Julia Agnes Washington Bond, 99, whose son Julian became chairman of the NAACP, died Friday in Atlanta.
Julia Bond was born in Nashville, Tenn. Like her parents and siblings, she attended Fisk University in Nashville and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1929, according to Carl M. Williams Funeral Home.
During her senior year, she met Horace Mann Bond, one of the few black teachers at the college. They married in 1929.
Horace Bond later became dean of the school of education at Atlanta University. As the university’s first lady, Julia Bond traveled to Europe and Africa, attending the inauguration of Kwame Nkrumah as Ghana’s first president in 1957. She also earned a degree in library science from the college at age 56 and was circulation librarian at the school’s library for seven years. She retired in 2000 at age 92.
At age 89, Julia Bond published “The Star Creek Papers,” a journal detailing the lives of poor black farm families among whom she and her husband lived in Louisiana during several months in 1934. She also contributed to an oral history published at Spelman College last year. Horace Mann Bond Sr. died in 1972.
Abram “Al” Lerner, 94, the first director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, died Wednesday in Canaan, Conn.
Lerner was a longtime art adviser to the museum’s founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, a Latvian immigrant who made his fortunes on Wall Street and as an owner of uranium mines. Hirshhorn opened the doughnut-shaped museum on the National Mall in 1974 with more than 6,000 modern sculptures and paintings.
As museum director, Lerner helped transform the private art collection into a national gallery of modern art that became among the most popular in the U.S. The museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution.
Lerner was a native of New York City and a graduate of New York University. He was an apprentice muralist for the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency to help artists and writers. By 1947, he was director of ACA Gallery in Manhattan.
Lerner studied art in Europe in the mid-1950s and, after a brief show of his paintings, began to serve as Hirshhorn’s private curator. Having gained Hirshhorn’s confidence, he was placed in charge of the planned museum and sculpture garden.
After retiring in 1984, Lerner moved from Washington to his summer home in Southampton, N.Y. He resumed painting and had a one-man show at the prestigious Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, N.Y.
