N air of serenity wafts from Beverly Jones Cox ’67 as she glides down the hushed halls of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, where she is director of exhibitions. She is leading us to see Gilbert Stuart’s famous “Lansdowne” portrait of George Washington (the original, not the copy at the White House), which the museum recently purchased for $20 million. Along the way her guests stop at Sen. Hillary Clinton’s recently hung portrait as first lady. Cox agrees that it flatters Mrs. Clinton, then nods toward a nearby portrait of a 19th-century predecessor, Dolley Madison, who was from Greensboro, you know.

More intriguing facts fall from Cox as we turn down another hall, making it clear that she knows every inch of the gallery and the story behind many of its 19,400 historic portraits. She should, because Cox has worked here nearly 40 years, since graduating from East Carolina in 1967. Within seven years she was named curator of exhibitions and served in that role until 2000 when she became responsible for all exhibitions and collections management. She’s mounted more than 300 exhibits and developed a reputation for staging shows that pull in gobs of visitors.

You could say that the museum itself is her most recent show. It’s housed in the circa 1836 Old Patent Office building above the Gallery Place Metro Station at Eighth and F streets NW. The imposing edifice (left), with a portico modeled after the Parthenon, reopened last summer after a five-year renovation and again looks like the structure Walt Whitman praised as “the noblest of Washington buildings.” During the renovation, most all of the gallery’s pieces remained on loan or in traveling exhibits. For the official reopening last July, Cox finally had the pleasure of displaying the collections in a state-of-the-art facility.

The National Portrait Gallery is much more than the only job Cox has ever had; it’s been her life, she says later when we sit at the coffee shop. Her desk was in the same room in this building for more than 20 years, in the area where Whitman himself toiled as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1860s. Revolutionary War portraits now hang in that space.

“I raised my kids here; they are as familiar with the gallery as their own home,” she says. Years of staff Christmas parties were held here in the coffee shop, which used to be the library. “I can still picture my youngest playing over there.” The gallery provided a warm, inspiring focus for family life as she and husband Norman Cox ’66, whom she met at East Carolina, raised two daughters. The massive columns guarding the gallery entrance seemed to block out unsettling strife from the White House and the Capitol just blocks away.

After all these years together, the institution and Cox have come to look like each other. The gallery reflects her personality and taste in a thousand ways, large and small. There also is a striking resemblance between the women in the historic portraits gracing the gallery walls and Cox’s own appearance. Her face is unlined and untanned, just like Dolley and many of the other figures smiling down from the gallery walls.

'I raised my kids here; they are as familiar with the gallery as their own home.'

Living the revolution

The peace and quiet found in a museum was exactly what Cox craved after college. Like the rest of the ’60s Generation, she experienced Vietnam, three assassinations and graduated into a nation in flames. Growing up in suburban Washington, where her parents and many neighbors worked for the federal government, meant she felt those stings more than most.

It’s not surprising, then, that Cox identifies her years at East Carolina with national scares and tragedies, beginning with the Cuban missile crisis her freshman year. “I remember getting a call from my mother on the pay phone in the hall at Umstead. She worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and wanted to warn me to be extra careful and maybe pack a bag because we might go to war with Russia. I remember sitting on the dorm floor crying because I thought we were going to be bombed.”

President John F. Kennedy’s assassination placed a pall over the campus her sophomore year. “We thought it was the end of the world. A friend and I drove down to Emerald Isle to get away from it all.” They walked the beach and cried to the stars. Junior year, she remembers lining up at Wright Auditorium to give blood for ECU boys dying in a place people were just becoming familiar with—Vietnam. And then there were those awful months after graduation when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were gunned down.

“I came home after graduation and interviewed at the Smithsonian. They said they had a job at the new portrait gallery, which was opening in six months. I got a position as an historian writing labels for the opening exhibition. A few months later I was at lunch when the waiter brought news that Dr. King had been shot, and the city had turned violent. I raced back to the gallery in time to watch as all of Seventh Street was being burned and looted. I had to get through a rioting mob in order to get out of the building that evening. The next day the National Guard was posted all over the area. It was very frightening.”

Cox threw herself into her work inside the comforting walls of the museum. She quickly learned the velvet ropes process of staging exhibitions. Each one requires between two and four years of planning, she says. “Most of the work is done in the field, researching the pieces of art, where they are, who owns them, arranging for them to be loaned to us. You have to do all these necessary steps for up to 200 pieces in each exhibit.”

With a couple of hundred exhibits under her belt, Cox began thinking of ways to broaden the public’s perception of the gallery as just the place with all the portraits of the presidents and first ladies. One idea she had was a show entitled If Elected, a 1972 exhibition of portraits of all the candidates who ran for president and lost. Critics initially sniffed at the idea but later conceded that the show added new shades of understanding of presidential campaigns.

“That was a lot of fun, and it did generate a lot of discussion that some of those losers—Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern—really contributed to our understanding of what America is.”

She topped that in 1983 with the Champions of American Sports exhibit, remembered as probably the only time Bobby Hull’s hockey stick has hung in a museum. “It was one of the best exhibits we’ve ever done. I got to travel all over the country to different sports halls of fame collecting material. I got to meet such interesting people—Bill Russell, Red Auerbach, Johnny Unitas, Arthur Ashe.

“It was one of our most popular exhibits. It attracted an audience of people who might not normally come to a museum. President Reagan liked it. He invited us to the White House for lunch.” Even the New York Times art critic was impressed after first wondering if “Wilma Rudolph’s track shoes can compete with van Gogh.”


Meeting her husband

Beverly Cox knew only one other person—an older girl from her hometown of Arlington, Va.—when she enrolled at East Carolina in 1962. She was pleasantly surprised to meet several other students from the Washington area on campus. One was Norman Cox, a Lambda Chi Alpha who served in student government and helped coach the JV swim team under Coach Ray Martinez. Norman came to East Carolina with his twin brother, Tom.

Norman and Beverly hit it off immediately and were married in 1966—her junior year, his senior year. He majored in psychology; after taking a year off, she earned a teaching degree in American history while student teaching at Robersonville High School.

Norman was hired as a special education teacher at Beverly’s old high school in Arlington, “which was a little awkward at first because here she was married to a teacher at her old high school and being around her old teachers who remembered her as ‘Bad Bev,’” Norman laughs.

Norman soon took a better-paying job with a federal agency and eventually worked for more than 30 years at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., retiring in 1997 as deputy director of personnel. During those years the family put down roots in Arlington and raised daughters Megan and Cara. Cox, who barely stands five foot three, volunteered as a Brownie leader, soccer coach and PTA president.

Megan graduated from UNC Chapel Hill and then the physician assistant program at Duke University. She works for the state at a public health clinic in Durham. Cara inherited her mother’s art sense and obtained a degree in graphic design from the Corcoran School of Art in Washington after first attending N.C. State. She now works in Philadelphia.

“We’re down in North Carolina pretty often to visit Megan, and we’ve stopped at Greenville several times over the years on the way to the beach,” says Norman, who does a lot of volunteer work with hospice. “We’ve always had a dream of coming back to East Carolina, having a house at the beach. Some of my fraternity brothers still live there, people like Chuck Humphrey.”

Beverly also has maintained a friendship with former North Carolina Sen. Robert Morgan, who serves on the gallery’s advisory commission.

Even after 40 years of marriage, Norman is Beverly’s biggest fan. “She is an extremely bright woman, a kind woman, and one of those success stories of people who came out of East Carolina and did well. She is a classic story of the person who started at the bottom and worked her way to the top.”


The end of the tour

Beverly Cox senses that it soon will be the right time to leave the only job she’s ever had. The National Portrait Gallery is firmly established as a pivotal force in American art and is now ensconced in one of the Capital’s most beautiful buildings. There’s a sense of mission accomplished.

“When we’re talking about new shows I find myself saying ‘we’ve done that’ or ‘that isn’t the way we did things in the old days.’ So, it’s almost time to wrap it up and let some new blood come into the museum. But I’m having a hard time letting go.”

She says this standing on the ornate tiled floor of the vaulted gallery in the main hall. “Guests danced on this floor during Lincoln’s second inaugural ball,” she says, adding softly after a pause that “maybe I’ll retire in the spring.”

Then she brightens and asks her guests if we’ve seen Joseph Duplessis’ portrait of Benjamin Franklin, which graces the new $100 bill. Perhaps we’d enjoy Andy Warhol’s portrait of Michael Jackson or Jo Davidson’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. They’re right this way.



How Beverly Buys Art

What does the director of collections and exhibitions for the National Portrait Gallery actually do? Sometimes she just answers the phone and knows the right thing to say.

Beverly Cox’s ringing phone back in 2000 is what started a cascade of events which resulted in the gallery obtaining ownership, at a price of $20 million, of what critics agree is the most seminal piece of American art, Gilbert Stuart’s famous “Lansdowne” portrait of George Washington. It had been on permanent display at the gallery since 1968 but actually was owned for generations by a British noble family.

“I got a call from the owner, Lord Rosebery, saying that he needed to sell the painting to cover the costs of his farms,” Cox recalls. “My heart sunk at the news [that he wanted $20 million] because I couldn’t imagine that we would ever be able to raise the money in the few short months he gave us. Fortunately, our director went on the Today show making an appeal for support—school children from all around the country sent in their dollars—and within a few days the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas agreed to buy the portrait for the nation.”

And what did you do at the office today?