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Anita Kenerson, patron and museum teacher
By CRAIG BASSE, Times Obituaries Editor
ST. PETERSBURG -- Anita Kenerson, a popular teacher at the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts and an organizer of the museum's Stuart Society, has died at home. In failing health for more than a year, she died Tuesday (April 1, 2003) at the Westminster Shores retirement community. The cause was heart related, said her husband, David. Her age was not announced. For 22 years, she taught "The History of Art" and "Modern Art" to hundreds of adult students at the museum. After 86 courses, she retired in 1997. Usually advertised only by word of mouth, her courses, which she limited to 10 to 12 students, were always filled and had waiting lists. "I enjoyed teaching, but I just felt like 86 courses was enough," she said at the time of her retirement. She later carried out research for the museum's docents, headed a book-purchasing committee and oversaw thousands of the museum's reproductions used in the local schools. A past president of the museum's fundraising Stuart Society, she is credited with suggesting to philanthropist Margaret Acheson Stuart, who almost single-handedly created the museum, the forming of a guild to support it. From what was essentially a small committee, the Stuart Society was born in 1962; the museum opened three years later. She and her husband also underwrote construction costs for the Kenerson Library at the museum and bought some of the library's first books. Born in Jersey City, N.J., she received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Adelphi University and a master's degree in psychology from Columbia University. She worked at psychiatric hospitals in New Hampshire and Iowa. With a minor in art at Columbia, she later studied at the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania and took University of South Florida graduate courses at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. She and her husband, a hospital administrator and university professor, and their children moved here from Gainesville in 1956. She was a member of St. Matthew's Episcopal Church and St. Anthony's Hospital Auxiliary. Survivors besides her husband include a son, David R. Kenerson Jr., Norfolk, Va.; a daughter, Martha Lynne Kenerson, Chappaqua, N.Y.; and three grandchildren. John S. Rhodes, East Chapel, is in charge of arrangements. -- Information from Times files was used in this obituary.
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