No Place Like Home

Lynette Korenic says she’s always known what she wanted to be: an art librarian. What she didn’t always know, however, was where she wanted to be: Madison. And that’s curious, because she’s spent most of her life here.

Though she was born in Berwyn, Illinois, Korenic moved to Wisconsin’s capital at a young age when her father, an architect, took a job with Flad Architects. She found her passion early in life.

“I was always into art,” she says. “I was enthralled by it. But I was also attracted to interdisciplinary study.”

Korenic studied art through the School of Education, but teaching was never her objective. She quickly added master’s degrees in art history and in fine arts, as well as in library science, with the intention of being an art librarian. But there were few art librarian jobs in Madison, and those that existed were filled. So while she was finishing her last master’s degree, she began a fifteen-year odyssey that would take her around the country.

In 1982, she landed a position as an art librarian at Indiana University in Bloomington, and two years later moved on to a similar position at the University of California-Santa Barbara. While there, she enrolled in doctoral studies, eventually earning a PhD in art history with a dissertation on Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ceramicist Susan Frackelton.

But in 1999 — again before her degree was complete — she returned to Madison to take up her current position as the head of the art library housed in the UW’s Chazen Museum of Art.

“I guess I always wanted to be back in Wisconsin,” she says. “I can remember literally crying as I drove back across the Mississippi River.”

She finished her doctorate in 2006, and though she’s back at her original alma mater, Korenic says that six degrees are enough. Still, she continues learning, working to develop her technique with watercolors and writing a book about Frackelton.

J. A.