Gannett family, First Amendment Museum, topic of Lithgow talk

AUGUSTA – Lithgow Public Library will host Genie Gannett, who will talk about how the Gannett family lived their First Amendment freedoms across four generations, and how she and her sister Terry Gannett Hopkins created the First Amendment Museum.
The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 19, in the library’s Community Meeting Room, 45 Winthrop St.
Gannett is a retired public school art teacher who taught in Maine, Florida, and Alaska. Her first lesson each year was to have students to make small self-

portraits to attach to an “artistic license.” This symbolic “license” helped students understand that they had permission to think outside the box and embrace their freedom of expression. Her graduate field work was centered on interdisciplinary instruction and became the focus of her teaching.
Community engagement has always been an important part of Gannett’s career. She was a founding director of the Friends of Independence Mine in Willow, Alaska, Founder of the Marion County (Florida) Art Association, vice chair of the Ocala (Florida) Municipal Arts Commission, and a former board member of Old Fort Western, Friends of the Blaine House, (Maine’s governor’s mansion,) and Friends of the Maine State Museum. She holds a bachelor’s degree in studio art and a master’s degree in educational administration and is a member of Kappa Pi, the National Art Honorary Society. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Maine at Augusta.