Leslie Greene Bowman, AS '81M, doesn't hesitate for an instant when asked about her new job as director and CEO of Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.

"When a call came about this position, it felt like the Mother Church saying, 'Would you like to come home?'" Bowman says. "It was a magical opportunity, the kind of thing that comes along once in a lifetime."

Bowman, who grew up in Ohio and Los Angeles, has spent most of her professional career working on the West Coast, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1980 to 1997 and, most recently, at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

She becomes head of Winterthur Oct. 1.

"For me, as a specialist in early American decorative arts, the leadership of Winterthur marks the pinnacle of my career," Bowman says.

The Winterthur Museum houses the premier collection of decorative arts made or used in America between 1640 and 1860. Each year, Winterthur attracts upward of 200,000 visitors. The museum's more than 89,000 objects include furniture, textiles, paintings, prints, pewter, silver, ceramics, glass, needlework and brass. In addition to the 175 period rooms in the one-time country estate of the late Henry Francis du Pont, Winterthur has 22,000 square feet of display space in its galleries, which opened in 1992.

The museum's 966 acres of land also include a 60-acre garden of native and exotic plants. The Louise du Pont Crowninshield Research Building houses more than 72,000 books and approximately 500,000 manuscripts, microfilms, periodicals and photographs related to pre-1920 American art. It attracts scholars from all over the world.

Bowman will oversee an annual budget of $17.5 million and the management of 500 employees, a good 50 percent of them part-time. She also has been charged with boosting the museum's recognition.

"The biggest thing I hope to accomplish is to boost Winterthur's national profile, both in the popular mind and in the American museum landscape. Winterthur is still a bit of a sleeping giant. You say its name in museum circles, and everyone responds with the utmost respect. It has a reputation for such impeccable quality and commitment to not only its collections but also its graduate programs and its activities," Bowman says.

"But, Winterthur doesn't yet have the mainstream profile that it could, in terms of its interaction with other museums and its exhibition programs, which are still fledgling. There's a tremendous opportunity to raise the popular consciousness about Winterthur across the country. Particularly when you get west of the Mississippi, if you say the name 'Winterthur,' probably six or seven people out of 10 don't know what you're talking about."

W. L. Lyons Brown Jr., chairman of Winterthur's board of trustees, describes Bowman as a skilled and charismatic leader and says she "is ideally qualified to lead Winterthur into the 21st century."

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bowman most recently was head curator of decorative arts and assistant director of exhibition programs. During her tenure, she curated several exhibitions, lectured internationally and published two catalogs in addition to numerous articles.

Her challenge at the National Museum of Wildlife Art was to broaden the focus and improve the professional standards of the young museum, whose holdings since its 1987 opening had consisted largely of the wildlife art collection of one couple. The museum looked to Bowman to bring the museum to the next level, to make it a nationally recognized and respected art museum.

"I reinstalled all the collections. I worked with the staff to refine the mission statement and help them understand how they fit into that. I went into almost every department to fine-tune what they needed to know to ratchet up the bar and raise the institution's profile and standards," Bowman explains.

She also diversified funding sources and refocused collection efforts beyond the original focus on North American, mammal-oriented works. Now, the museum is concentrating more on a historical perspective and including European and American paintings, sculpture and works on paper. The pieces currently range from a 15th-century engraving by Albrecht D¨urer, which depicts St. Jerome in the landscape with his attendant lion, to a Jamie Wyeth painting.

"What I think I succeeded at very well in a short time [at the National Museum of Wildlife Art] was creating a vision, providing the leadership, galvanizing not only the staff but the board and particularly the major acquisition funding sources around that vision, and really moving with it. The institution is, by all accounts, a different one from what it was before," Bowman says.

Though the two museums differ in size and focus, Bowman says she hopes to draw on her directorship in Wyoming to help bring Winterthur to its full potential. Among the goals that most excite Bowman is the prospect of taking Winterthur's "embryonic" exhibition program and increasing the number of both the traveling exhibitions launched by Winterthur and the exhibitions brought to Wilmington from elsewhere.

"There's a wonderful opportunity here to grow the exhibition program, to refine it, to network it with other museums, to make it a powerful instrument in the community," Bowman says.

First on the agenda, however, is getting to know her staff and the museum better and settling her family into its new home. Bowman is married to Cortland Neuhoff and is the mother of Haley Neuhoff. An avid equestrian, she also hopes to make time for riding. Last year, Bowman was a regional champion in three-day eventing, a contest she describes as similar to a triathlon for horse and rider.

-Theresa Gawlas Medoff, AS '94M