Maine artist and writer Ashley Bryan will be in Philadelphia on Thursday to help the University of Pennsylvania Libraries celebrate the acquisition of his personal archive with a pop-up exhibition and reception, but some in Maine lament the occasion as a lost opportunity to keep an important archive at home.

The Ashley Bryan Center, based on Little Cranberry Island in Maine, where Bryan has lived much of his life, worked out a deal with the Ivy League school’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts to house the bulk of Bryan’s letters, correspondence, books, poetry, drawings, watercolors and paintings that have been part of his island home for decades.

Bryan, 96, lives with relatives in Texas in the winter and will travel to Philadelphia for Thursday’s event, said Nichols Clark, founding executive director of the Ashley Bryan Center. “He’s coming to Philadelphia, which we did not expect. But you know Ashley. He was not going to be denied this wonderful opportunity,” Clark said.

As he did in January when Penn announced the acquisition of the archive, Bryan will participate in an onstage Q&A. Thursday’s reception will include a small, temporary display of items from the archive. Among the items on view will be illustrations and correspondence related to Bryan’s just-published World War II memoir, “Infinite Hope.”

Simon & Schuster published the memoir, which tells of Bryan’s experiences as an African-American soldier in a segregated Army and his first-hand account at Omaha Beach in the days after D-Day. He tells the story with text, archival documents, photos and drawings that he made at the time.

Bryan is a painter, illustrator, poet, puppet-maker and arts philosopher, who is best known for his energy, enthusiasm and his faith in the wonder of childhood. He has illustrated more than 50 children’s books and won numerous awards and honors. He was born in the Bronx and has lived in the village of Isleford on Little Cranberry Island since retiring in 1987 from Dartmouth College. He first came to Islesford in 1946 while attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Thursday’s event, from 5 to 8 p.m., is the first of several planned at Penn that will utilize the archive, said the Kislak Center’s senior curator Lynne Farrington, who grew up in Old Orchard Beach. A larger exhibition will open in February, which will set the stage for a full-scale exhibition of archival material in the near future, she said.

“Right now we’re working to get the archive fully processed so it’s accessible. That’s a big piece of what we need to do at the next stage,” Farrington said. “We are starting with a small exhibition, but we’re thinking bigger and thinking about ways in which this archive intersects with other collections in interesting ways.”

While Thursday’s event is billed as a celebration in Philadelphia, it is being met with some remorse in Maine. Louise Rosen, a longtime Maine arts administrator who created an Ashley Bryan Day event in Lewiston when she directed L/A Arts, said she was disappointed the archive was leaving the state. She described it as a lost opportunity.

“Ashley Bryan has such a deep connection to the state of Maine. It’s obviously been in his life since his time at Skowhegan. It’s had a big impact in his work and one would think has been a source of inspiration,” she said Tuesday. “The idea of Ashley and his work to continue to be associated with the state of Maine would seem to be quite important. The state has a strong reputation in the visual arts and he has been a major contributor to that. Perhaps for some people he’s not thought of in ways that the Wyeths might be, but I think it’s just a matter of time.”

Clark said the decision to move the archive out of state was based on Penn’s ability to integrate the collection in studies across disciplines, the archive’s availability to graduate-level researchers and its promised public access and digitization. Penn pledged to do more with it than any other institution that expressed interest, he said.

The Ashley Bryan Center offered the archive to Penn as a gift without financial considerations, Clark said.

“Ashley wanted everything to stay in Maine and we wanted to honor that. But as you started to probe the archive and saw the breadth of the people who had come across his horizon and his own profound thinking, which appears not just in letters, but in diaries and things such as that, it had to go to a research institution where it would be mined by both undergraduate and more significantly by graduate students,” Clark said. “That’s what started us on the hunt for major institutions along the eastern seaboard.”

Both Colby College and the College of the Atlantic were involved in early discussions about the archive, Clark said.

He agreed with Rosen that Bryan is poised for a major star turn, and said Farrington and her colleagues at Penn will help make that happen through exhibitions and symposia and by providing access to the archive to scholars, curators, educators and others.

“They are going to do for Ashley what Ashley is totally disinterested in doing for himself. In five or 10 years, Ashley will emerge as a remarkable artistic, cultural and intellectual figure of the 20^th century,” Clark predicted.

In an interview earlier this year, Bryan said he felt gratified and relieved that his archive was going to a place where it can be shared for generations. “You can’t help but feel good that the work you are doing is deemed important enough that it will be preserved and open to anyone who is interested in working with it,” he said.

In an email, Maine artist Daniel Minter, a director of the Ashley Bryan Center, wrote, “It would have been great to have the materials here in Maine. That was Ashley’s preference. No place here was able to take it in a meaningful way.”

Much of the archive will remain in Maine at Bryan’s home, which he returns to each spring, and Maine museums and institutions will have access to the archive, Clark said. “Virtually everything” that has been physically transferred so far has come from Bryan’s drawers and files, Clark said. His island home remains full of books, sculptures, toys, trinkets and other physical artifacts from his artistic life, and “we are mindful that Ashley will live with the things he sees on a daily basis,” Clark said.

Minter noted that the Storyteller Pavilion next to Bryan’s home on the island houses some of Bryan’s puppets, and the sea glass windows that he made for the island will remain.

Nonetheless, Rosen sees Pennsylvania’s gain as Maine’s loss. “I feel Ashley is deserving of even greater recognition than he has had. He is a force of nature, an inspiration and a guide. Whatever may contribute to amplifying that is great, but it feels as though, organically, it would have made so much sense for it to be connected to Maine,” she said.

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