Endowment renews photographer's ties to MFA

February 1, 2006
The Boston Globe
By Geoff Edgers, Globe Staff

[...]
{Estrellita} Karsh recently stood in the Museum of Fine Arts' study room for prints, drawings, and photographs. She'd come to announce her decision, more than three years after her husband's death, to endow the museum's position of curator of photographs. Anne Havinga, the curator since 2001, assumes the position named for the Karshes.
[...]
Yousuf Karsh, born in 1908, left his native Armenia for Canada as a teenager. He came to Boston in 1928 to serve as an apprentice to photographer John H. Garo. Four years later he returned to Canada, but he always felt a strong connection to Boston and the MFA, where he spent so much time during his early years.
[...]
Though his work is at major museums around the world, Karsh maintained his relationship with Boston. The MFA hosted his first US museum exhibition in 1968 and held another show featuring 120 of his photographs in 1996. The following year, the Karshes moved back to Boston, where he died in 2002. The MFA's annual Karsh Lecture in Photography will feature photographer James Nachtwey on Feb. 8; the event is sold out.

With the endowment gift, the Karshes become ''Great Benefactors" of the MFA, meaning they have given between $2.5 million and $5 million over their lifetime.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.