Centre College announces 2022 faculty retirements

Sheldon Tapley will retire as H.W. Stodghill, Jr. and Adele H. Stodghill Professor of Art, Emeritus. He has taught at Centre throughout his career beginning in 1983. He often paints and draws alongside his students in the studio. “Working with students—seeing their skill, creativity, and confidence grow—is very rewarding. I stay in touch with many alumni. It is a great pleasure watching their careers develop.”

At Centre, he has been awarded the Kirk Prize for excellence in teaching, the Cantrell Endowed Professorship and the Stodghill Endowed Professorship. Tapley was honored as the Martha & Merrit de Long Memorial Artist-in-Residence at The Evansville Museum, and the Kentucky Arts Council awarded him an Al Smith Fellowship.

“Sheldon Tapley revitalizes, indeed, electrifies the still life genre by combining aspects of contemporary life with painterly constructs derived from the history of Western art.”

From Master of the Not-So-Still Still Life, by Daniel Brown; The Artist’s Magazine, May 2012.

Distinguished New York gallerist Peter Tatistcheff described Tapley’s paintings as having “a magical believability.” The artist’s exhibitions at Tatistcheff Gallery established him as painter of national reputation, whose art is in public and private collections across the country. His works have been reviewed in The New Yorker and published in major articles in American Artist and The Artist’s Magazine.

“Tapley masterfully blends the discipline of a hard-earned classical technique with a vision that is thoroughly modern and personal,” wrote Bill Creevy in American Artist. The artist’s pastel, Jury Rig, was on the cover of the magazine. Kentucky Educational Television has also featured him in the documentary series Looking at Painting and an episode of Kentucky Life.

Museum solo exhibitions of Tapley’s art have been presented by The Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento and The Evansville Museum. His paintings and drawings have been shown at public institutions across the country, including The Arkansas Arts Center, The Naples Museum of Art, Manifest Gallery, The National Arts Club, The Southern Ohio Museum, University of Kentucky Art Museum and the Grinnell College Museum of Art. Tapley is an exhibiting member of Zeuxis, an association of still-life painters who curate touring shows for museums and universities.

Tapley has been represented by commercial galleries nationwide: Tatistcheff in New York City; Harris Gallery in Houston, Texas; Linda Schwartz Gallery in Lexington, Kentucky; Jerald Melburg Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina; M.A. Doran Gallery in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Cincinnati Art Galleries in Ohio. Harris Gallery and Linda Schwartz Gallery presented the earliest solo exhibitions of Tapley’s art.

Tapley was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in 1959, to British parents, and raised in Europe and North America.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate holding a 1980 B.A. from Grinnell College, Tapley received an M.F.A. from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1983.

Philip Lockett will retire as professor of physics, emeritus. He has taught full-time at Centre since 1990 and had prior teaching assignments at the College from 1971-72 and 1980-84. In 2005, he received the Kirk Award for Teaching Excellence.

Lockett’s early research at Centre involved modeling astrophysical masers, which are like lasers but utilize radio waves instead of light. Successful modeling of the masers allows the physical conditions in the regions where they are formed to be determined. This research involved Centre students. His most recent research has been to support Bruce Rodenborn, associate professor of physics, and his students have worked to model bacterial swimming using macroscopic robots.

Lockett has received grants from the Kentucky Space Grant Consortium and Kentucky EPSCoR to purchase computer hardware and software essential for the conduct of his research. He has presented the results of his research at meetings of the American Astronomical Society and the Kentucky Association of Physics Teachers. He has published the results of his maser research in the Astrophysical Journal.

Lockett received his B.A. in physics from Centre College, an M.S.E. degree in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Kentucky. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Anne Lubbers, who died unexpectedly on Mar. 4, 2022, was awarded emeritus status posthumously. She was a professor of biology at Centre College, where she had taught since 1993.

A plant ecologist, Lubbers had special expertise on factors affecting seed production. Her work was published in professional journals, including the American Journal of Botany and Ecology.

Lubbers provided her Centre students opportunities for collaborative research. For several years, she studied reproductive success in wild ginseng. One or two students worked with her each summer as they visited eight forest populations throughout Kentucky of this increasingly uncommon species. One of those students, Karen Trowbridge, subsequently was awarded third place in the biology poster competition at the joint annual meeting of the Tennessee and Kentucky Academy of Sciences in the fall of 2001.

Lubbers said of such fieldwork for students: “Whatever field our students go on to pursue, they gain some really important basic skills in this program—how to be organized in collecting data, the importance of being careful when recording numbers or doing lab work, how to interpret the information obtained, how to use a computer for graphing and—especially—how to think logically and concisely.”

Lubbers was a member of the Botanical Society of America, the Kentucky Native Plant Society, the Ecological Society of America, and the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society. She held a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and a Ph.D. from Duke University.