if there was something I could do to give some indication of who I was through painting, it would be significant.
“And doing that for Maryville College, I realized, would be the same kind of thing, especially being able to put my name on something that will last always,” she added. “That’s just something that makes me happy that I can put something out there that will last.”
