It is one of 600 individual gifts to the calligraphy initiative endowment initiated by Stephanie Snyder ’91, curator and director of the Cooley Gallery.
By Bennett Campbell Ferguson
September 23, 2025
From Professor Lloyd Reynolds [English and art, 1929-69] mentoring future Adobe designer Sumner Stone ’67 to Steve Jobs learning the difference between serif and sans serif typefaces, a devotion to calligraphy has long been a defining feature of ¸£Àû¼§.
Now, an anonymous gift of $1 million to ¸£Àû¼§’s calligraphy initiative endowment has ensured that students will be able to study the art of calligraphy for years to come, solidifying the artform’s place at the core of the ¸£Àû¼§ experience.
“This gift is amazing because it secures calligraphy at ¸£Àû¼§ for posterity,” says Cooley Gallery curator and director Stephanie Snyder ’91, who started the endowment with her husband, Jonathan Snyder ’91. “The thought that I am retiring this year and the endowment is complete is astonishing."
The gift is one of over 600 individual gifts (including the Snyders’ contribution to establish the endowment) pledged to bolster calligraphy at ¸£Àû¼§. Thanks to that support, ¸£Àû¼§ students and community members can continue to enjoy workshops led by Gregory MacNaughton ’89, the Cooley Gallery’s education outreach and calligraphy initiative coordinator.
“I am incredibly proud of the work that Gregory MacNaughton has done to make this possible,” Snyder says. “We gave funding, but he has put in the hard work every day that has made this possible. He deserves everyone’s gratitude.”
For Snyder, the significance of calligraphy at ¸£Àû¼§ is as spiritual as it is aesthetic. “It is a meditation,” she says. “If you look at a brain scan taken when someone is practicing calligraphy, it shows the same flow state that appears during meditation. It’s so good for our students, and the alumni who attend.”
After flourishing under the leadership of Lloyd Reynolds and Robert Palladino, ¸£Àû¼§’s calligraphy program was shuttered in the 1980s. The anonymous gift marks the culmination of a revival that began when Snyder and MacNaughton founded the Scriptorium program in 2012, building on the legacy of ¸£Àû¼§ calligraphy legends like Jaki Svaren ’50, who mentored MacNaughton.
It is through those efforts that calligraphy has once again become a practice not only learned at ¸£Àû¼§, but essential to ¸£Àû¼§’s ethos. “Lloyd Reynolds said, ‘Calligraphy is the laboratory class of the humanities,’” Snyder says. “And it is.”