Content
Stuart P. Embury majored in biological sciences and anthropology at the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1966, and earned a medical degree from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in 1969. He was a family physician in Holdrege for 35 years before retiring in 2006.
He has led teams of volunteer doctors and nurses to Haiti annually for forty years through the nonprofit organization he established, and he has donated to organizations there, including funding a center for malnourished children.
Embury collected more than 11,000 books and exhibition catalogues, considered one of the top five private book collections on American art in the world, and donated it to the university. The Stuart P. Embury MD Library of American Art, part of University Libraries, contains primary material and books covering all major and many minor figures in American art. Anyone studying local and regional art, as well as Great Plains Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Nineteenth-Century Studies, benefits from these materials, which would otherwise not be available.
His collection of the letters of artists, medical professionals, and political leaders, which he researched and wrote about and have been recognized nationally by scholars, will be donated to the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C., to be freely available to the public. He has returned to campus several times to share his expertise in free talks.
Dr. and Mrs. Embury have donated to the Sheldon Museum of Art; the International Quilt Studies Museum; the Center for Great Plains Studies; the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney; the School of Art, Art History and Design (his gift is the only funding that exists for art history graduate students); and the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
“Stuart and Lynn Embury are the best of Nebraska. They are unfailingly kind, thoughtful, knowledgeable and possessed of great personal and professional integrity. Their gifts emphasize their belief in caring for the bodies and minds of young people in the broadest possible sense.”
Ken Price
Researcher and self-proclaimed outsider who grew up in California and studied at Chicago
