Oral history interview with Claire Kelleher, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Claire Kelleher
INTERVIEWER: Linda Danford
DATE: November 20, 1990
[Begin Side A]
LD: Claire, can you tell me when you came to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at
Greensboro] and in what capacity?
CK: I came in September of 1968, and I got here a few days before school opened because that
was the year they changed the visa requirements and it took them a month longer to process
them in London [England]. It just took longer because nothing happened.
LD: And you came here from London or from—?
CK: I came here from London. I was—I had been teaching in England. I got my degree there,
PhD, in London. And so I was hired, and the way they did things in those days, which
actually works out much better than the way they do it now. They use the "old boy" network.
And I was working at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Warburg Institute [University of
London], and I'd go over to Anthony Blunt’s [art historian] office, and the secretary would
say, "Oh, Miss Kelleher, they only write for strange situations." Everybody was afraid to
write to the Courtauld and the Warburg didn’t, so I knew some people. I wrote to Rudy
Wittkower [chairman of department of art history and archaeology] at Columbia [University,
New York, New York], the chairman, and said, "Look, I'm sick and tired of hearing that
people want me [unclear]." And he passed the letter on to Bert Carpenter [professor of art,
director of Weatherspoon Art Gallery], who's a Columbia [University, New York, New
York] person, and that's how it happened. He got a letter from London, and I had to have a
letter for the visa, was about all that was required, except for some fingerprints and a chest x-ray.
And so I wrote about one or two letters, and they'd already interviewed five people from
Columbia. They didn't search very far. Of course, in those days art history, there were certain
institutions you hired people from. You better have your degrees from there. They're not
going to look anywhere else.
And so they were looking for a medievalist and other things, so I came here and
stayed in New York a few days, and then came down. It was in the middle of a drought. And
I stayed at that little motel. It used to be just out there on West Market Street opposite the
university, the Shady Lawn. Stayed for five bucks a night, and it was air conditioned. I came
down by train. He met me at midnight. I like to still take trains in this country. I had thought
I'd stay a year because I didn't know where I was going when I took the job. I thought—and
then I went and checked the McGraw-Hill directories in the Middlesex Library at the
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University of London. And all I could find was a whole bunch of colleges in this town, and I
thought, "What the heck. Oh my God, I'm coming to the old Woman's College [of the
University of North Carolina]." I'd heard about that, even at the University of Chicago
[Illinois]. So I figured it was safe, but I was afraid it was going to be a dry county. I heard
they didn't drink in the South, except bootleg liquor. It scared the wits out of me after being
used to wine in London, so I was surprised they had any library and was stunned to find out
how good the art library was. It has always been a major part of the—over here. That's
because the person who was the art historian here for years, Anne Marie Elizabeth Jastrow
[art professor]—Jastrow they call her here. She was a classical archaeologist from
Heidelberg [Germany], and she and Charles Adams , who also [was] director of the
[Jackson] Library, put together a very good art library. And the library still does favor us. So
one thing and another, I realized suddenly I was in a good art department. Good courses
layed out, but the awful part about this job, and it's worn me out ever since I've been here,
was the slide collection. It was nonexistent. They had big, old lantern slides.
LD: The slide collection?
CK: Well, yes. That's a loose term because they hardly had one. And I got two undergraduates
and we had a photographer and got to work and gradually over the years, with considerable,
mostly undergraduate and graduate help, but it wasted a lot of my time.
LD: Did they put you in charge of that or did you just take it upon yourself?
CK: I assumed that it was "either you do it or else." It was one of those jobs that needed to be
done, and the truth is that some people don't give a shit about this sort of thing. They really
don't. As long as they can get away with the minimum, and the chairman of our department
at that point didn't give a damn. Said he didn't. And I lived nearby, and I was staying until
9:00 [pm] in the evening making slides. Bent over, doing it properly. We had the proper
equipment. At least, I used some of my equipment. And I found out how to do it the
following year, and the result was [unclear] small quality. And over the years I simply
worked on this with as much money as they could get together. You'd buy certain particular
things that are available and try not to get junk. You get the cooperation of your fellows help
with this. So from starting from an absolute trash bin, either the large ones or some cheap
orange ones, we got very good projectors together, the best. We simply built on that. So I'm
always surprised when I meet people twenty years later, and say, (I did just the other day),
"Oh, I enjoyed your course so much in medieval art," and want to throw up because it was
awful. And when I had to show them. Today everything's marvelous. I've traveled a great
deal and done a tremendous amount of photography doing my own work in medieval art.
I've been to Russia, Turkey. I've been all around East Germany as it was then, as it was a
year ago. Everywhere, and so there's been a lot of photography done, but it really was done
here by me.
LD: How large was the slide collection?
CK: We were trying to figure out the other day. I think it must be fifty thousand or more. The
new chairman has really put everything into it. She's an artist, and they've a lot of help. But
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that keeps me busy. I've had a lot of help in the last two years.
LD: Is it computerized?
CK: No. Are you kidding?
LD: But you have one on your desk.
CK: Well, I haven't even used this thing. This is for—I want to use this to write something like
word processing. Oh, gosh, we got these fancy things. So anyway, we got that [unclear] is a
lot of typing and hand labeling [unclear]. I've got some good art stories. So the art history's
come a long way. The basic courses were still the classic standards, and we had a good
program. The new chairman said, "Oh, I like this." She's an art historian.
LD: What are the mainstays of the program?
CK: Well, the three courses: ancient art, medieval art, which follows [unclear], Renaissance [15th
century] through Baroque [16th century] or Rococo [19th century artistic movement and
style], and then Modern. And the others are—I hate to use the word—survey. Those are all
one term. Each of those courses is required by an art historian. And then the other is the
history of architecture, which I also teach. And then we simply build onto the other, good,
sensible courses as we've gone along. So we don't like these two term surveys or any of that
crazy nonsense. The introduction to art was done in one term.
LD: Like Art 100?
CK: Yes, something like that. They’re sensible; they’re classic. The books are written for such
things, and it's a healthy program. But I still feel I’m running from pillar to post, looking at
baroque architecture. Now Richard’s [Gantt, art faculty, 1976 MFA] here to do some of that.
And there are still simply a lot of problems. We had some special grants the last year or two
to update and buy back from these companies at a reduced rate. Slides that went orange, and
if you don't think that gave us [unclear], you have no idea what it was like teaching art
history. It takes a lot of time to assemble things. So we moved into the new building here.
We were in the old building with a lecture hall everybody laughed at. I said, "Look, it
works." And the new one, which I drew up the specifications for, was not handled properly
at all. We were better off in the old one.
LD: Well, tell me something about that. You moved into this building this past summer?
CK: No. Last year.
LD: Last spring?
CK: Yes. No last year, over the summer. Yes, that's right. And we were told to pack up our office,
and I had a huge studio. And they gave us the boxes and all the stuff, and they were very
nice about it, the people in charge of that. And I left over some forty-six boxes. I’d picked up
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my room from the plan. I got this one, the biggest one. And they—look up there. See that top
row—those tacky little useless bookcases. Then they told us to order stuff, so Carl
[Goldstein, art history faculty] worked on this, my colleague, an art historian next door, and I
was in charge of other things and they said, "Buy new equipment." They don't tell you how
much money, what is equipment, what is new equipment, what is it you're supposed to be
doing. So we were standing in Roger [Davis] what's his name's office, the purchasing there,
trying to help us, but all through this the stupes on campus over in the planning thing didn't
tell us anything, didn't tell our poor overworked secretary anything. So we put in the orders,
and they found out over the summer nothing had been processed before the budget ran out
because they hadn't told all that was supposed to be taken back over to her. However, we got
all these extra things in here, and two days before class opened they certified the building.
They put in some fake railings up front. You see, that makes the building safe.
LD: Oh.
CK: Oh, yes. And then they put the boxes in. I was six months trying to organize them. But the
new auditorium has nice acoustics, and they got fancy lighting in there. You could launch a
rocket with all those buttons. But the screen was a trash piece of bed sheets, all wrinkles, and
it wasn't the width I asked for because you have to have great big double projections. It's
very specific. We're going to have to build in something on our own and do it. They sacked
the campus architect. Although he left, they said he took a job at Duke [University, Durham,
North Carolina], but he was horrible. And—
LD: Was this his fault?
CK: Oh, whose fault. It was so mixed up like all buildings that you don't even know. I've just
been checking some renaissance architecture in here, and nobody knows really who put
those Greek stairways in [unclear]. I think probably did most of it. Lorenziana in Florence,
but you know, that's it with architecture. You're never sure. That way you can always blame
somebody else. Anyway, the new fellow knew something should be done, so we may have
to build something in there. We went without blackboards. I don't use a large room. We use
the walls—everybody's using walls now instead of screens. But it's very, very important for
art history that just certain things be right. The rest of it can go to hell.
LD: And the size of the screen is important?
CK: It's a very big, strong, wide screen that we didn't get. We’re using the walls. But now I'm
finding out that all places now construct to use walls, so we may just do that in the large
room, in working out. It's no good for public lectures. A lot of things aren't right in that
respect, and then they ran out of money—you see, this is what happened. It's this whole way
the states spend money. They give you a whole glob. You got to spend it at once, so you go
out and get frivolous and spend it instead of saying this is what has to be done slowly. You
know, it's moronic at this state. They've got a lot of other stories about slide purchases. We
had a very good dealer in London [unclear] in the galleries. But not everything. Sometimes
you go off, and you know there's a lot of stuff the department needs, but the only way you
could do it would be to say, "I need two books." So Margaret [?] ordered them from the
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bookstore, charged to the art department, and we'd get it in payment—our portion. And
we've had to pull a lot of things like that for the Tate Gallery [London, England; holds
national collection of British art] slides. It saved us money. It's a long story. I won't go into it.
So that has hampered some things, but the slide room on the other side has to be right next to
the lecture. I mean, we couldn't put the collection [unclear] last two years today. And, you'd
been there all day long, you come outside and say, "Gee, there's been a thunder storm. Gosh,
the weather's changed." It's true. There was a window in my office, but I was rarely in there.
And so, there are nice things about this building, of course. It's not to be laughed at.
LD: What do you like about it?
CK: Well, this is a pleasant office. It's not nearly the size of the studio, but everything fits in it. It's
very light; it's a very handsome building. It's a very beautiful building inside. The locals can't
get used to the exterior, but they will.
LD: Do you like it?
CK: Yes. Yes. I mean, it's a smallish building, and you have to design it to serve the interior, but
it does echo the building around it. The playful little tower out front.
LD: Even I noticed that.
CK: Yes. Well, we're getting somewhere. Well, the sculpture court is pretty dead, particularly in
this climate. It's like an execution yard. Well, we're in South Carolina, North Carolina, the
36th parallel—to have an exposed place like that is just awful.
LD: Do you think it's just too harsh?
CK: Yes, absolutely. Too harsh. The inside is really is very good and Grace Glueck came down.
You know, she's the arts editor for the New York Times, charming old lady, and she said
she'd been in a lot of new buildings and she liked this for the spaces. Spaces, to a large
measure, is what architecture is about. People forget that. And we'll put that auditorium
right—it's too bad because the acoustics are excellent. I don’t like to use it anymore, but I
have to use it.
LD: It's a nice size though.
CK: It's a nice size, and it does have nice acoustics. The slide collections are right there behind it.
But I'm telling you, the way they build buildings today, if you fart too loudly, you can hear
right through the walls. [laughs] It's true. We always tell everybody that comes in there,
“Don't have beans.”
LD: And the walls are pretty thin?
CK: Oh, yes. They're very thin. And we were adjusting things and the place shook. The other
things they didn't buy for us were clocks or wastebaskets. Richard and I got some money
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together and we—from the department and went over to Office Depot.
LD: Richard who?
CK: Gantt, teaching colleague down the hall. And we had to watch where we put the big quartz
clock. We had a clock in that room. Not over the door where you wanted it, so [unclear]
watch this thing shake.
LD: Every time the door opens?
CK: Yes. That's the way they build buildings now. And we noticed it the other day when our state
of the art air conditioning broke down because Duke Power had light fluctuations, and it just
threw every lever in the place. The building was dead, and I could hear Carl next door
talking on the phone, and he said the air sort of acts like a baffle, the way they used to do it
in a hotel room in Moscow [Soviet Union]. Soviet stories to exchange. So we—slides are
what you teach with in art history, and that's really come along, but at blood, tears and sweat
on my part. And so the course was the same. We did increase the amount art historians and
the way to add to it to make it better than what we had.
LD: Most people don't say that. Most people say that the quality of their students has declined.
CK: No. I'm talking about our faculty. Oh, the faculty has improved immensely. We had one or
two misfits here, and I think that our enrollment is up and I think it's because the bad people
have gone. There's no use glossing over that. We had some bad times here in art history
teaching.
LD: How many majors do you tend to have?
CK: I have no idea. We never seem to break it down. Unfortunately, the art history majors are not
very good quality. This department is noted for its studio, and it still does have a big
reputation. But the art history [unclear] is strong, too. And our enrollment is up. We don't
know what to attribute it to, except that it takes a few years for it to feedback, the fact that it's
safe to send students here for the introductory courses. I've heard that from a lot of people.
Oh, gee, we had one gal, and she taught modern art, and she wrecked the courses and she
came one day in purple dyed long johns and [unclear]. She's gone. And things like that
would happen. Then we had another flip flop who couldn't seem to manage her classes, and
she came almost naked, I think, a couple of times. [laughs] I don't know. However, it's
changed now, and everybody has to work. There really are. But I don't think the quality of
the students is good.
LD: That's usually what one hears.
CK: I was talking to some of my colleagues this morning, handing back papers, and did you see if
there are any term papers in? For that many, it would have been thicker. I talked to them
again and again and again and trained them in the library to do research. I mean, I've talked
to them so much about it, and it goes in one ear and out the other. I'm having them come see
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me about them. Some of them are. There's always a few good people. I don't expect all these
students. I just don't. I just expect honest effort, and I'm not getting it. They don't seem to
know what you're driving at. They can't respond well on exams. I sit here—I wrote a sample
test for a class. [unclear] And the reason you have to get a good grade, you come and see
and we'll see what we can do about it. Everything. I had one girl in half an hour the other
day. I said, "You see what I mean?" "Yes." It was just being able to identify a thing, name,
date, places, telling you what it is and talk about it. It took me a half an hour to get her to
understand that she had to do this. And this is what's—I blame previous teaching of the girls.
There's too much of this. And I'm asking where it's coming—well, it really doesn't matter the
facts as long you understand something. Understand what without facts? Will you tell me?
It's a combination of things. But I feel I'm just working so hard to get people to realize this.
And also talented universities, they don't want them to work on their own [unclear]. Then
they pack in large classes. Mine aren't large. Everybody avoids me because they have to
work. Although they've [unclear] out the department now. There's no place to run. No place
to hide. They start running around bouncing off Amy [Lixl-Purcell, art faculty] or me or
somebody else. [laughs]. But somebody's told them they didn't have to learn anything. I don't
know if our intake is lower, if better students are going elsewhere.
See, when it was a women's college, the women had to come here. I wasn't here
when it was a women's college, but I still attempted to come. And now they all go to
[University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill. I don't think they pay as much attention to the
students over there. And the university's only got itself to blame because they don't value
teaching. You know, they don't. I don't think they do. There's all this shit about publishing
and even more now and grant getting. That's the other thing. There was this huge letter in the
New York Times. While you were gone, I cut it out and gave it to our department head. You
want to get grants. I've been interviewing department heads about that, and how much
committee work the faculty should do. And you get feeling pretty bad. Grants are fine for
science, but not the humanities mostly. And we shouldn't have to be chasing them up just to
do it, to show the university we're doing it.
LD: Why do you think they're bad for the humanities?
CK: Well, there aren't that many is what I'm saying.
LD: It's harder to do.
CK: Well, a lot of times you don't need them. I was talking to the history department, and he said
well he usually push a button [unclear] sit in a chair all day long and do it. But maybe Steven
[Danford, physics and astronomy faculty; interviewer’s husband] can tell you what he has to
do to build something. Maybe they need money for certain types of research.
LD: Well, it's usually equipment that they need the money for.
CK: Yes.
LD: So you're saying that you just don't need—?
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CK: Depends. Sometimes in psychology, they place these charts around the College of Arts and
Sciences and well, yes, they're doing a survey on something and they've got to hire all these
people to do it. Or—
LD: Well it takes money to run a lab.
CK: Well, that's it. Set up experiments. It doesn't take money to write poetry. You have to be
starving to write poetry, don't you?
LD: [laughs] Yes, I don't think that's a very popular point of view among artists.
CK: Well that's fine, but if the universities are going to measure people on that basis, then they
can close up right now, couple of years. Now these annual reports—I have nothing to tell
them except that I've been doing research all year, this, that and the other thing. But then I
usually add—you're contributing to you own demise simply by demanding things that have
nothing to do with actually what the fact you're doing. But they can count—you know what's
the problem, the bottom line, is if you can count something and take it to court. But if you
say, "Well this is good." "Oh, well what do you mean by that?" We ought to take a work of
art to court some day and demand to know why a museum bought that instead of six bits of
shit by some minority artist.
LD: Well if this is a problem on studio artists come up for tenure, is it not? I mean, the evaluation
is very hard.
CK: Yes. You can get that information from somebody else. We know they're good is all you can
say. Look, I want to tell you something. When Bert Carpenter got tenure, he was hired with
us. I got tenure and Joan Gregory got tenure and Andy Martin [both art department faculty]
got tenure. We all know we wouldn't have gotten tenure today under the present
circumstances. And I'm not trying to be immodest, but I think that it would have been some
loss to this department to quote Andy Martin. I don't know. He studied at the École des
Beaux Arts] in Paris, and he was a very fine artist and was a very good teacher. What else
can I tell you? He doesn't do all the shit. Joan Gregory didn't believe in publishing. You see,
her degree happened to be in art education, and, therefore, they say if you have a doctorate,
then you should write. Well, as a matter of fact, she does very nice collages, and where
would you be without her insight and organizational material? I didn't think J.B. Trapp,
director of the Warburg Institute, doesn't have a PhD. They couldn't have run the place
without him. And even before he came, he's published very little. What he has done has been
very insightful. Now how can you do those—where would you be without these people?
People who you could ask questions of any subject. The only thing they value is piles of
paper, statistics, something they can count. What worries me some day, is in this society they
can think of nothing of rights and lawsuits. They're going to haul paintings into a court and
decide whether or not the Metropolitan Museum [of Art, New York, New York] has any
right to buy that instead of—and he laughed. Thirty years ago you wouldn't have believed
what they're doing today, and everybody sits back in great acquiescence, and now everybody
has to be politically correct. That's the latest.
Have you heard about this garbage? Yes. All I do is tell them is go shove it up their
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asshole. Well it's not scholarly. It's got nothing to do with learning. And so I'm glad I'm not
going to be around much longer because I just retreat into my own corner and cannot believe
what's going on. I think this school has withstood a certain amount of it. We're not Stanford
[University, Palo Alto, California]. We're not making idiots of ourselves like Duke, who's
going to hire on the basis of race. I think that's terrible. And they've said that. They're
altogether too trendy. Nobody's thinking what the value of something, so it's not very
encouraging. What is encouraging, of course, is the university's—too bad we lost [Joanne]
Creighton [dean of the College of Arts and Sciences] and Dean riding across the creek. It
was going to be hard to implement. I thought two courses was enough to take in one term.
Just simply take the ancient art and the medieval art and alternate. One off, one on, you
know. Because it's quite clear to me that something's got to be done. I don't know how well I
can do it because a friend of mine says—I see her every summer in London. She teaches at
Colgate [University, Hamilton, New York]. [unclear] And she said, "When you come right
down to it, the only people who are really good at that are the people in the English
department. And I said, "You're right."
LD: Teaching writing?
CK: Yes. As I said, I really don't know how to organize a student's paper. I was talking to a girl in
here this morning who has obviously done a lot of work on the cathedral at Chartres. The
other thing I kept telling her, was to try and make sense of, first thing you have to ask to do a
color supplement for your newspaper on the Cathedral [of our Lady of] at Chartres [France]
with the amount of words they requested. And I said, "How would you really get down and
explain this to somebody?" And I said, "Now, if somebody came in to me and said, 'Listen,
we need this big thing on Chartres. Would you do it for us?' I'd have to sit down pretty hard
and think." I'm talking about structure as architecture. I said, "I have to think it all out again."
But, at least, to begin to realize that maybe you can do something by yourself. Do you let
your children watch television all the time?
LD: All the time? No. They have a limit.
CK: They have a limit. Do you think it makes people passive? I'm sure it would.
LD: Well, I think whatever it makes them, too much of anything like that would obviously be
bad.
CK: Yes. I expect so.
LD: There are two problems with it. One is what they're watching usually is pretty awful. And
then the activity of watching, which is keeping her from doing other things.
CK: Well, this is just it. I doubt if their minds are following it. It's a sort of—
LD: Hypnotism?
CK: Yes, hypnotism. It's keeping people occupied. It's terrible. People keep occupied in other
ways. They might take a baseball bat, and I think sports are much the same way. People
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watching tennis. You can have it.
LD: It's probably helpful.
CK: Well, if they do it to—
LD: To be doing it than watching it.
CK: All right, to do it, yes, but most people just sit on their butts.
LD: And watch it?
CK: Yes. That's about it, I think.
LD: We're a nation of spectators.
CK: You think this country's bad, you ought to be in England. Oh, they're much crazier than they
are here. More trash crazed. Yes, that's really true. You only hear about the good side. The
average Englishman's a slob.
LD: You don't get that impression from what you see on public television, do you?
CK: No, I know you don't. And many people have done surveys on that. And oh yeah, that's all
they talk about's the telly.
LD: I did notice when the last time that I was there that they were watching a lot of American
[television] programs like Dallas. Very popular.
CK: Listen. I hate to tell you some of the people who are mesmerized by it. I can't believe it. I
don't own a television set.
LD: That's actually the best policy.
CK: I'm just not interested.
LD: But I have to say that if you have a television set, it's very hard to keep your children from
watching it at all.
CK: I imagine it would be a real problem.
LD: So I think we decided that the limit was the way to go.
CK: Well, I don't know if it's had any effect on the students or not. But I got a lot of stories about
the guy who I had fourth year here was dyslexic. He was a student, a nice quiet boy in the
studio. And he was in an advanced class of mine, and I noticed him before in the class, and I
thought his writing was pretty primitive. So I suddenly realized what was the problem. And I
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said to him, "Mr. [unclear], do you have a problem. He says, "Oh, yes. I'm dyslexic." "Oh.
Oh." I said, "I wish I'd known sooner. Would you like more time?" "No." "Would you like
me to do this for you?" "No. It's fine." So I asked him a bit about his background. Well, his
parents were missionaries in Africa, which explains his square cut glasses. And he says,
"Mother taught me to read." This happens in dyslexic families. I said, "Right. How did you
do your English composition, your history, your other things. Where were you?" He said, "I
was at Brevard [two-year college, Brevard, North Carolina]." "Well, how did you make out
at there? What did they say?" "Nothing." "Didn't anybody notice it?" You hear what I'm
telling you? That kid got to me before anybody commented on the fact that—how could he
have written history and English with the teachers not asking him something? How could he
have passed his English composition?
LD: Well, they could have been multiple choice tests.
CK: Well, it's telling you something about the education system, isn't it. Brevard? He goes to
Brevard. He pays money out to go to Brevard? Phooey. I'm telling you, you wonder what the
schools are not noticing. You know I only found out yesterday that Brevard was a two- year
college. I kept wondering what [unclear]. But over the years, I think, I don't work in the
department today, but I know there were some exciting times in the past. I think I arrived
here during the Vietnam troubles [Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam,
Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975] or
whatever it was.
LD: Was there anything going on on campus?
CK: Yes. Not as much as other places. They says because they’re laid back here. I said, "I don't
know." Oh, we had some dreadful people. You know up there at the corner of the School of
Music, they dug it up this year, and they reseeded as grass. It was all bushes before. It was
grass before, and those were the times when all these hippies and people sat out there, and
they only get [unclear] to do that. We had these terrible—
LD: To plant bushes?
CK: Oh, yes. The only other thing that was going on was these used hearses and these horrible
people, they were motorcyclists. They were great big, burly, sort of pseudo-[Ernest]
Hemingway [American writer] characters. They were all tattooed, and they wore chains, and
they made themselves as repulsive as possible in leather jackets, and they'd drive these things
and park on Tate Street.
LD: In Greensboro?
CK: Oh, yes. It was pretty bad. There were some— we never had the problems [unclear] I don't
remember too much about it. It was mostly [unclear]. But we had times when we had some
very, very enlightened people in the art department.
LD: Such as?
12
CK: Well, I was just talking to Yates, a guy's name, and he was a funny little blond-headed guy.
He teaches high school in Washington, and experiment with dead animals. And somebody
reminded me—you talk to what's her name in the library over there? She's head of reference.
About the time he went and he tied all the dead cats up in the boughs of the tree outside the
library.
LD: He tied dead cats to the what?
CK: To the boughs of the trees.
LD: Boughs of the trees.
CK: And she made him take them down.
LD: Where did he get dead cats from?
CK: Oh, I thought from laboratories. Yates was into it. I don't know. He'd get all sorts of weird
things. We had a lot of characters.
LD: That would be highly unpopular today.
CK: Can't you see all those crazy little animal protestors coming out?
LD: Dead cats hanging from the trees.
CK: Yes. I like it. We had some crazy things. There was the time that—I think it was the second
year I was here. Near the gallery in the other building, they cooked up spaghetti for three
days and got lots of ketchup, and then they went and jumped in it naked. They hadn't
intended to be naked. And this all happened and this crazy girl, Pat O'Leary [Editor’s note:
Pat O’Shea, Class of 1971], in the English department. She was sort of straight-like a stick
with red frizzy hair. They did it and this other girl didn't like Pat O'Leary, so they told the
police and we wound up down at the police station. And it got on the national news.
LD: Was this an art event?
CK: Yes. Well, it was something being one of the more sober people [unclear], and it hadn't
meant to be that way. It just suddenly happened. They went around into the ladies room just
around the corner, took their clothes off and jumped in. And she said it was so hard, she said,
sitting on this cold spaghetti squishing—[unclear]. But anyway, it got on the national news.
But I think the charges were let off. They said the police officers were rolling with laughter.
LD: I'll bet.
CK: Yates and his dead animals. Then they got the foundry ripped up again. We had a lot of
trouble with the [unclear] it was one of the biggest ones, collegiate ones in the country.
13
LD: You had trouble with what?
CK: The foundry. Really getting somebody competent to run it. That's a big thing over there, you
see. And then, finally—
LD: You're talking about metal working for—
CK: Bronze casting.
LD: Bronze casting.
CK: Yes. We have this great piece here in the outer gallery by [unclear]. But right out—they had
to cast it in two pieces eventually, but when they finally got things going, this—. I think later
on we got Herk van Tongeren [American sculptor] and they had the television crews in. We
had great parties over there. It's all on television somewhere. It's a massive—of course,
people only see the exciting side of it. Pouring the bronze like Incas at a steel plant instead of
all the work that goes into sticking all the [unclear].
LD: Has it been used continuously?
CK: Oh, yes, it is. And we got [unclear]. And then we got a very good person in, and he wasn't
here two years from a bronze casting family and he had lung trouble. Years of it. His family,
John Spring, casts for a lot of well-known people, and he had to leave because he had
nothing else to work at. Fortunately, we only got stuck for a year's work in his compensation
because he hadn't been there all his life. And we got somebody else now. But it's been hard
to—it's a very expensive thing to run too. It's a lot of work.
LD: What's it like having an art history department which is joined onto a studio art department?
CK: Well, most of them are like this in this country.
LD: It causes problems sometimes, doesn't it?
CK: No.
LD: What about when you choose a chairman?
CK: Well, you see, Bert Carpenter is here, and then we looked around for somebody else. And
then we got one of our own people. It's a question of the person. It really is. Leadership is a
question of the person.
LD: So Bert was the chairman when you came?
CK: Yes.
LD: And he was succeeded by Joan Gregory.
CK: Gregory, yes. I don't quite know what was going on there, but I think Joan did pretty well
14
working in the department. I think she just moved in because she could see things weren't
moving up down here. The way the set up was then was all very hokey in that the
Weatherspoon Gallery was all part of the art department, and there was a faculty member in
charge of the gallery. And then after Jim Tucker had been here for years as an assistant
professor [of art], we suddenly realized that he'd never been tenured, so they better tenure
him, hadn't they? Incidentally, I was tenured under the old rules. One day got a letter
saying— [phone rings].
Yes, that phone call, that's the way it works. Our state of the art communications
with five offices. The head’s never over here much, fortunately for her, and we have to put
an extension in the slide room because if I was in the slide room, which I often am, and Carl
picks up the phone here, he could have—I would be picking it up downstairs. Even if five
people pick it up, we've had time this morning when five people were all bellowing into the
phone. And so I sort of established this rule. On the other side you could stick your head out
the door and yell down the hall, "Hey," and [unclear]. So I said you can't have any tryst, no
secret phone calls. It's all got to be above board.
Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, yes. So the gallery was part of—sort of being run
by one arm, and so they decided that, as it grew, it's the whole business administration here.
And then, finally, they are appointing a director to the gallery, and he, somebody Bert knew
in New York. And he wasn't here a year and a half, but he was rolled over dead after the
opening of Art on Paper [exhibit sponsored by the Dillard Fund, a fund of the former Dillard
Paper Company, now xpedx].
LD: What was that?
CK: Memorables and Donald Droll [assistant director of Weatherspoon Art Gallery; curator,
painter, former New York art dealer] in the old building. So he died. Then they were getting
this new building underway. Took two years to find a director because it's just that hard to
get the right person. And finally they did, but in the meantime, when Joan became
department head, she told Bert to look after the Gallery. So jobs sort of grew like topsy. It
was too much for her to run both, so she said, "Bert, you kind of look after that." And he did
that with Jim Tucker as curator. You see these dogs, directors, curators, are all so—oh, they
moved around like a massive amoeba and sort of grew and split. And now it's a full-fledged
gallery with close liaison with the art department. When the [unclear] gave us the money, we
knew we couldn't put the art building and the new building altogether. It would cost a mint.
You got the foundry and all the students—just wouldn't put the art history in here.
LD: So art history came over here to the museum, and the studio art remained in the old building.
CK: Yes. In the meantime the old gallery spaces we hope to use for the photographic thing, I
think, has been taken over by interior design because they’re gutting that deal, what we used
to call the Home Ec[onomics] building. What do they call it now?
LD: Environmental Sciences. Something in environmental sciences.
CK: Some god awful—
15
LD: Yes. It's a long fancy name.
CK: And so—
LD: So they're going to move in there temporarily?
CK: Yes. And so everything is discombobulated. Space didn't materialize.
LD: I've noticed some student art.
CK: Yes, well, that's the people from—part of that group is in there and they're using it. So they
get that space. But this is a full-fledged gallery, and different relationship altogether to the
department. It's not under the art department. This happens [unclear]. You weren't quite sure
just how it was falling apart or how it was working. But that—so this is a, with a full-fledged
gallery with curator.
LD: Do you think that was the right move?
CK: Oh, yes. It had to become professional. There's no question about it. People in the art
department moaned, but I said, "You can't have an amateur operation." But art history and
studios are pretty much the standard in this country. Some are big and dominate. The art
history may be important or the art history—or the studio may be separate or it may be co-relation.
That's all. But this seems to be the general arrangement. Oh, sure, at Harvard
[University, Cambridge, Massachusetts] you got art history. At NYU [New York University,
New York, New York] you got art history. At University of Chicago—I think a lot of them
have studio division. Just how good they are is questionable, but it keeps people happy who
want to mess about the studio is about all I can say. But it's a major component of a
humanities program. When we see our undergraduate programs, so it’s been said, as a part of
liberal education, which it should be. We don't want it to be separate from the art school. It
should be liberal education. Every artist gets out of here, we feel, should have a liberal
education. We're not training commercial artists. We're training people on the basics to
create art. There's no excuse for that. Just no apology for it rather. We were training artists.
You want to take a course in lettering because someone's interested in teaching it, okay.
You’re taught sculpture, graphics, and painting. We're not going commercial on all those
students. There are four divisions to the degree. The BFA for studio art, which is, I think,
kind of limited. The BA in studio art. The bachelor of art education for people in teacher
training. I hope they don't abolish that. The teacher training will gone altogether in another
year. And then the BA in art history. That's how it works.
LD: Now you have a new chairman of the art department. Has this person come?
CK: Yes, she's here.
LD: What's her name?
CK: Porter Aichele. A-I-C-H-E-L-E. She's from Charleston [South Carolina].
16
LD: Porter Aichele?
CK: Yes, Porter Aichele. I think she pronounces it Aichele.
LD: And what is her—what was her background?
CK: Well, she's got a BA and an MA in romance languages from Vanderbilt [University,
Nashville, Tennessee]. Then she went on to her art history at Bryn Mawr [College, Bryn
Mawr, Pennsylvania]. She specializes in twentieth century European [unclear]. She's a good
administrator. We're lucky she applied. We wouldn't have gotten anybody. There's just
nobody in art departments. You should see some of the goons we brought down. The
administration moved too slowly last year. And we didn't need anybody. We hired somebody
five years before, and he turned out to be a good administrator. And it was because we were
given a chance to look around a while [unclear]. The whole thing was handled in a very—
this is why we got this bad person who taught modern art. Everything too late to set up the
arrangements for hiring them, instead of starting in September. We were scraping the bottom
of the barrel. You get idiots. Most of the people out there are idiots anyway. Anyway, this
gal happened to want to come back down from Philadelphia in this direction. She taught at
Vassar [College, Poughkeepsie, New York]and a lot of places. She was an assistant dean at
Tyler. Of course, the administration made a great, big stink because she didn't have tenure.
Or she was, or any identifiable right as I understand it. You know, they like to bring people
down with all these trappings. Meaningless. So they're tenuring them right now, I guess.
LD: You're talking now about Porter Aichele?
CK: Yes. Yes, this is the way it is. But she's a nice person, and she's caught everybody's
imagination. She's an administrator. After all, there's nothing wrong with that if you're a
sympathetic administrator. Who are you going to get to get to run an [unclear] these days?
Exactly. Look who they're getting to run universities so they can raise money.
LD: Yes. Universities tend to assume that administrative skills are the same as or often found in
academics and it's not true.
CK: No. I think if you take a number of people who work for IBM [International Business
Machines], how many of them would be administrators? You really look around at the
people with ordinary jobs. How many are capable of responsibility? Really? I'm not
impressed with the administration. They organize—I organize well with all the rest
[unclear]. Anyway, she's also married to a painter who's retired [unclear] So she's got
tremendous insight. It's sympathy and insight and willing to listen. So she's going in all
directions at once. I think she'd like to teach, but the administration is so happy [unclear].
LD: Where's her office?
CK: Well, it's down the hall. It's the first one up here. Well, she has two. The art department
office is on the other side, so everything's over there. She was in here this morning, but the
phone rang so often, everybody leaping on it at once. But it's over there. Sometimes she
17
escapes. So she just, as I say—but we were lucky we got her. You should have seen the tub
of lard this guy brought in to interview. He came in, and he had this [unclear] statement to
make. And I just looked at Joan Gregory's face [unclear]. It just isn't the people.
LD: Well, then it's a good thing you're [unclear].
CK: Well, it was like getting somebody to direct the gallery. They're searching again for a curator
[unclear]. At least she's got a rent-controlled apartment. More than quaint. But she, she
[unclear]
[End Side A—Begin Side B]
CK: Am I supposed to say something?
LD: Yes, anything you want to add?
CK: We used to have some pretty wild times. There were some pretty wild student things going
on here in the late '70s. It was unbelievable, some of the antics that were going on.
LD: Like what?
CK: Oh, please. Anyway, even some of the students—I had one student who was a pain in the
neck to me. She became the joke around Greensboro. And it was just dingy. We'll leave it at
that. But it was pretty wild and pretty funny. You get in groups like that, and all of a sudden
something blows. We've had a lot of good students over the years. One of them, inevitably,
died of AIDS [Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome], but—yeah, he did, Robbie. He
made it big in New York and came back down here [unclear], but he had AIDS. But a lot of
them have done that. It's still a place to come. And I think, now, the way things are going, it's
going to be the place to come. As long as the state doesn't run completely out of money this
year. But what you do here today is I can't wait to retire. Joan Gregory retired [unclear] early
retirement. She'd had it. So they're going to make up their minds [unclear].
LD: Are you looking forward to retiring?
CK: Well, yes and no. Yes, I think so. I can do more.
LD: What are you going to do? Travel?
CK: Yes [unclear] can afford to. Gosh, the price of travel—I traveled when the going was good.
It's been years and years. It would be nice to get to a place in February or March when there's
no damn tourists covering up things. Get down to—
LD: You had a hot summer in England this summer, didn't you?
18
CK: It was awful, yes. It's really killing things, this climate. I think there is something wrong.
[unclear] I think that's up above the Minnesota section. Drought, drought, drought. Heat,
heat, heat.
LD: We had no rain this summer.
CK: I know.
LD: Virtually none. Made up a lot of it this fall, but it was nothing.
CK: You should come to the neighborhood association meeting.
LD: Well, thank you for the interview. Let's talk about that after the tape is off.
CK: [laughs] Yes, I think that's right.
[End of Interview]