Craigen Weston Bowen, 54; worked in art conservation
Craggy mountain cliffs offered Craigen Weston Bowen stingy toeholds as she scaled sheer walls from Quincy to Yosemite. With similar precision, she made sure ancient works of art survived to be studied by scholars and students.
She brought that same unerring touch to befriending people she encountered at home, work, and in pastimes that ranged from rock climbing to gardening, colleagues and family said.
"Without intention, without any ego, but just because of who she was, she was the center of every universe that she traveled in," said her brother, Frederick W. Weston III of Waterbury, Vt. "She was adored by all her friends, all her colleagues. Her relatives, obviously. She just made things right."
Ms. Bowen, who was 54 and deputy director of the Strauss Center for Conservation at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, died in her Lexington home on March 1, less than a year and a half after being diagnosed with cancer. The Harvard University Art Museums created a fellowship last year to train those who wish to follow in her footsteps.
"She was smart, she was a good craftsperson, but she was truly charismatic," said Marjorie B. Cohn, print curator emerita at the Fogg and a mentor with whom Ms. Bowen served an apprenticeship three decades ago. "Everything she did was inspiring to people for its quality, but she also had a way of bringing people in. In teaching, students would feel it was a joint adventure. It was always a shared enterprise with Craigen and that made it wonderful for everyone."
At Harvard, where she also was the Philip and Lynn Straus conservator of works of art on paper, Ms. Bowen's presence was felt beyond her teaching and technical expertise. Years at the museum gave her a perspective few gained.
"She had an intimate understanding of the way the museum worked," said Henry Lie, director of conservation for the Harvard University Art Museums. "So it was very helpful to get her opinion about any sort of operational or physical detail."
Ruth Craigen Weston grew up in New Jersey and at her family's summer retreat on Great Pond in Maine's Belgrade Lakes region. Like her mother and grandmother, she was named Ruth, but chose to go by her middle name, which she shared with other relatives and ancestors, female and male.
Ms. Bowen studied art and astronomy at Smith College and minored in physics, then began a three-year apprenticeship with Cohn after graduating. At the Fogg Art Museum, she learned the craft of restoration, how to prevent damage to artwork on paper, and ways to ensure that art was safely exhibited, housed, and stored.
"She was so excited by an original piece of art and thought there was so much to learn from the original," Cohn said. "There's always a joke about paper conservators that they see more of the back of a piece of art than they do of the front, and that's true. But there's so much to be learned from the back of works of art."
For two years, Ms. Bowen worked at the Williamstown Regional Art Conservation Laboratory at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.
Then, in 1980, she returned to the Fogg and married Mark Bowen, with whom she had two children, Andrew and Anna. Although their marriage ended in divorce they remained good friends and their children divide their time between their parents' homes in Lexington and Arlington.
"Craigen had absolutely no understanding at all about couples that could not divorce amicably for the good of their children," her brother said.
Within the overlapping circles in her life, family played the key role. At the house in Maine, her brother said, Ms. Bowen organized her children, nieces, nephews, in-laws, and friends in activities as physical as moving rocks and brush or as sedentary as playing cards.
Just as his sister had been an inspiration to him as a child and teenager, Weston said, she became a role model for the next generation.
"One reason my daughter chose Smith College was she took one look at Craigen and said, 'That's what I want to be,' " he said.
A little more than two years ago, Ms. Bowen and James Evans of Watertown became a couple, and their relationship soon faced the challenge of a serious illness.
"The act of devotion that this last year has been for him is something to behold," Weston said. "When she was diagnosed and it looked pretty clear from the start that this was not going to end easily, she asked him not to leave her, and he never did. He adored her, and she, him."
Devotion, friends and family said, was something Ms. Bowen returned to all she loved and nurtured at home and at work.
"She was a very moral person and believed in doing things the right way," Cohn said. "For somebody who had all the practical smarts that she did, she was an idealist, ultimately."
In addition to her children, brother, companion, and former husband, Ms. Bowen leaves her father, Frederick Jr. of Rome, Maine; and her sister, Martha Weston Feldmann of East Greenwich, R.I.
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. today in the Calderwood Courtyard of the Fogg Art Museum. 