Oral history interview with Gilbert Carpenter, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Gilbert Carpenter
INTERVIEWER: Anne Phillips
DATE: April 27, 1990
[Begin CD 1]
AP: Growing up in Montana—I’d like to know about life, and we can begin anywhere. Tell
me about home.
GC: I was born in 1920 in Billings, Montana. My father was in business. Billings was a town
of 20,000 and thought of as a city because it was the biggest thing in any direction. We
lived out of town a ways and owned some acres where we had cows and chickens and
potatoes and all that kind of stuff. And, oh, it was a very neat childhood. There were, I
guess, half a dozen kids around that you knew to play with, but most of them were a mile
or more away. And we were brought up on the horses. And I guess I went to a movie
once when I was eleven years old.
AP: How far away?
GC: That would be in town—like three or four miles, but we weren’t supposed to go to
movies. In fact, when school was over, why we would—we might get into town once a
month or so. The rest of the time we were just running the countryside. We were very
much on our own. We had to make up our own way of doing things.
AP: Freedom of space—external and internal space?
GC: Yeah, and from the very beginning for some reason that I simply can’t account for, I’ve
always wanted to be an artist. My brothers didn’t. Nobody in my family was. There were
musicians in my family.
AP: Playing instruments or singing?
GC: Playing instruments.
GC: Had an uncle who lived with us as a teenager and later who studied in Paris with the very
famous French pianist, [Alfred] Cortot, who was perhaps the greatest teacher of his time.
He was a superb pianist. My mother was, for years on end, the local chairman of
community concerts.
You know, speaking of your history of things, the year Marian Anderson [one of
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the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century and an African American] was
scheduled. Got into town, I remember they wouldn’t let her into the Great Northern Hotel
[segregated facility]. Her accompanist could stay there, but she couldn’t so she came and
stayed with us. And then our maid wouldn’t serve her, so mother told the maid she had to
stay in her room down in the basement. Those were strange things. [laughs]
AP: What was the year, about?
GC: What would that be? 1936, I guess. That was before she sang at the DAR [In 1939, the
Daughters of the American Revolution refused Anderson to sing to an integrated
audience in Constitution Hall. With the aid of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Anderson performed a critically acclaimed open-air concert on
Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.,
to a crowd of more than 75,000 people and a radio audience in the million]. She was a
wonderful singer of course. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo came through; you know,
this is a town of 20,000.
AP: What did she—? Tell me a bit more about Marian Anderson. What did you do? How did
you feel?
GC: Oh, I thought she was wonderful. We were in awe of all these musicians. I mean, you
know, they were great travelers from the outer world. When they tried to sell them to the
viewer, there’d be a barrage with all of their clippings and stuff. They were heroes in
Europe. And we used to love it.
AP: So she stayed with you, your family. Do you remember what you ate? What did your
mom serve for dinner?
GC: No, I don’t remember what we ate. I don’t—I never was very aware or that, but we
always ate in the big dining room at the formal table.
AP: Did she talk about how it was to be—?
GC: No. I’m sure talked to the folks. But, you know, she only stayed one night, and she was
getting ready for a concert. Mother was very solicitous, you know, trying to make sure
that there wasn’t anything bothering her [unclear].
AP: Were you aware of how famous she was?
GC: Oh yeah, sure. In fact I think I thought of her as a great deal more famous than she was. I
mean, so famous that she glowed.
AP: Yeah, you could hardly touch the hem of her garment. You could just sit and look at her.
And your grandmother you said also lived in the house too?
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GC: Oh, yes, my mother’s mother. She lived with mother most of the time and then with
mother’s sister—sort of traded back and forth. Her husband died—I remember when he
died—he was fifty-four years old. I was about, I dunno [sic], six or seven, maybe five.
He had cancer, I remember. One time he was sitting on the couch while we were eating. I
remember telling everyone he looked like a dried-up, old gecko.
AP: You said that?
GC: I said that, and I can’t forget it. They all laughed, you know.
AP: Oh, my. Now that was when he was already sick—after that?
GC: Oh, yeah. He died a few months later.
AP: Did he say anything or respond in any way?
GC: Not to that, he didn’t.
AP: Were you scolded or did you feel—?
GC: No, we were never scolded. I mean once in awhile something subtle would be said like,
“That wasn’t nice,” but I don’t remember ever being scolded for anything.
AP: Not squashed down by mother or father—great freedom in the family, would you say?
GC: I guess it was great freedom—sure it was great freedom, but we didn’t exercise it in
terms of the way my kids behaved in the sixties.
AP: I think of the way my children were also; they had much more freedom really [unclear].
GC: There weren’t any restrictions, and another thing that was really—and this is a
commonplace idea now, but there was absolutely idea that came into the family that
wasn’t introduced there by the parents. And I remember hearing somebody swear, and
dad telling him to get off the property. I thought that swearing must be the worst thing in
the world—just absolutely.
AP: Well, was this a moral—I’m thinking of influence of church, or was it more an ethical?
GC: It was ethical more and more. At that time my parents were Baptists, but they didn’t go to
church very often. My dad’s parents were strict Baptists.
AP: I see. Where did they come from? How did they—?
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GC: Dad came from Omaha [Nebraska]. My mother came from Iowa.
AP: So they pushed west.
GC: And my grandmother—this one—told of us going into Iowa in a covered wagon. That’s a
big leap.
AP: So you grew up hearing those stories and knowing that quite intimately. Well, then your
journey, after uncle’s death and your grandmother’s being there—some more of your
journey?
GC: Well, I went from Billings High School to Stanford [University]. My sister had been
[unclear]. I was in the graphic arts department as they called I then. Business then wasn’t
very good. In fact, I formed a lot of ideas there about how art should not be taught.
AP: What ideas?
GC: In terms of if we get there, what we do when we get here. But there were some good
things about Stanford. I remember that my junior year on my way down to Stanford—by
that time my younger brother was going there too—we’d drive back and forth. I decided
that I didn’t want to go to Stanford—that the art department wasn’t any good, which it
wasn’t. And simply went on through, went on down to Los Angeles and went to the
Choinard School [Institute] I spent a year there. And then when I went back to Stanford
the next fall, they gave me credit and never said a thing.
Now this school would never dream of doing such a thing. You know, if you
simply didn’t show up for school and went somewhere else and then you came back,
would they give you credit? And Choinard was an unaccredited school. In many ways
there’s been a real deterioration then in education—the the replacement of a sense of
education with a sense of formality or something—junk, you know.
AP: Cluttering?
GC: Yeah, and even the art department—God, if somebody around this art department came
in and said, “Gee, I went to a better place than this,” you know, they would probably
bounce you out. But I told them I thought that I needed a better school; I told the art
department that and they said, “Oh, isn’t that nice,” and they gave me credit.
AP: I see. So you went back then to Stanford?
GC: Yeah, I went back to Stanford. Let’s see, that was ’41? Yeah, and just at the end of the
fall semester—Pearl Harbor. And I stayed around for another quarter—quarter system—
and ducked out again before the quarter I graduated and went down and got a job as an
engineer at Douglas Aircraft because they were converting everybody into engineers at
that time, you know, if you could pass the test.
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AP: Which was drawing some lines or creating or?
GC: It was one of Stanford’s own tests. You know, they gave you a mathematical test—you
know it was an object test. And obviously there weren’t enough engineers [unclear], and
so I worked as an engineer.
AP: What was that like?
GC: Oh, I liked that. That was at the El Segundo plant which is right off Manhattan Beach
outside of Los Angeles.
AP: So you went there about ’42, ’43?
GC: I was there in spring of ’43, Pearl Harbor was December ’42. I went down there in March
of ’43. I worked there for a year, and then I quit, got drafted.
AP: How so? Why?
GC: They wanted to make a court case out of it to keep me from being drafted and keep my
on as an engineer when I didn’t have an engineer’s degree. It was clear that they could
keep anybody who had a degree, but I didn’t have a degree. And they wanted to—and I
didn’t want to go through that. And so I went and got drafted. I went back to Montana,
got drafted from Montana and that’s the last time I’ve been there.
AP: You haven’t been back since then? Oh, my.
GC: Not because I don’t want to. I’ve tried, but never, you know. Things have been too busy
to, you know. I will go back, I think. I retired last year. Nothing’s keeping me so—but
there hasn’t been any time in between.
AP: When you were drafted, then what happened?
GC: Oh, I ended up—I thought I was going to end up in aircraft maintenance because there
were some airplanes I knew more about than anyone else in the [United States] Army.
But the Army didn’t do that. They put me in the weather service.
AP: Where did you go in the weather service?
GC: I had a wonderful time. I spent—I got sent very quickly over to England, out of Funday
[?], which was the closest airport to Holland, and we had to work thirty hours a week
because they considered it such critical work. So we would string a series of shifts one
after another together, and then we’d head for London. Three days on base and four in
London. And then I got sent to Paris, stationed right outside of Paris so I could go to the
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Grand Chaumiere School [Acadèmie de la Grande Chaumiére-art school], wander
around Paris, walk to Versailles.
AP: Did you feel scared, or were you—?
GC: Not by the time I got to France. The war was over in Germany. In England, it was kind
of—you know, those buzz bombs came over, and they bombed the [unclear] airport. You
know, it wasn’t—the Englishmen were getting it a lot worse than we.
AP: Especially in London? In the inner—?
GC: Yeah, you’d go to London, you know, and you would have to get down—
AP: You hid out in shelters?
GC: Had to, yeah. You know, everybody was doing it.
The war was actually a very interesting thing to me. I met George Brecht
[American conceptual artist and composer].Lot of things in Paris. And I almost took my
discharge over there, but I decided to come back. And I got hired out of the Army. I was
supposed to go to the University of Hawaii to teach that spring, but I couldn’t get out of
the Army soon enough. So, my folks had moved to Salt Lake City; my dad managed a
paper company. And I spent a year there, and another woman and I started an art school
there. But then the University of Hawaii got back in touch with me—hired me. And I told
them I still didn’t have my degree from Stanford; Stanford gave me my degree without
ever finishing up, so I think I got my degree from Stanford. By that time—you see I cut
out my junior—I’d only gone two-thirds of my senior year, and they still gave me my
degree.
AP: I like the creativity. [both laugh]
GC: Yeah, okay. So I was the third man in the art department in Hawaii. Two of us were hired
at that time; there were four of us then. The art department now has eighty people. And I
stayed there for—and I had gotten married (not this marriage, another one), and we
stayed there for three years. And I got to thinking about teaching and what one was
trying to teach, how it was going about, and soon—. And it all seemed no good, you
know; everything was wrong, so—.
AP: Say some more about that—the right and the wrong.
GC: When we get here—because here I had a chance to do it the way I thought was right
because I was in charge. And I went to—I took a leave of absence, actually, and went
back to Columbia University—first to the school of painting and sculpture because I
thought that they would be able to—big high-powered school, but they were doing it as
badly as we were in Hawaii. And so I was still on leave, so I went over to the—and
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registered the second semester in the art history program, which was in the school of
philosophy. And once I was over there, why things began to make some sense.
AP: How so?
GC: Well, they were talking about art and not about—they were talking about what a painting
is and style and the relationship of artist to client—artist to culture and stuff. That was a
great art history department at that time. Meyer Schapiro [American art historian] was
there, a whole crowd of—NYU [New York University], I think, has replaced it as
perhaps the superior program. But at that time it was an absolutely great program.
AP: Give me some dates, some approximate years there.
GC: Well, this would be 1950. Actually we arrived in New York in the fall of ’50, but my first
registration in art history would be the spring semester of ’51. And I took the balance of
that semester that thinking I would go back to Hawaii when my year’s leave was over.
But by the time I’d gotten well into the semester, why it was perfectly apparent to me that
there was a whole bunch of stuff here I wanted to, you see, study—I wanted to know.
And these guys were so smart; they were great compared to the art history I'd had at
Stanford which was just junk. It was just slides and series of slides, and these guys were
really good.
Millard Meiss—he’s dead now, but he wrote one of the very great books,
Painting in Florence and Siena [After the Black Death, 1979], which was one of the very
recent art history books. Paul Wingert, who was the first man to teach the history of
primitive art as art and not anthropology. And Columbia was the first school to offer this.
As you can see I’m very interested in it. I had been interested in it in Hawaii.
But at any rate, I stayed on. After staying there for awhile, I went in to get myself
into graduate school because I was doing this under general studies. I met that Rosenquist
[?]—that guy who later became head of the College Board. He was dean of the graduate
school then. Boy, did he lace me up and down.
AP: Oh, for what?
GC: He couldn’t figure out how in the hell I’d ever gotten out of Stanford. He looked at those
transcripts, and he sent me back and told me that if I were good, he would let me be a
junior at Columbia, which was just right because that was all the stuff I’d had at
Stanford really. You know, I had to pay for all that. And so I started taking courses
[unclear]. I took almost every graduate course they offered there, too, at the time—you
know, because it was relatively—. Not every one, I didn’t get into Middle Eastern, for
instance, where they have [Helen] Posada [art historian and archaeologist]. She was the
great teacher of Middle Eastern, but I never got in. Anyway it took awful long.
And then they also—first, I also got a position as a graduate assistant [unclear]
instructor. I got into the faculty. Our first child, had married and we had bought a
building, a house, and then our first child came and we could cope with that. But the next
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year the second one was on the way, and we couldn’t cope with that. And Hawaii offered
me a visiting position to come back for a year so we went back—that’s because we
couldn’t handle New York. And once we got to Hawaii, the next year they wanted me to
be head of the department so I took the department head. Then we had another—no, we
hadn’t had another one. But we stayed there for three years, but it got terribly boring.
And Columbia wanted me to come back and I didn’t have my PhD yet, but Paul
Winger told me if I’d come back and write a paper, then I could have my doctorate.
Millard Meiss, who I’d been working with in the Renaissance (and that was really
what I wanted to do), transferred to Harvard [University] then to the Princeton Institute
of Advanced Studies and then he died very shortly after that. He stopped and saw us on
his way through Hawaii. I think he died a few months after that.
AP: What was his age? Do you know?
GC: He was relatively young. I would guess he was maybe sixty years old, and I guess it was
cancer. He was a wonderful man. He had had a lot—in fact, he had been the primary
organizer of the flood relief in Florence—all the volunteers that went over, Meiss was—
because he was the center of his—. And I was working in Florentine studies when I was
working with him, and then he left and I started working with Paul Winger. My project
was the catalog based on the surviving works of Hawaiian sculpture, which were all
destroyed in 1826 when King Kamehameha was converted by the Christians. He ordered
all the sculpture burned that night. And 104-105 pieces survived. So you have a great
sculpture style with a highly contained group of surviving work. And that is the most
reasonable catalog raison d’être, and were working on that and that’s what I would have
done if I’d gone back to Columbia.
But I got intercepted by John Sedgewick, who had also taught at Columbia with
me and was an art historian down here, now at the College Art Association meeting in
Philadelphia. We were out drinking and he told me—made me promise to come on down
here because they were looking for a department head. And I came down and Mereb
[Mossman, faculty member in the department of sociology and anthropology, principal
academic officer of the college, first as dean of instruction, then dean of the college She
also served as dean of faculty and as vice chancellor for academic affairs] offered me a—
she and—can’t think of the chancellor.
AP: The year, so you can sort of use it as—?
GC: That’s the spring of ’63.
AP: That would have been Dr. [James B.] Ferguson or Dr. [Otis] Singletary?
GC: Dr. Singletary. He was a very vigorous man. They had me over at Chapel Hill the next
day, and I called Jean [first wife] that night, and asked her if she wanted to come to North
Carolina. She said, “Where?” When she connected it up with the English department
here, well, everything was fine because this had such distinction. In fact, it was a very
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distinguished school once you started examining it. It also was a place where—. By now
our third child was on the way, and it was a place where we could—. We were going to
go back to New York, but we still couldn’t imagine how we were going to do it. You just
couldn’t imagine—.
AP: With the children?
GC: Yeah. It just seemed so great to just come down here and land in a house, do things
like a family and we did that.
AP: Tell me a bit more about Mereb Mossman seeking you, asking you.
GC: I thought that Mereb was an absolutely wonderful woman. I don’t know if it—I know
the big problem was my lack of a degree. I also know that she talked to Millard Meiss
and some of these other people because she did it all in a hurry. The art department
here— went the rounds quickly. Thing were so—things that have gradually gotten so
they take months—could at that time within that very simple administrative structure—
Mossman and Singletary—those two talked to each other. Around this administration,
people don’t talk to each other. They could decide on that. So I guess I wasn’t here
more than two days, and they made the offer to me. Talked to Jean on the phone and we
had tentatively decided to take it That was that. Dr. Mossman knew what she was doing.
I guess that lack of mobility around the place is the most, the saddest [unclear].
AP: Perhaps discouraging?
GC: Yeah. It’s not just this campus; I think it affects lots of them. But this campus has
somehow—because maybe it was so uninhibited before. Also, we have gotten a series of
administrators who somehow have thought administration was the center of things.
AP: And it should not be in higher education.
GC: It should not be. Absolutely. Let’s see, when we got here at the—I guess we had nine
people, I think, in the art department, something like that in 1963. At the height of the
development of the department, I believe there were twenty-two, something like that,
which, in terms of art departments—since this department contained art history, studio art
and art education, so there was a range—it was a smaller department, a concise
department. In fact, it was a very compact department.
At that time there was a distribution of function among the three campuses of the
university—in art, [North Carolina] State [University] had architecture, and [The
University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill had art history, and UNCG [The University
of North Carolina at Greensboro] had the studio—so we were encouraged. We had full
steam to go ahead and develop studio and as much art history as was required to support
the studio program so we never undertook a graduate art history program except that
kind of art history which supported the MFA [master of fine arts].
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At that time there was very close interaction between the MFAs in art and English
and in dance. In fact, it was a really a quite wonderful period. The English department
was very strong at that time with a wonderful group of students, and we rather quickly
got a nationally recognized faculty together in the art department and were drawing very
strongly on good students from around the country, so we had a really fine batch of
students too.
And one of the things that is true about any graduate program is that you have to
maintain a balance between the quality of the faculty and the quality of the students. And
those—that was such a symbiotic balance that you can’t fiddle with one without out
messing up the other. One of the places, incidentally, where our program got clobbered
about ten years later was when they—in the decision that came from somewhere to
develop the graduate programs and priority was given to the psychology program. The
out-of-state tuition grants were taken away from the art department—all of them—and
given to psychology for them to get students with. And the out-of-state tuition, of course,
had gone up and up in the meantime. So that suddenly it became—suddenly the good
out-of-state students didn’t come here, you see. And we lost that balance.
AP: And that was in the seventies—about ’73, ’74, ’75?
GC: Yeah, right along in there. I must—I mean one of the things that has always been
confusing to me—of course, was a series of administrative decisions that tore apart what
was one of the really distinguished humanities program in the country here in favor of the
practical programs. Of course, the legislature had legislated that, but why the
administration didn’t protect us from it is one of my big things that I find very sad about
it because in the period that followed as sciences became impossibly expensive to
maintain on an upper-bracket level and as the competition of every community college
and this and that—every community college, college and university started competing on
a student-for-student level for the state money because the legislature set it up in that
asinine way. UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro] then, in order to
maintain some sort of an idea about budget, goes head on into competition with Guilford
[Technical] Community College, you know, and all the way around, therefore programs
get encouraged in terms of the number of night students they can bring in, like the
business department. This place goes to pot. And this seems to have been systematically
overseen that we do it. And I think it’s been difficult to watch this depreciation,
deterioration.
AP: In the fine arts and in the humanities—I mean in art and humanities. Again, you’re
saying—since the mid-seventies here?
GC: Again, the odd thing is that the humanities and the fine arts are inexpensive
programs; they’re the ones that you can run for almost nothing. And they let those go in a
kind of scatter-brained pursuit for something, and I don’t know why.
For a long time there was a lot of emphasis on how many students do you have?
Well, what in the world difference does it make? We were always being asked that,
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oddly enough. Incidentally, there was one semester when the art department was one-half
of one percent smaller than the history department, which meant that we were the second-largest
department on campus. And we were operating at a student-faculty ratio of 21:5
when the legislated requirement was for 22:5. And the department was blowing itself to
pieces trying to [unclear] in energy.
But to get back to some of those things that we passed earlier—but it was one of
the things I really liked about coming here. I had been head of Hawaii for three years
where things were fairly rigid and hard to move around, but here I was encouraged to
redo the program.
The growth of the art department in colleges was substantially a post-war thing,
and it was a hurried thing in which, in all sorts of ways, the education of an artist was
patched together to fit within the credit system and the teaching credit system—that is,
how teachers get—teaching hours system that existed in universities. It resulted in some
very bizarre things because some universities considered a drawing class just like
supervising a biology laboratory. And if you did that why, in order to get a drawing
teacher, he had to be teaching night and day all week long, that sort of thing. And there
were things of that sort that were involved.
But the teaching of art at any rate as it was done in art school was a really old-fashioned
thing; it’s a kind of apprentice thing. That was one problem. Another problem
is that the master’s program—the MFAs that were being offered all over the country
described themselves in the catalog as turning out students of substantially professional
accomplishments. Now by the 1970s, there were some 40,000 MFAs; in New York
(which was the art capital of the world), there were perhaps fifty introductions of new
artists every year—successful. Your chance of becoming an artist of acknowledged
professional reputation, which you were promised, were about the same as your
becoming an NBA basketball star off of the UNCG basketball team. And we were
cranking these things out and sending out all this publicity—the wall was full of posters
advertising this. And the education was not professional; it was being offered by
teachers who never had had an exhibit or who could not pass muster as artists. And the
whole thing went nuts.
At that time early in the seventies, it may surprise you to know there were forty
colleges in the state of North Carolina offering a major in studio art.
AP: In North Carolina?
GC: In North Carolina. Now figure that out in fifty states. And every one of these people
presumably thought they were going to be an artist. There is something utterly ridiculous
about this. So there were several things to do about it. One was at the undergraduate
level—to try and establish a core of what I call university level subjects within the art
department that constituted an education rather like a major in English. So we injected a
very high art history requirement—the highest in the country—and we got good art
historians. And in order to get to a—and we—while we maintained the BFA bachelor of
fine arts] which was in the program, we discouraged students from taking it and
channeled as many of them as possible into the BA [bachelor of arts] program, so that
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they had to take the full range of courses.
And in advising and counseling, the BFA was to be limited to those who were
exceptionally qualified for university work. And there are those who really can draw like
a dream but can’t read and that sort of thing. Or those who simply could not be
discouraged—in other words, who were going to be artists dammit no matter what. And
those are the only ones that are ever going to be artists anyway. So unless they were
willing to just stamp their feet at us, why, they couldn’t get into the BFA. And they—we
wanted a person who had an art major to be educated in the way a person with—a history
major or English major or something—but with a visual emphasis rather than with a
verbal emphasis. And I still think this is an eminently practical thing in an age that is
becoming more and more visual and more and more oral. I mean all these kids that are
really are brilliant musically can’t even describe what they’ve been hearing. But that’s
the age. And television has turned lots of verbal things into visual things, so I think all
that’s okay.
And then for the—in addition to that, we used the gallery here which was just a
little thing and began to use it not only to build a collection, to build an exhibition
program of very contemporary work. If you’re teaching people to be contemporary
artists, for heavens sake, they have to see what’s going on; they can’t just rely on what
the teachers tell them is going on because the teacher’s going to tell them what’s going
on is what they’re doing. You see, so you have to face [unclear]. You can’t—in English,
you can’t keep the students from reading the books. In all these art programs around
here— they were outside of a city—the students could be kept from seeing anything that
was being done except what the teachers were doing.
So we started it out with things like the Art on Paper show [annual exhibition
sponsored by Dillard Paper Company], which would hit the students with the stuff that
was done that year and that sort of thing, but—. And then a benefit of that was in that
period—it’s not true now, but in that period—when these young contemporary artists
were having—you know, there weren’t all the exhibition facilities and stuff; that is, there
wasn’t the interest in contemporary art, and we offered them a place to exhibit in the
gallery.
And we had an absolutely brilliant range of artists. They would sound like—you
would think that they were—comparably in physics, it would be a list of Nobel Prize
[Since 1901 the Nobel Prize has been awarded for achievements in physics, chemistry,
physiology or medicine, literature and for peace. The Nobel Prize is an international
award administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden.] winners that have
taught here. Dan Plathen [?] for instance and Saul Wayeta [?], and Peter Agostini
[American figurative sculptor] was brought onto the faculty as a sculptor. And Peter
didn’t even have a high school education, but he was one of the most brilliant sculptors in
the country. And Mereb gave him a full professorship with tenure. She could do that.
AP: About what year?
GC: That was shortly after he came; I think ’65 or ’66. And that was so unusual. This
department’s [unclear] was all over. There were some years there—I would say between
13
’67 and ’73 or so—when this department really ran with the big departments. We were
one of the four or five best departments in the country. And this was generally
acknowledged. We were the smallest one of all of them though. And every student who
came through here, we had—tried to maintain a proportion of one professional artist—
and I mean an artist that you would read about in a national magazine—and one
professional teacher. We tried to keep it fifty-fifty. And the professional artist taught
freshman courses, senior courses and graduate courses. Everybody did.
[End CD 1—Begin CD 2]
GC: There wasn’t any place in the country where the students got—where they didn’t have to
graduate into that or be chosen into it or something. And that was the undergraduate
program. Now the graduate program was always different. And I think our graduate
program was never as successful. Rather generally, we’ve had a few brilliant graduate
students; but rather generally the seniors in the undergraduate program were better artists
than the MFAs.
AP: Were the undergraduate students mostly from North Carolina or did you recruit—or did
students come from way away, as opposed to graduate school?
GC: Well, there was always a limitation you know, but I would guess most of them were from
North Carolina. I never really paid much attention.
AP: Yeah. Undergraduate and then the graduate.
GC: The graduate program was very largely out of state, A lot of it was out of state, not all of
it. But there was another thing that we did at that time that I’m so proud of. They’ve quit
it since. Because with the graduate program, we started open admission on the theory that
if you have forty art departments—many of which were two-man departments—and if
you’re going to have selective admissions where you require a portfolios before you let a
person in, any kid who was unfortunate enough to get into thirty-nine out of those forty
departments, wouldn’t have a chance at getting into graduate school. If his parents, you
know—. If for any reason he hadn’t gone to State or East Carolina [University], Chapel
Hill, why he wouldn’t have a chance at getting in on a selective basis. So we set up the
system (And Mereb supported us on it.) that anybody who had an art major from
anywhere could come here and register for graduate courses without being a candidate.
After that, we would evaluate their work in terms of our standards and then they would
be allowed to take selected lines of undergraduate courses that would qualify them and
then move on into graduate work when they removed these deficiencies.
AP: So it became a training ground and—but also a chance for them to see who they were, as
maybe—?
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GC: Exactly. And I still think—they’ve quit this now—the graduate school finds it
disreputable. On the other hand, I don’t think they know what they’re talking about
because the undergraduate art training is so impossible. Now they say, well it’s—what do
you call it—has a—it’s been?
AP: I don’t know the term. But anyway there’s a term.
GC: But I might say that we were invited to be one of the founding members of the agency
which evaluate. And I couldn’t do it. At least—because the other schools in it, from my
point of view were offering—their standards were wrong. They’re still teaching—turning
out tens of thousands of MFAs.
Another thing we did in the department was we eliminated all those courses in
costume design, in advertising art, in lettering, in all of those courses which were
vocational in nature, on the basis that Guilford Technical [Community] College was
teaching them. Guilford Tech could teach them for about a third of the cost that we
required to teach them. If we taught a course in advertising art, we had to hire somebody
and give them tenure, right? Because the AAUP [American Association of University
Professors]—which meant if the guy was any good at advertising, we would have had to
pay him three or four times the going rate for an instructor, right? Guilford [Technical
Community] College could get the best commercial artists to come out and teach one
night. We couldn’t do that. And for $30 or something, they could teach a course in
advertising art that would be greatly better than the one we could teach. Now we put all
those courses back in again because UNCG wants to draw the students away from
Guilford [Technical Community] College. Now we were giving credit for students—
there was a whole list of courses—of vocational—that an art major could take a certain
percentage of his program in vocational courses—but we didn’t offer them; we would
accept them from Guilford. The students would have to go out to Guilford to take them.
Now Guilford’s program was thriving, and ours was thriving. And we were
teaching what I call university-level courses, and they were teaching vocational courses,
and I think that’s the way it should be. There should be some distinction. That’s one of
the things that’s happened to North Carolina—everything is done in a mish mash.
Everybody’s teaching the same damn thing.
AP: And there’s no integrity.
GC: And everybody’s trying to give doctorates for everything, just a mish mash. There’s such
an absolute lack of any intellectual clarity about what’s being done.
AP: If we think about intellectual clarity and go back to some of your days at Stanford and
then work at Columbia and Hawaii and here—. And your vision, (I’m tracing this vision
through.) how have things changed for you or how you insisted on what you wanted
professionally?
15
GC: I had the opportunity oddly enough, and it and it was pure accident, of going after what I
wanted. I might say it was expensive then, but a lot less expensive than it is now. I mean
my Columbia stuff was all in the Bill of Rights [unclear]. My children couldn’t do that
now; they couldn’t fuss around that way looking for the right thing
AP: So there’s a freedom in the unknown; there was a freedom in the finding of oneself.
GC: And a certain tolerance, I might say, within education itself. Now education is—well the
trouble is we aren’t managed by educators anymore. We’re managers who, even though
they are dealing in education, think they’re selling shoes of something.
AP: Car salesmen? It does seem to have changed?
GC: It has really changed. I remember when I was at Columbia, when they hired [Dwight D.]
Eisenhower [five-star general in the United States Army, supreme commander of the
allied forces in Europe during World War II, 34th president of the United States, named
president of Columbia University in 1948], boy, did that affect the faculty. But
Eisenhower actually was a man of very broad understanding, it turns out, compared with
what was to come.
The education—the university system, not the vocational education system—even
if it’s a school of medicine or law—but the humanities part of the university system
should be disconnected from the goals of business, from the goals of politics. It should
be—of course, I think that that’s one of—part of the history of this whole thing was
North Carolina’s reaction to the student revolts and the sudden sense that this sixth estate
(the educational system) should be reined in. But that is absolutely contrary to the health
of our culture—that an outside view, an analysis and judgment of what’s happened
should be closed off.
I don’t know if it has occurred to you, but the administration used to be two
rooms in the Foust Building—the chancellor was on one side of the hall and Mereb was
on the other. The whole administration took place in space the size of the bottom floor of
this house. They built the new administration building, you know after the Columbia and
[University of California at] Berkeley incidents [student unrest], and you have that
ground floor with a single elevator and stairway that you can block the doors on; the
administration can all look down, and the chancellor is up in a sky loft that is absolutely
impregnable—that’s a fortress, that damn building. And its absolute purpose is to insulate
the administration from the students and the faculty and everybody else.
AP: [unclear] rest of the life. And the grounds crew, everybody.
GC: The symbol of that is impossible. I’m really surprised. Of course, George [sic] Ferguson
was not a visual man, and I think he had no sense of architecture. But anybody can look
at that building and find out that its meaning is offensive. Certainly Ferguson
misunderstood it. Ferguson, you know, as chancellor used to walk around. When I was
head of the department, he would come in just almost any time, and we’d sit and talk.
16
Can you imagine this guy doing that? [Chancellor William Moran] He wandered into
classes and stuff.
Singletary was out on the campus every night. Now the chancellor's house is
surrounded, and you’re not allowed to trespass and he’s never out any time. You could
put a whole—two football fields on his front yard and it’s right in the center of the
campus. I can’t believe it.
AP: I’ve caught myself almost tripping across the grass. Oh, wait, no, it was—.
GC: It was alright when Singletary was here because the kids were invited onto the lawn and
into the house and stuff, and he was always out. He was the father of the—you know, he
carried that on, but the whole thing’s nuts now.
AP: So the whole structure’s changed. I mean, it did change in vision and mission. I don’t
know where—all over and around.
GC: The art department, I know, which is—I mean I finally retreated into Weatherspoon [Art
Gallery] because that’s the only place where any real development continued to be
possible. The legislature when they started moving—. I know that [Academic Affairs]
Vice Chancellor [Stanley] Jones invited [College of Arts & Sciences] Dean [Robert]
Miller and I into his office to talk about an interior design program. And since we were
invited in there to talk about it, why I talked about it and told him that this was the wrong
place for an interior design program. You certainly shouldn’t have an interior design
program disconnected from an architectural program. In other words, if the university
system needed an interior design program, it had to be over at State.
What was her name? The head of home economics. Yeah. [Dr. Naomi] Albanese
decided that home economics should have an interior design program. So she invited the
head of—there are two professional organizations of interior design, and she invited the
head of one of them down here. She looked over her program and pointed out that the art
department was—we were the background support for her program. This guy was interior
designer in Cleveland [Ohio] for Halle Brothers [department store]. And he came to the
art department and sent in his report (Dean Miller has the report.) that the art department
was giving the program—that Halle Brothers would find desirable as preparation for
interior design. We had the art history; we had the general education; we had the highly
professional artists and so on. And he would recommend that they don’t introduce any
interior course.
So Albanese brought the other guy down [laughs], and he was never brought
around the art department.
AP: I see.
GC: And then Jones—they started an interior design program in home ec[onomics]. In fact,
they were going to build a building; they had preliminary design for it which we figured
as big as that [unclear] new county building. In fact, it was so luxurious, every student—
17
it was modeled. It was to be parallel to the architectural program at State. And since they
didn’t want an interior designer to feel inferior to an architect, each of the student spaces
was equal to the student architect at State. What was the name of the girl that was head of
it? She had taught in the art department.
Anyway, Jones was very fond of her. That got preliminary financing. It cut off all
development of the art department, and the new positions kept going to home ec
as they were building up a support program for it. And then after five or six or eight
years, the state was through funding. I think Albanese had retired. But that was part of
the death of the art department anyway. It’s odd because I never understood when we
were in there, when we were with the [unclear] hat he was telling us what to do. I
thought he was asking us what to do. I just misunderstood the new administration.
AP: About what year did all of that begin to happen?
GC: I was still head of the art department; I think Bob Miller was still dean—’73 or ’74, quite
awhile ago. And I think that whole project dragged on to about 1980.
AP: Have we suffered as a public university? I mean to public universities suffer as opposed
to private because—?
GC: No. One of the things that I was thinking of when I decided not to go back to Columbia
and to come here—I just—it had seemed to me at that time that the real future of
education was with the public interest. It was entirely logical that this become a public
thing. And that was a big—I didn’t think that the private universities could really keep
up, among other things. I thought that whole elitist thing was going to drop away. The
idea that we would have billionaires and stuff; these kind of fortunes didn’t seem—I
hadn’t conceived of it—that money would concentrate in the way it has. But I was wrong
in that because the big private universities, they remain much—. Well, the legislature,
for instance, can’t require that they serve the governor’s industrial program as we have
been told to—that we have to train people for jobs so that companies will move here and
this and that.
Cost effective was one of the words that came in in 1973 or so. Every program
had to prove itself cost effective. I thought that we were one of the most cost-effective
things happening in the state. We had really great teachers teaching twenty-one full-time
students and that sort of thing. I thought that that was great. Weatherspoon Gallery has
been one of the most cost-effective things that happened in the state too.
AP: Tell me about the history of—was in place when you got here? You’re talking about the
building behind McIver [Building]?
GC: Yeah, that new building. The new one is where the gallery is now. It has been
disconnected from the art department now, but at that time it was all part of the art
department.
In fact, at that time there were larger things involved here. For instance, at that
18
time we thought we were creating a new kind of art culture where art would be taught, art
would be seen.
AP: And touched?
GC: Yeah—that since art was not being down for churches and was not being done for
palaces, it has to be done for someplace. The most complete environment for it would be
a university where the students are, where the artists are, where the people to see it are
and where the work should be kept and maintained. Within the art department, that all—a
nodular culture within the culture— seemed correct. We also, incidentally, were putting
film programs in; we had a film program started; we had our own publication started; we
had the Unicorn Press which was in the art department very briefly until it got expelled
by the University of North Carolina Press which said we couldn’t have a press.
AP: Oh, they did? Thowing their weight around, huh? Didn’t like the competition?
GC: I don’t know if you know Unicorn Press, but it’s one of the very distinguished small
presses that still operates; we brought it here from Santa Barbara. And then they expelled
it. It published its first—it published several books with our library here as the publishing
point.
AP: UNCG Press didn’t like this idea or did it come from the chancellor?
GC: Frankly, I don’t know exactly where it came from. I understood it was from the press.
But also there are some really strange things about this because they were a liberal press,
a very liberal press. They published those two Catholic priests [brothers Daniel and
Philip Berrigan] once on FBI’s [Federal Bureau of Investigation] Ten Most Wanted
Fugitives list for involvement in anti-war protests. They were supporting the anti-
Vietnam—
Without even knowing, but because even Mossman claimed to have no
knowledge of the source of these orders. I think it was the FBI that kicked them—. I
really feel, that, that was the time when you went over to A&T [North Carolina
Agricultural & Technical State University], the FBI was sitting there photographing
everybody as you went through the door.
AP: What year? What time?
GC: Oh, the early seventies. Our pictures were all on record, you know—you couldn’t go to a
program like that without passing this barrage of just click, click, click.
AP: I found out this morning that faculty or staff members had to sign a pledge when they
came that they were not a Communist. I found that out today.
GC: That’s right. No, that’s true.
19
AP: It was a shock?
GC: Yeah, it was a shock. I wasn’t a Communist when I signed it, but I’m also not a
Christian which was a bit of a subject here [unclear]. I think there was a, “so help me,
God,” or something [unclear].
AP: Well, speaking of Christians and Southerners and Communists and FBI, how did you find
the climate of North Carolina.? Who were the students? I’m asking you also about the
background of the students. Does one’s background have to do with the rest of one’s
creative energy or one’s life? Have you seen that played out in faculty and staff here—
our backgrounds? I’m asking you if you—did students seem provincial, what you did to
break down the provinciality of notions?
GC: Well, of course, in the art department, I guess we—there were a few native North
Carolinians, but for the most part, the department was imported.
AP: Faculty?
GC: The faculty. And the department was, I think—I never was too—I think the department
on campus was thought of a radical place and certain kinds of students were over here.
I’m not sure about that.
AP: How would you compare yourself with people in music or drama? All equally radical?
GC: If you’re talking about the kind of music you get in the music department which is
[unclear] is conservative music because music is bifurcated now in a way that, very
interestingly, the visual arts are not. The visual arts went through the conflict of
traditional versus non-traditional in the 1930s. Music went through it in the 1950s, and,
from my point of view of course, the important contemporary music has not occurred in
the environment of the music department, but in the environment of teaching. The official
music has never acknowledged that. So again, but in a less clear way, many art
departments have been doing the same thing—they’ve been teaching one kind of art
when the art that is acknowledged is another kind of art. I don’t know about drama.
AP: It is probably too broad a question.
GC: I do think—incidentally, and this is an important thing with me—that when you mention
drama and music, you’re talking about performing arts. Now writing and painting,
architecture and the composition of music—if you’re writing it down, not if you’re a jazz
player—are what I call constructive arts. And one of the biggest errors in education and
it’s taking place of the school of art—is to put these two together. Because
temperamentally and in terms of all the conditions of proper education, and soon, the two
are absolutely different.
20
That’s when Mossman was—when I came here, Mossman assumed that we were
putting together a college of art. And I refused because the art department then would
have been in with a very large music department and a very large dance department and
drama department, and those three have a coherence. We belong with biology and math
and history and philosophy and poetry.
AP: And theology?
GC: Yeah, all of those things. We’re a constructive art. We belong in the College of Arts and
Sciences. And I always thought that was, you know—I wasn’t trying to keep it. I would
be perfectly pleased if they would spin off dance, drama and music into a College of
Performing Arts, which they should have done. And they should have done it before they
established the School of Arts in Winston-Salem.
AP: I was going to ask you about that.
GC: Singletary tried to arrange that. Winston-Salem overpowered him in the legislature.
AP: Money in Winston-Salem?
GC: No, political. Just politics. Charlotte had recently gotten the University of Charlotte, and
[University of North Carolina at] Wilmington. Winston-Salem simply had no state-supported
non-black educational institutions, and they considered themselves artsy
anyway [unclear].
.
AP: What about SECCA [Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art]?
GC: That’s part of their claim to art supremacy. It’s a kind of silly organization.
AP: Going back to your own life—personal vision and how you’ve worked it out in your life,
your own wishes, your own creativity. How have you worked that out in your personal
journey and your professional life you’re leading here?
GC: Sometimes I regret that I have spent so much time in education. My friends who never
got involved in the administrative side—start to think about it. I really should have—. I
consider myself very seriously a painter, and I’m glad to get back to it now. On the other
hand, cultivating a career as a painter or a reputation as a painter is a very substantial
thing.
I mean, Alex Katz [American figurative artist associated with the Pop art
movement], for instance—I don’t know if you know art history or not [unclear]. Alex is
an old friend of mine in New York in the fifties. Every time I go to New York, why Alex
is out on the street meeting everybody. So when I’m up buying paintings for
Weatherspoon, he’s running the streets again. That’s the way—you know, there’s a
professional side to it. And, of course, he became a big name in painting, and Phillip
21
Perlstein [American painter and part of the contemporary Realist school] and all the
guys— I regret that in a way. I especially regret it because of the way things have been
dismantled here. I thought we had something really worthwhile, and it's been torn apart
and simply doesn’t exist.
AP: How did it happen? I mean, why—?
GC: It happened because you’re in an institution where the orders come down. And the
several times when I have really had to take a stand on something, I’ve been defeated
every time. I’ve really put things on the line several times. The last time was with the
location of the new museum building. And this went before the Board of Trustees. Now
in this idea about the art department, the core of it was an exhibition facility and that
active art life that took place in the exhibition facility with the students on one side and
the public on the other so that there was a real interaction. It’s kind of like the stage of a
theater [unclear]—that this belonged at the center of the art department, We were—the
proposal was that this be built there adjacent, connected to the present studio business
and that that relationship be maintained.
The chancellor wanted this to be a museum. Now a museum’s a separate thing.
And he wanted it to be part of the gateway to the campus. He visualized it opposite
Aycock Auditorium as some sort of a gateway to Rome, and he also didn’t like those
stores which were cluttering up the outline of the campus. This offered him the chance to
solve two disturbing organizational problems at once. I went to that Board of Trustees
meeting, and I presented as much of this as I was allowed. And the chancellor said he
preferred it the other way. So they voted him right and me wrong. I think it’s a shame
because then he said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter; it can stay with the art department. “Of
course, it can’t stay with the art department. So the very next thing to do was disconnect
it administratively from the art department. So now we are in a perfectly normal
disconnection where the learning about it and the making of it is on one side and the
whole social, political side that takes place somewhere else.
AP: I’m wondering how many students go in—you know, would be—go through there,
maybe cut around it or go one way, go left instead of right?
GC: The way we had it planned was that it was going to go out into that park, rise up above
it. There was going to be a skywalk across the street leading, diving right into the
classroom building. So when kids came out of the classroom building to come down to
their dorms, they would have to walk right along, right by the open doors of the gallery.
And that seemed great to me. And you would look down from the skywalk into the park.
But now, you see, that would have eliminated his excuse for closing off Spring Garden—
which is also bothering him terribly.
AP: The stores? And the tramps—a couple people looking at the sunshine at 6:30 in the
morning when the rest of us are up and at it—maybe been up all night looking at it.
22
GC: But anyway those are the things that make it seem like—
AP: Other comments about the faculty or about the students?
GC: I think the students—the students here were interesting. It has occurred to me again that
the students at Columbia were probably better. I don’t know that they were any smarter,
but they were directed into a more substantial achievement. I don’t what's happened to all
these brilliant Southern girls we’ve taught. It’s still odd. A few of them-—you want some
really brilliant people, and it evaporates.
AP: When you came here the school was already coed?
GC: No, it was just coming. It had been designated to become coed, but it still wasn’t coed.
AP: Did that make the difference? Was that the blow—the death blow of this women’s—?
GC: In a sense it was because they were so nervous about it and were so eager to make
concessions to draw men and stuff, you know, like the business school and this and that.
I don’t think any of that was necessary; I think that that was an excuse. I don’t think
there was anything rational about it. If they had at that point gone on, and as you went
into the ’70s you’ll recall when there was a kind of great difficulty in young people in the
humanities finding places to teach.
In the seventies instead of building a business school and stuff, had they
reinforced the humanities, they could have had the best faculty in the whole world. I
mean, you could get—.
AP: It was here.
GC: Everything was here. The people were here who knew who to hire. We don’t have that
anymore; there aren’t even people here who know the right people to hire. You don’t
have the department heads you used to have. So even if you—it would take them a
generation now to put it back together again. If somebody had the [unclear]—. But what
a remarkable thing it would be right now, you see, to have one of the—it could easily be
named one of the half-dozen best undergraduate humanities programs in the country. It
could easily be that.
AP: And it was good; I mean, it did have that reputation.
GC: Oh, it was very good. It did have that reputation, and it was that good.
AP: I’ve heard it called the Wellesley [College, one of original Seven Sisters] of the South.
GC: It was. Well, I think it was better than Wellesley in many ways. I had taught Ivy League.
And my daughter, you know, went to Bryn Mawr [College, another of the Seven Sisters].
23
We know what that is up there. It has its faults too. One could have had it here; it could
have been developed. Why in the world they didn’t do it is just such nonsense. Instead
they kept pushing it down. One of the problems was somebody’s fascination with
enrollment statistics. And they’re still fascinated with them. But the point is that for all
that they've done about it, the enrollment hasn’t gotten that big. Now, one of the things
that I would really like to plant in somebody’s statistical mind is that they compare the
administrative hours per student in 1963 with the administrative hours per student now,
and I would just take a bet that they’re six to one. And they keep saying, “Well, it’s so
complicated now.” You know how complicated it is.
AP: I understand that an earlier registrar used to run the school out of a shoebox. Granted
computers are wonderful.
GC: The computers, I think, help. The registration system at Columbia was terrible, the
University of Hawaii was terrible. We all had to run them out of shoeboxes; you had to
have big chalkboards and stuff—that wasn’t very good; the computer really helped that a
lot. But it should take more people to keep a chalkboard than it does to run a computer—
why does it take more people to run the computer?
AP: We seem to have twisted it around—turned around?
GC: It’s terrible. I guess we have about 10,000 students now. I think that when Mereb and
[Chancellor] Singletary and Business Manager [Henry] Ferguson and the registrar and
the dean of the graduate school and the dean of students were the administration—each
of them had one secretary. I think we had about 8,000 students, maybe 7,500. Now we
have ten [thousand]. Now what’s the difference? Look at all those buildings that are full
of them. The development office is larger than the whole university was, and the
development office incidentally—well, I won’t get into that. We don’t need that.
AP: Well, visions, other comments, other plusses, minuses? When you look back on it, look at
now, look at the future—for yourself or for art. Other comments, bases, that we haven’t
covered?
GC: Art's a big and a very different thing now; it would take a lot of time to cover. I still don’t
think at the—I think in university, art should be thought of as a major subject for a
general education; that’s what it should be thought of. We would do just as well to drop
all pretense of training professional artists because that’s as dumb as running a basketball
program because people make pro ball. It doesn’t make sense. This campus was
responsible for educating people.
AP: Are we asking what’s happened to the liberal in imagination? Are we asking basic—?
GC: I might point out—incidentally, this was one of the things that we did in the early
seventies—that if you simply go through the educational backgrounds of the American
24
artists that became well established and well known after the fifties; that is those who
were educated within the environment of these big university programs, more than half of
them never took a university program. Donald Judd [minimalist artist] was a philosophy
major at Columbia; they take majors in all sorts of things. They get educated. And what
you need to know about art depends on what you’re going to do. If you’re going to do
that, why you don’t need to draw a figure. You can each draw the figure the way you
learned to draw a figure, and it doesn’t take a whole university program to teach you.
I think the best part of my education was the courses I took with Ivor Winters at
Stanford, who was the great poet and critic there. The critic part of it was the good part
because—and that’s what a university should teach you to do is how to criticize and
evaluate, how to put yourself up against other people, your work up against other work.
And if you can do it one field, you can transfer it to another field. And when you start
making sure that people take lettering courses and color courses and this and that before
you let them have a degree and don’t let them into other things, you’re cheating them.
AP: We’ve lost; we’ve lost the vision.
GC: Yes. And there’s a lot of territoriality in a university.
AP: That’s frightening. I wonder if it goes back to Montana or rural areas? Cities, the mix, the
diversity.
GC: I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.
AP: Thank you very much.
[End of Interview]