Maureen Jane Johnson Hickey, 86, longtime resident of Great Barrington and Naples, Fla., died on January 8, 2025, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease while under hospice care in Lee.
Born on November 27, 1938, in Dayton, Ohio, the daughter of William Jerome Johnson and Marie Margaret Lucid, Maureen grew up in Goshen, Ind. She was a 1960 graduate of Marymount College in Tarrytown, N.Y., and studied abroad at Royal Holloway College in Surrey, England.
Maureen met her husband Paul Joseph Hickey in Boston on a blind date when she was a social worker for the Catholic Charities Bureau. They were married in Maureen’s hometown of Goshen on June 29, 1963, at St. John’s Catholic Church. They moved to Wayland, Mass., a suburb of Boston, to raise their four children while Paul worked for Hillenbrand Industries. They moved back to Paul’s hometown of Great Barrington in 1979.
Having just completed her master’s degree in humanities from Simmons College in Boston, Maureen launched her lifelong career as an art educator in the Berkshires, and she went on to achieve a doctorate in museum education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she specialized in American artists of the Hudson River School. As the founding director of education at the Berkshire Museum for over 10 years, Maureen initiated new programs for adults and children, lectured, and led countless tours to art exhibitions in Boston and New York. Based on her doctorate research, Maureen curated the exhibition “A Return to Arcadia: Nineteenth Century Berkshire County Landscapes” for the Berkshire Museum in 1990. The exhibition presented groundbreaking research into the ways the burgeoning 19th-century community of artists and writers were deeply inspired by the beauty of the Berkshire Hills. The exhibition drew heavily from the Berkshire Museum’s own significant collection of 19th-century paintings.
In the 1990s, Maureen founded the Berkshire Art Gallery, which showcased contemporary Berkshire landscape artists, and she continued to curate, lecture, lead art-themed travel tours, and consult as an art historian. Most notably, she co-curated “A Walk in the Country: Inness and the Berkshires” for the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown in 2005, highlighting the importance of the Berkshire landscape to the famed 19th-century artist George Inness.
Maureen was not only passionate about art history but was also a champion of all the arts in the Berkshires. She supported many cultural organizations, serving as a board member and volunteer on countless committees for places and causes that she believed in, such as the Berkshire Botanical Garden, the Southern Berkshire Literacy Network, the Berkshire Bach Society, Recording for the Blind, Jacob’s Pillow, Tanglewood/Boston Symphony Association of Volunteers, Elder Services, Chesterwood, Fairview Hospital, the Mason Library, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and St. Peter’s Church. Maureen was also a lifelong sports enthusiast who grew up water skiing on Lake Wawasee in Indiana, golfed and played tennis at the Wyantenuck Country Club and Stockbridge Golf Club, and swam laps and walked the beach every day in Naples.
Paul and Maureen were enthusiastic travelers and created a vast art collection representing every country they visited. They traveled to places such as Australia, New Zealand, China, Russia, Iceland, Greece, South America, Egypt, and Tanzania and never missed an opportunity to travel throughout the U.S. to visit family in California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Washington, D.C. Paul and Maureen retired to Naples, Fla., where they were active with the Naples Botanical Garden and the Naples Philharmonic.
Maureen is survived by her three siblings, William (Bill) Patrick Johnson, Philip Charles Johnson, and Margaret (Peggy) Anne Shirley, and her four children, William (Barbara Forbes) of Boston; Elisabeth (Adam Carter) of Washington, D.C.; Margaret (Gregory Cherin) of South Egremont; and John of Crested Butte, Colo. She also leaves behind her nine grandchildren, Cameron Forbes Hickey (Lauren Carey), Allegra Johnson Hickey, Stewart James Hickey, Charles Carroll Carter II, Emma Isabella Grant, Henry Foxhall Fordyce Grant, Elinor Rose Cherin, Dillan Clair Hickey, and Dahlila Belle Hickey. She was predeceased by her husband Paul Hickey.
There will be a private burial at St. Peter’s Cemetery in Great Barrington, with a memorial service in the spring. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations in Maureen’s memory be sent to support the Education Department of the Berkshire Museum, 39 South St., Pittsfield, MA 02101.
