Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project For Craft and Decorative Arts in America

Interview with Michael James
Conducted by David Lyon
At the Artist's home in Lincoln, Nebraska
January 4 and 5, 2003

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Michael James on January 4 and 5, 2003. The interview took place in Lincoln, Nebraska, and was conducted by David Lyon for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America.

Michael James has reviewed the transcript and has made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a verbatim transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

DAVID LYON: This is David Lyon interviewing Michael James in his office – home office, actually – his study, in Lincoln, Nebraska, on the fourth of January 2003, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Do we have that? I think so. And Michael, could I just see the level on you? Just say something.

MICHAEL JAMES: When and where were you born?

MR. LYON: Yes, exactly. When and where were you born? Let’s talk about it.

MR. JAMES: Okay. Well, I was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1949 – June 30, 1949, and lived my entire life there save for three years during which I was in graduate school in Rochester, New York, and the last two and a half years since our relocation to Nebraska.

MR. LYON: Obviously your childhood had something to do with your becoming an artist, right? Tell me a little bit about your family background.

MR. JAMES: Well, I grew up in a working-class, French-Canadian neighborhood in a working-class, French-Canadian family.

MR. LYON: Did you go to parochial school?

MR. JAMES: I went – yeah, my family was, and remains for the most part, devoutly Catholic, and during the 1950s and 1960s I attended a Roman Catholic parochial school, St. Anthony’s, which was the parish that we lived in. And in fact, I only ever had religious-associated teachers, nuns, for my whole education, until I went to undergraduate school. And those were the days when nuns wore habits, so my experience of education until I went to university was definitely conditioned by –

MR. LYON: It was very black and white?

MR. JAMES: - the black-and-white authority [laughs] figures that these nuns personified.

My family – my father was the sole source of income in our family as I was growing up, and he worked as a clerk in a supermarket, an A&P supermarket, for our entire life. I mean, he retired from that company as an assistant manager of a local supermarket sometime in the 1980s, I believe. So, given that we had ultimately a total of seven children, of which I’m the oldest, there was never enough money to do more than cover the essentials, and the single extravagance, which my father would have described it as, of sending his kids to Catholic school, which meant that he had to pay a certain amount of tuition, which in those days wasn’t very high. I think it was something like $150 a year for each kid up to a certain number, then after that the rest didn’t have to pay, so it was sort of a deal, I guess. But they were really committed to the religious component of our education. And not knowing any different, it was fine with me for all those years.

So we lived in a three-story tenement building that my grandmother owned for many years, and usually – well, for most of my youth she lived – she and my grandfather lived on the first floor of the house until he died. And then I have an aunt on my mother’s side who lived above us. She had seven kids also, so at one time there were about 14 kids in that house. And since I was the oldest in my family and also the oldest grandchild, the first of the 26 grandchildren, there was always a lot going on. My grandmother eventually sold the house to my father and mother and moved down the street to an apartment.

But we were what I would describe as an extremely close-knit, traditional, third-generation immigrant family, because the first generation came in in the late 19th century – the first immigrant generation on both sides, grandparents – great-grandparents on both sides came from – on my mother’s side from Canada, from Quebec, to work in the textile mills, and on my father’s side from Lancashire, England – from Preston, in fact, in Lancashire - to work also in the textile mills. And my parents’ – my grandparents’ generation were textile mill workers. My grandmother – I still remember my grandmother working in a textile mill on Collette Street that we – where we lived, and I would – that 2:00 or 3:00, or whatever time it was in the afternoon that the shops let out, she would come out with dozens of other women who worked in these textile shops.

But my parents’ generation didn’t work in the textile mills, and none of my parents’ siblings, to my knowledge, ever worked in the textile industry. By that time they’d already moved into other occupations – mostly, again, blue-collar jobs for the most part.

MR. LYON: Now, did you speak French at home?

MR. JAMES: We spoke French – well, I should say that we understood French, and we went to a French - bilingual French school. St. Anthony’s Parish was bilingual, and a lot of – almost all of the parishioners were French-Canadian descent, and the language was still – at least in the 1950s and the 1960s -- was still very much alive in that community, so that I perfectly understood French, because half of my daily school classes through 8th grade were in French, and then in high school I always had several subjects in French – religion and French grammar and French literature, specifically. But eighth never – as kids we never used – we rarely used it outside of school, even if my grandparents spoke to us in French, which they did sometimes. They spoke English perfectly well, but they also – between themselves and their own siblings -- so that would have been my great aunts and great uncles -- they spoke French. But when we were around as kids, they would speak to us in French; we would answer in English. We always answered in English; we never spoke back in French. So that was sort of – I guess it’s typical of, by that time now fourth generation kids, to quickly sort of try to distance themselves from that immigrant –

MR. LYON: Actually, I think it’s unusual with fourth-generation to even have anything left.

MR. JAMES: Well, I guess it’s because the parishes kept it so much alive, and there was also a lot of back-and-forth. I remember in high school I had a girlfriend who was French Canadian – more I think, in her case. She was second generation because her mother – her mother spoke very little English. Her mother was almost exclusively a French speaker and – well, actually I never heard her mother speak English, so she only ever spoke French. And I dated this girl for about three or four years and spent a lot of time with her family. And at home around the table, in her family, everything was in French, always, and I would be there answering in English, as I always did, but perfectly understanding what everybody else was saying.

I just – I guess in high school I just found it really embarrassing to be using that language in a country where English was the main language. I think I also felt that I didn’t speak it well enough, that there was a little bit of that. But nobody ever forced us, outside of school, to speak French. As long as we could make ourselves understood when, you know – a lot of the French speakers who only spoke French, like this girlfriend’s mother; she understood English, but she just wasn’t comfortable using it.

But in any case, there was a lot of that, and today it’s pretty much disappeared. By the 1980s the French speakers started dying off, and the parishes stopped – well, actually, well before the '80s the parishes stopped having masses in French, which was one of the main ways of keeping the language alive. And today, those parishes are largely now Portuguese and Hispanic in terms of the makeup of the congregations. So while there are still a lot of French descendants in the New Bedford area, the Frenchness has long since disappeared from their lives, as far as cultural sort of component.

MR. LYON: But how about you?

MR. JAMES: Well –

MR. LYON: You mentioned two things that one could assume at least had something to do with your later development, whether you knew it would or not, and that is at least an awareness of French and some sort of emotional link to the textiles.

MR. JAMES: Well –

MR. LYON: Or is that just pushing it?

MR. JAMES: I think it might be pushing it a little bit. I mean, I’ve always – I said that I, you know, sort of descended from textile mill workers, but the culture of the textile industry and the life of textile mill workers never really touched me that much. It was part of the environment in a way, but my parents weren’t directly involved in it, and it’s a loose connection, I guess I would say, although, you know, I grew up being very aware of fabrics and textiles as a result of that, so there is that connection for sure, but I can’t say that there’s any way that that experience pushed me into textiles, because the last thing I ever anticipated working in would have been textiles, ever, you know, right through undergraduate school, right through – well, almost through graduate school. You know, I never thought about textiles as anything that I could employ creatively.

MR. LYON: But you were drawn to art. How did that come about?

MR. JAMES: I was drawn to art. That’s very bizarre. That’s – I often wonder why that came about, because unlike – certainly unlike a lot of middle-class kids I came to know later, I had no exposures to art in a formal sense growing up, other than what I sort of discovered on my own or by accident, because my parents didn’t take us to museums. That concept would have been way out of their range of experience. And –

MR. LYON: So what did you do summers as a kid?

MR. JAMES: But I liked to draw, so it started with that. I liked – as a little kid I spent a lot of time drawing, and my brothers – we had seven kids. My parents had four boys in a row. I was the oldest, the second oldest was born a year later – a year and a month later, the third oldest was born a year and two months later, or three months later, then the fourth boy was born another three or four years after the third. Then there was a space of about three or four years and then they started having girls, and then they had three girls in a row. So my two brothers, in sequence after me – and I loved to draw. We all drew as little kids. And my father would bring home pieces of pads from work that – each week he would have some of these pads to bring home, and we would just fill them with drawings. So we liked – you know, we liked to draw, and they encouraged it.

And I was fascinated as a kid. I remember one of my favorite TV shows was Jon Gnagy, drawing sort of TV artist.

MR. LYON: How do you spell his name, do you know?

MR. JAMES: I think it was J-O-N – I don’t think it was J-O-H-N. It was J-O-N, and Gnagy was – I think it was G-N-A-G-Y, if I’m not mistaken. I mean, that would be an interesting –

MR. LYON: That’s an odd –

MR. JAMES: – name to look up and see what comes up when you search that on the Internet, because he was – I mean, they have some of those TV teachers on public TV today that – I don’t know who they are, but I know they exist – and he was of that sort of – he was of the '50s, that person who did TV instruction. But I watched that show faithfully.

MR. LYON: So you must have had a TV early on.

MR. JAMES: Yeah, we had a TV from when I was probably four or five.

MR. LYON: So the early '50s. That’s early.

MR. JAMES: I do remember the first TV. My grandmother got the first TV downstairs, so I do remember watching this little screen and it being a big deal that they had this TV. Then my parents got a TV a few years later. But once they did, I was faithfully watching that show.

Now, the other thing that ties into this as a sort of first exposure to art was some artwork that I became aware of through a paternal aunt and uncle. In fact, it was my father’s aunt, a woman named Theresa Slattery, and she was married to my Uncle Dan Slattery – S-L-A-T-T-E-R-Y – and they lived in New Bedford also, and he worked for the Star Store department store as a shoe salesman, and they had sort of moved into sort of more middle-class kind of lifestyle and had a nice suburban home, which, growing up, my parents always dreamed of living in the suburbs. That was their dream, but they were stuck in – because they couldn’t afford anything more than the three-family tenement house in what, you know, essentially was inner-city New Bedford, and they always dreamed of having that nice little Cape Cod in the suburbs.

Well, this aunt and uncle had that, and they had decorated this house with paintings by local artists, mostly pretty – what I call now pretty-picture paintings of whaling ships and New England landscapes under snow. And I can’t think of the names of the artists, but they were well known for that type of painting in the southeastern New England area.

MR. LYON: Were these, like, oil paintings or reproductions or –

MR. JAMES: Yeah, they were oil paintings, and they were good, for what they were. You know, they were what you would find in an average sort of tourist-oriented gallery or something.

MR. LYON: But they were real paintings?

MR. JAMES: But they were real paintings – they were real paintings. And those exposures motivated me to want to paint. That – and I got exposed to those probably when I was about eight, nine, 10 years old, about the same time as I started going on my own – because in those days it was safe for little kids to get on a bus and go downtown by themselves. I, at a very young age, probably 10 or 11, started going downtown to the main public library in New Bedford on the bus.

And the library in New Bedford in those days was the only place in New Bedford where you could see any kind of real art. There was a [Albert] Bierstadt that I can remember – a huge view of the Rocky Mountains, if I’m not mistaken. And there – I think there also was Thomas Cole. In any case, there were a lot of 19th-century sort of luminist painters, and also painters from that southeastern New England area, painters who had painted in Newport and the Fairhaven and New Bedford areas, Westport and so on, that were in the collection of the New Bedford Public Library.

Those paintings today have been sort of transferred to the New Bedford Art Museum, which occupies a space in a former bank across the street from the public library building in downtown New Bedford. But when I was going there, that was my exposure to art – that was my first exposure to real – real art, good quality art, you know, art with pedigree as opposed to the kind of art that I was seeing in my aunt’s home, which wasn’t bad for type, but it was sort of high-level Sunday-painter kind of art.

So I started looking at art books in the library, which was also another book exposure, and so by the time I was 13 – actually, by the time I got into high school I was pretty much a confirmed artist. You know, I was with the group of kids who were the “art freaks” and the ones who did art classes at school, because I didn’t have any kind of private art training outside of school. My parents couldn’t have afforded that. But I remember at that point starting to think that this was really what I wanted to do, that when I went to college – it wasn’t a question of if I went to college, it was always – that was always assumed, which was interesting because I was the first person in my entire family who had ever gone to college.

MR. LYON: Because your parents were so –

MR. JAMES: But my parents were absolutely determined that we would go to college, and they didn’t care what we studied as long as we went to school and got a degree, so that’s why they would – you know, unlike probably a lot of middle-class or upper-class families of the period and today, who would have dissuaded their children from studying art, my parents didn’t care what I studied as long as I went to college, so in that sense they were supportive.

But in any case, I think when I was about a sophomore in high school, so I would have been about 15, I asked my father to take me to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I’d never been there. Going to Boston for us in those days was a big deal. If we went to Boston, that was like a major excursion that maybe we did once a year to go see Christmas lights or to go to the Franklin Park Zoo, which was outside of Boston, or to walk around the North End or to go look at some of the old graveyards, which I remember doing with my parents, and going to the Boston Commons, but we’d never done anything like go to a museum. And so I asked my father to take me to the Museum of Fine Arts.

And I remember that it was – I’m pretty sure it was a spring – late spring day. It was cool, but it was relatively mild, and I do remember my father didn’t know how to get around Boston, so we had to get to some landmark location where he could park and be able to orient himself on foot. And I remember that we parked near or at the Prudential Center, which was under construction – it was still under construction, if I’m not mistaken. It wasn’t done.

MR. LYON: It wasn’t finished until ’68.

MR. JAMES: So that – yeah, so this would have been just before that.

MR. LYON: Sixty-four, right before they tore down the rail yards.

MR. JAMES: It would have been right around that, ’66 – maybe ’65, ’66, I can’t remember exactly, but we parked there or near there and walked to the Museum of Fine Arts, which is a long walk.

MR. LYON: About two miles.

MR. JAMES: Yeah. And the significant thing about that experience was that it’s the only thing that I remember, my entire childhood growing up, my father doing with me alone. None of my siblings came. He took me alone. It’s the only thing I remember my father ever doing for me alone, other than driving me to school and so on.

MR. LYON: It’s hard with seven kids.

MR. JAMES: Yeah, exactly, and plus, you know, he worked – he worked six days a week, basically. So I remember about that experience – I don’t remember much of what I saw, except the one painting that sticks in everybody’s mind who visits the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and that is the Copley of the – oh, what’s the title of that painting? You know, the guy who’s fallen in and is about to be eaten by a shark, or appears to be – that huge painting. I can’t remember the title of it.

MR. LYON: [Inaudible.] [Watson and the Shark, John Singleton Copley, 1778.]

MR. JAMES: I remember that painting, but the thing that I remember most is feeling – going there, feeling like I was coming home, feeling like this was where I was supposed to be, feeling some sort of affirmation I guess. Now, you know, I can say this in retrospect more clearly, but at the time I don’t think I fully understood what I was feeling, but it was significant and it was something that confirmed for me that this was what I should be doing.

MR. LYON: Well, you must have at least had a hint for you to have asked your father at all.

MR. JAMES: Well, I felt – yeah, by that point I started to – see, I think I started subscribing to Art News magazine when I was still in high school.

MR. LYON: Oh, that’s amazing.

MR. JAMES: So I think when I started getting Art News magazine, I started discovering that there was this whole world out there that I knew nothing about, that I had had no exposure to, and I realized then that I had to – you know, I had to learn more about this, and so that was my first attempt to learn something about the greater art world out there.

When I went to university – when I got to Southeastern Massachusetts University in 1967 –

MR. LYON: That’s what it was called then.

MR. JAMES: Well, actually, when I started – the year I started, it was still Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute, SMTI, and then after I was there a year, it became – a year or two years – it became Southeastern Massachusetts University, and then maybe 15 years ago or so, 20 years ago maybe, it became the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.

MR. LYON: Right, it’s technically in Dartmouth.

MR. JAMES: Right, right. And so when I got my honorary doctorate in 1992, it was from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, as an alumnus of –

MR. LYON: SMU.

MR. JAMES: SMU. So, in any case, they – when I got to the university, of course then I really, you know, started getting some real training and also some real understanding of the dimensions of the art world that was beyond anything I’d experienced to that point. But I didn’t make my first trip to New York until I was a junior in undergraduate school.

MR. LYON: You did your undergraduate major in art – studio art?

MR. JAMES: In painting – painting and printmaking, yeah – painting major and printmaking minor. That was also what I did in graduate school; I was a painting major and printmaking minor.

MR. LYON: You know, for a small regional university it’s a pretty amazing that they would offer you a major and minor in – a lot of small schools you got a degree in art, period.

MR. JAMES: Right. No, they had fine arts majors. And it’s curious because almost everybody was a first-generation college student who went to that school, and I discovered actually, when I got there, that I knew a lot more about the art world already, just from what I’d read about, than a lot of kids who were coming in who were my, you know, classmates and so on.

So it is weird that they would have a program, but I think – I think the program did – it had connections to the original – see, before it became SMTI, it was New Bedford – there were two schools: New Bedford Tech and Durfee Tech. Durfee in Fall River and New Bedford, and they were both textile technologies that focused –

MR. LYON: So it was a strong graphic arts college.

MR. JAMES: There was a – yeah, there was a design component in both of those schools that serviced the textile industry, basically, and so these programs came out of that. And even to this day, SMU, or U Mass Dartmouth, still has a strong textile design area and a lot of – you know, a lot of the students who go – because I taught a semester there in 2000 – a lot of the students who go through that program end up working in the textile industry as designers, so – or at least some of the students -- so there is that connection.

MR. LYON: Although there’s not much textile industry in New Bedford anymore.

MR. JAMES: Exactly. There’s none – there’s none to speak of. So anyway –

MR. LYON: We’re at your undergraduate level. Did you know immediately you wanted to do painting and printmaking?

MR. JAMES: Well, you know, my idea that – of what art was was painting and printmaking – painting was it; that was what art was. And I mean, for me, graphic design was commercial art, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to do that.

MR. LYON: Now, where did you pick up that idea though?

MR. JAMES: [Laughs.] I don’t have any idea. I think it goes back to some kind of romantic notion of what an artist’s life was like, and I – really, I have to credit those paintings that I saw in my aunt’s house that were beautiful sort of landscape scenes of, you know, snowy New England villages nestled in among hills and rocks, stone walls and, you know, these sort of just fantasies of a kind of Norman Rockwellesque landscape that seemed just so, you know, beautiful to me at the time. So I guess –

MR. LYON: If you were reading Art News, I mean, didn’t that essentially promulgate the idea of the hero artist – you know, the romantic painter?

MR. JAMES: Yeah, and I fully bought into that through undergraduate school in a program that also sort of promulgated that notion that we, the painters, were sort of following the true noble call – you know, the real – we were the real artists.

MR. LYON: The visual elite.

MR. JAMES: Yes, exactly – exactly. And it was a program, at least when I started out, that was pretty much focused on the conventional fine arts media. As I was there – during the years that I was there, they branched out a bit to include ceramics, and that program – the ceramics program started up while I was there, and also a little bit of jewelry, but not as a program but just as an offering that started there. But there was really no craft program.

MR. LYON: Of course that’s changed.

MR. JAMES: And that’s changed a lot there. It’s there since they acquired the Program in Artisanry. But –

MR. LYON: So you’re saying that it was probably your junior year when you went to New York for the first time?

MR. JAMES: I went to New York in 1969 to see the “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970” exhibition at the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art]. And that was a big deal, going to New York for the first time with some friends from school. We were all undergraduates and we were all painters, and we were all going to New York for the first time, I think, except for maybe one of us. There was one kid in the group who was from Connecticut, and he’d been to New York. We were all making our first trip to New York by bus, and – actually, I think what we did, as I recall, we drove a car to a suburb of Hartford, where this kid lived, spent a night there, and then we took a bus from Hartford to New York the next day, if I recall correctly.

But in any event, however we got there, we did, and we had one day, and we went to see the show at the Met, and I don’t know – I don’t recall anything else that we did, but I do recall that show having – you know, making a huge impression on me, because here was a collection of all of the artists of the day that we had been hearing about, seeing slides of in slide lectures in our courses at the university, collected, you know, in a major show that probably still doesn’t have a parallel, because I don’t think there’s been a show like that done that surveyed the entire sort of territory of contemporary art – of current contemporary art of the period. Nobody has done that since. The Met certainly hasn’t done it.

MR. LYON: Nobody has dared.

MR. JAMES: And it was a huge show, and I recall most vividly two rooms that made a big impression on me. One was Joseph Cornell – a room full of Cornells that was beautifully installed and lit – you know, the black boxes and black pedestals in a black room with little spotlights just illuminating the interiors of each piece. It was stunning; and a room of Ellsworth Kelly drawings, the line drawings of plants and leaves that he did – that he was doing. He was actually doing those then, his most current work. Those two – but of course, you know, everybody who was anybody in the contemporary painting world of the late 1960s was represented in that show.

So that was, you know, like – I think I may actually have been taking the history of modern art at the time, and we may have been – and we probably were encouraged to go see the show by whoever was teaching the course. And, yeah, it was Evan Firestone who taught that course, I recall.

So, in any event, I got to New York and didn’t get to New York again until about, oh, probably about six years later – six or seven years later before I got back to New York. By that time I was going back to New York as an adult with my formal education behind me and seeing it somewhat differently. So –

MR. LYON: So was there anybody – you graduated in, what, ’71 then?

MR. JAMES: I graduated in ’71 from U of Mass. Dart. – from SMU, of course, and interestingly, Buckminster Fuller was the keynote speaker at our commencement. And I don’t remember anything that he said except I knew that – I knew what he had done and knew that he was significant, but that’s a little – I don’t know what that has – it doesn’t –

MR. LYON: It’s one of those interesting tidbits.

MR. JAMES: – little detail, yeah. But that was at the end of a very stormy period during those four years at that school as, you know, on campuses everywhere else– there was a lot of protests, and I remember being on – you know, striking a lot, classes being disrupted a lot on that campus because there was a big controversy with the president of the university, a fellow named Driscoll, who – and a controversy that erupted around one of our professors, a guy named Donald Krueger. And that is a huge history that I’m not going to go into because it’s too complex, but it brings up the subject of Donald Krueger, who had a big influence on me as an undergraduate.

MR. LYON: Sort of a mentor?

MR. JAMES: Yeah, and became a mentor who has – you know, he’s been important to me in my growth as an educator, I guess, and less as an artist, although somewhat as an artist because he always served, on the rare occasions when we get together, to be a sort of sounding board against whom I could sort of look at ideas or thoughts that I’d been having about my work. Donald Krueger came to U. Mass., what was then Southeastern Massachusetts University, I believe from RISD [Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI].

And it was interesting because at that point in time I didn’t know what was – you know, I didn’t know the politics of the school or what the school was sort of – how the school was functioning administratively, but I do know that there was – they’d just built this new campus – we were on this new campus that Paul Rudolph designed. They were expanding a lot of programs and the art program was being expanded. In the year that I started, at least three new faculty were hired, and I had all three of them in that first year: Donald Krueger, Caroline Mills, and Bill Elliot. And if I’m not mistaken, they were all nabbed from RISD. So that would raise some interesting questions about, you know, how that happened and what was going on with RISD that so many faculty would want to bail. But in any case, I don’t know anything about that; I just think it’s kind of curious.

So anyway, we had this young – they were all relatively young at the time – foundation team, and Donald Krueger taught color, Caroline Mills taught 2-D – no, she taught 3-D design, Bill Elliot taught drawing – and I guess Donald also taught 2-D design; I forget. In any event, what stands in my mind the most is that he was important to me as my first sort of color pedagogue. It was in his color course that I realized that I really loved color as a subject, and that I could make art around that subject – around color. So consequently, at the time I got involved – I got interested in all the color-field painters and people like Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler and [Jules] Olitski and various other painters of the period, not realizing really that painting was sort of at its last – beginning its last hurrah. But in any event –

MR. LYON: That’s an interesting concept.

MR. JAMES: And it’s also debatable, but that certainly became the perception in the '70s. So in any event, I had – Krueger was – oh, I know how I got on this, because the controversy over – that surrounded him in the years – the sort of years that coincided with the civil rights movement and the Martin Luther – the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and all that stuff, and the fact that we were spending a lot of time organizing protests and involved in sit-ins and strikes and, you know, Kent State and all that stuff.

Anyway, Donald was finally forced out or dismissed, and he only had taught there, I believe, two years, and I’d had him for – in my foundation year, and then I had him – I think the next year I had him for drawing, if I’m not mistaken, but that was it; then he was booted out. And the commencement was colored by the sort of aftermath of all of that stuff. I remember a number of the more radical students in that graduating class standing through the entire commencement ceremony with their backs to the president of the university, who of course was on the stage at the front of the gathering. So it was – you know, it was a period that was, as you know –

MR. LYON: Oh, I know well.

MR. JAMES: Yeah. Donald and I didn’t see each other – I should say that I was really intimidated by him. He was a tall, imposing figure who was – he often looked very sort of – well, he would – he had the capacity of looking at you and looking right through you, making you feel very small. He shaved his head at a time when that was fairly uncommon and he – so he was a really imposing figure, and he certainly knew a lot about art and the art world. And I think that one of the reasons for his demise was that he was fairly threatening to the longer-term faculty, and he thrived, I guess, on that, being that kind of – I don’t know how to describe him, but somebody around whom students would definitely gravitate, but somebody who would challenge the status quo, who was not –

MR. LYON: Part lightning rod, or firebrand.

MR. JAMES: Yeah, that’s what was I was looking for, a firebrand. He was definitely that.

So anyway, we renewed our acquaintance years later, close to – well, close to 15 years later. By accident we ran across each other at the Brookfield Craft Center in Brookfield, Connecticut, by which time Donald was teaching at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., after having spent five or six years – maybe not quite that many – after he’d been at the University – Southeastern Massachusetts University, working in graphic design – well, working as a graphic designer for a commercial graphic design firm in New Bedford, and then from there he went to Clark University, and I think he chaired the art department there, but he taught there until he retired in the early 1990s.

And anyway, in the early ‘80s we renewed our acquaintance and friendship through the Brookfield Craft Center, where I was teaching a weekend workshop, and he happened to be on the board of the Craft Center because he had become friends with a guy named Jack – what’s Jack’s last name? – Jack Russell, who was the director of the Brookfield Craft Center. Even today I think he’s still director. And he and Donald knew each other from Worcester, Mass., where Jack had been on the faculty of the Worcester Craft Center. So because Donald went to class, he got to know Jack when Jack became –

[END TAPE 1 SIDE A.]

– weekend, because I was teaching class and Donald was there for a board meeting. And so we renewed our acquaintance on a different level, because by that point I could relate to him much more as a peer –

MR. LYON: And he could probably relate to you more as a peer too.

MR. JAMES: – educator peer and as an artist peer. And so, over the years since then we’ve kept in touch. He visited us at our home in Massachusetts, and we’ve visited him in Seattle, Washington, to which he moved after he retired, and we keep in touch. Now he’s back living in New York State, in Cazenovia, New York, because he has a daughter who lives outside of Syracuse. And I just spoke with him a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve kept in contact with him, and he’s – you know, he had a long academic career, so he can certainly relate to my experiences as a beginning academic and I can relate to his as a more experienced and long-term academic. He’s been very supportive of my work, so I guess he’s sort of a kind of artistic father figure.

One little aside that’s interesting from a historical standpoint is that Donald was a student of Thomas Hart Benton in Kansas City in his youth, when he – he grew up in California and then he went to the KCIA [Kansas City Art Institute] – I’m pretty sure it was KCIA – and that’s where he – I’m a little unsure, actually. My recollection may be incorrect, because he also might have gone to Washington University in St. Louis, but somewhere, when he moved out here to study art, he got connected with Benton, and he became one of the circle of students that surrounded Benton, because he’s told me about spending many evenings at Benton’s home in Kansas City with his wife, Rita, cooking big plates of pasta for all these students that regularly gathered around Benton. And Benton apparently liked to have, you know, this circle of students that he could, you know, expound on his fairly narrow view of art. In any case, that’s a little aside.

MR. LYON: So we were going back to – you didn’t start working in fiber, though, until you were well into graduate school.

MR. JAMES: Well, you know, I – what happened in graduate school –

MR. LYON: Did you go straight from undergraduate to –

MR. JAMES: I went straight from undergraduate to graduate school.

MR. LYON: At RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology].

MR. JAMES: Yeah. You know, I have to explain that. I was a fairly sheltered kid. I mean, growing up I didn’t experience much of the world. I didn’t know much of what was beyond that small, narrow, very, very – I had a very provincial outlook that – the whole community I lived in was that way. And I lived at home through undergraduate school, so I shared a bedroom in the basement of our home with my brother through undergraduate school. At that time, that school, Southeastern Massachusetts University, was a commuter school, so I knew a lot of my friends had apartments or lived in homes in sort of communal situations with other students, but I lived at home. And so, when I decided to go to graduate school, I decided that I would go to whichever school was the furthest away from home that I could get accepted at from among the schools that I applied to.

And I applied to U Mass. Amherst; BU, Boston University, I believe. I think I applied to BU grad school and Rochester Institute of Technology. And RIT accepted me, and I accepted them because they were a full day’s drive away, and that was really my rationale for picking that school. It’s weird because we don’t – people don’t do that today; they don’t pick a school for stupid reasons like – at least –

MR. LYON: Oh, I think they do.

MR. JAMES: Maybe they do, but I never investigated the school. I signed on the dotted line before I even saw the campus; before I even knew – you know, before I’d ever been to Rochester.

MR. LYON: You’d looked at the catalogues, right?

MR. JAMES: Yeah. Actually, that’s not true. I did go up there with a friend; I do recall that. I drove up with a friend and looked it out – scoped it out and decided this was fine and I would go there. But in any event, I did, and as an educational experience it was useless, I would say. At least –

MR. LYON: I’m sure they’ll be happy to hear that. [Laughs.]

MR. JAMES: Well –

MR. LYON: It’s fine.

MR. JAMES: – maybe it wasn’t useless, but what I learned is stuff that I learned myself, because there was no – there was no – I don’t recall much in the way of educational experiences with any of my studio faculty. I really don’t. There were some crits in printmaking, but there were – there were very few crits in the painting area, and those tended to be group crits. My one-on-one with my professor, we usually ended up talking about everything else but – and I guess in some ways you could argue that that’s also –

MR. LYON: Part of an education.

MR. JAMES: Yeah. I mean, there was certainly probably some guidance that was direct enough, and much that was indirect, and a lot that was unspoken, and some that was spoken. So probably I’m being too hard on it, but I have to say that my whole experience with graduate school was clouded by my family life – my immediate family life because by then I was involved with Judy, and we were soon to have a child, so I was beginning a family life and absorbed in that while I was going to graduate school. It all seemed to go by in something of a blur.

MR. LYON: How long were you in graduate – three years?

MR. JAMES: Two years.

MR. LYON: Two years.

MR. JAMES: Two years.

MR. LYON: Those were the days of the two-year MFAs.

MR. JAMES: Yeah, those were the days of the two-year MFAs. And actually, there were a couple of people – there was one person in particular who is very important to me and that I’m still in contact with and am still close friends with, and this is a woman named Susan Russo, who was a graduate student with – she was a year ahead of me. She was in her second year when I was doing my first year, and she was doing fiber type of work. She was doing this work where she was making these 3-D forms in nylon, stuffed with some kind of fibrous batting. And then, if I recall correctly, she was covering them in some sort of resin and making these – would call it today very Eva Hesse-like work. And at the time I wasn’t aware of Eva Hesse, but of course at the time, especially among women students, Eva Hesse would have been the goddess, you know. This was 1971 –

MR. LYON: This is ’71 through ’73.

MR. JAMES: Yeah, exactly – yeah. And so Eva Hesse was hot stuff in the art world, and her influence was, you know, being reflected in the work especially of young feminist-oriented women artists in schools at the time. And Susan was doing work that sort of connected her – Susan and I got along real well, and she was also helpful as a more experienced student at the school at the time, and she – you know, she helped me iron out difficulties in the first year. So we stayed – we became friends with her and her husband, and have stayed friends to – we see her – we’ll see them periodically, but they’ve just recently divorced so – but we’re still in contact with her. So that was – I mean –

MR. LYON: You had some other friends from graduate school.

MR. JAMES: Yeah, I have another friend, Bob Clarke, who was – in my second year he was a first-year student, and we’re still in contact with him and his wife. We became very close friends with them. They still live in the Rochester area, in Pittsford, New York. And he’s a graphic designer and illustrator, primarily – very different type of work than I do, but somebody who was, you know, important, because he would give me feedback about my work at the time.

MR. LYON: There was another painter who had written some – wrote one of the first articles about your work.

MR. JAMES: Oh, David Hornung.

MR. LYON: Yeah.

MR. JAMES: No, David didn’t – I met David much later.

MR. LYON: Oh, okay.

MR. JAMES: And we should talk about David, but he’s later and he’s in a totally different context.

MR. LYON: Okay.

MR. JAMES: Anyway, while I was in graduate school I was minoring in printmaking. I was doing these live sort of stained-canvas, color-field sort of paintings in my painting studio work, and then in printmaking I couldn’t function in the printmaking studios. Printmakers are interesting, because I’ve seen this even here at UNL [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] since I came here. They have a – they’re very clubby. I don’t know what it is, but there’s this real sort of – how to describe it? Another kind of elitist –

MR. LYON: It’s like a guild mentality?

MR. JAMES: Yeah, maybe it’s that, but it’s also this sort of overtone. At a graduate level they certainly expect you to come in with a lot of technique, and I wasn’t a major, I was a minor and I had been a minor in undergraduate school, so my technique was passable, but it was never advanced, and there was no place in the graduate program for somebody who didn’t come in with top-notch skills. There was no support, anyway, for that person; you were sort of left on your own. And since I wasn’t that committed to it, I decided that I would concentrate on silk screen – screen printing -- and do it in my own studio. So pretty much I completed my minor doing screen printing that was very much related to my painting work and that I could do independently. So, again, I had very little interaction with the faculty in the printmaking area of that school.

MR. LYON: It sounds like you just wanted to get out of there with a degree.

MR. JAMES: I really enjoyed the time I spent in graduate school, but I pretty much recall it as being mostly self-directed, independent work, and I was left to my own devices. And maybe you could argue that that’s ideal in a graduate school, but I think when I look at my experience now, working with graduate students, advising graduate students, or serving on the committees of graduate students in both the textile department and the art department here, that the faculty seems to me to be much more involved in the graduate students’ development and progress than faculties seemed to be in mine when I was in school.

MR. LYON: We should probably get to this in a later session and talk about it. It’s something to think about that might have – that might have something to do with your professionalization of the studio art teacher.

MR. JAMES: Well, that could be, yeah. I think that may have something to do with it.

MR. LYON: When you and I got our MFAs, I mean, it was a kind of new business then, you know?

MR. JAMES: I think it’s something else – I think it’s something else. I think it’s a question of accountability of faculty today.

MR. LYON: That’s true; they have to be accountable.

MR. JAMES: Yeah. And because I think – when I think back to the experience that I had with Fred Meyer, who was my painting teacher, I don’t know that – I don’t know what he would have been held accountable for and by whom. My recollection was that every spare minute of his time was spent in his studio doing his work. He would deign to come out of his studio and walk around to each of the cubicles once a week, if I recall, and with me he mostly ever – only ever talked about jazz. I don’t recall our ever talking about my work.

MR. LYON: RIT is a research institution.

MR. JAMES: Well –

MR. LYON: That was the model.

MR. JAMES: Yeah.

MR. LYON: You know, it was not pedagogy but research, you know, produce.

MR. JAMES: Yeah. And I think it’s – I’m at a research institute today, but I think the faculty are expected to –

MR. LYON: That has changed.

MR. JAMES: Yeah. In any event –

MR. LYON: So you started talking –

MR. JAMES: Again, I – huh?

MR. LYON: At some point, though, you started being attracted to fiber here.

MR. JAMES: Well, here’s the story. At RIT – RIT has the School for American Craftsmen –

MR. LYON: Oh.

MR. JAMES: – which was a component of the art school. The School for American Craftsmen then had programs in fibers, metals – Hans Christensen taught there in metals. I can’t think of – I can’t remember the fiber person. In ceramics – there was a big ceramic program, but I'm trying to think of who the ceramic faculty were at the time, but I can’t recall.

MR. LYON: It’s probably not relevant.

MR. JAMES: Bill Keyser was furniture. And I didn’t take any courses in those areas, but I had friends who were ceramics majors or metals majors, and it was my first real exposure to the craft world, and I found it to be a much more – I found there to be much more camaraderie, much less of a competitive atmosphere. People seemed much more trustful and supportive of one another, and I was sort of fascinated by that, because that wasn’t my experience with painters. And also, I liked the sort of down-to-earth sort of, you know, fingers-in-mud aspect of that, and I was getting, at that point, more and more disillusioned with the direction that the art world was going in at the time, which was at the period in time, sort of conceptual art was really gaining momentum, performance art was in its early years, and those directions didn’t interest me very much. And I was also getting, at that point, frustrated by this notion of there being this high-art area, this area of noble pursuit, and then all this other stuff that was considered to be less valuable or less important, or considered to have less – what’s the word I’m looking for? – not value but –

MR. LYON: Sort of a prestige?

MR. JAMES: Yeah, prestige, I guess, to some degree. It’s still not the word, but it doesn’t matter. I was just getting disillusioned with it. You know, art that had no purpose suddenly didn’t seem to be what I wanted to be doing. And this was also in the early years of – just before the – as the buildup to the bicentennial was beginning. I’ve written about this a number of times –

MR. LYON: I know.

MR. JAMES: – and I’ve talked about this.

MR. LYON: But this is for the record, so –

MR. JAMES: But it’s for the record. But it did have a bearing on it, because I was starting to notice and pay attention to media coverage of traditional American arts, and connecting those to what I was seeing being done in the studios of the craftspeople at the SAC school. And I also had – for a year I had an assistantship in the ceramics department making clay, so it was a really ignoble assistantship position, but it put me in contact with these makers, and started to kind of make me conversant in the language of craft artists –

MR. LYON: [Inaudible.]

MR. JAMES: – ceramics artists, particularly.

[Audio break.]

MR. JAMES: Okay, so where are we?

MR. LYON: We’re talking about how you came – so run up to the bicentennial. American craft – you were working in the ceramics department making clay.

MR. JAMES: Yep.

MR. LYON: I assume you – in other words, you were mixing dry clays to make stoneware.

MR. JAMES: Yes, yes. I was making different clay bodies to order –

MR. LYON: Okay.

MR. JAMES: You know, I’d get a list at the beginning of the week.

MR. LYON: So much kaolin and so much –

MR. JAMES: Exactly. Exactly. Well, I was writing my graduate thesis, right? We had a written component we had to do, and mine was called “University Studio.”

[Audio break.]

MR. LYON: This is David Lyon, interviewing Michael James in his home office downstairs in his house in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 4 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is disk two, session one. Okay.

MR. JAMES: I remember what I was going to say before.

MR. LYON: Okay.

MR. JAMES: I think basically in 1973 I decided that I wasn’t a very good painter and that I had nothing original or important to say in painting. And given the direction that the art world was going in at the time, it seemed clear that painting was not going to remain in the ascendancy, and it didn’t. It may be in the ascendancy again, now, but in any case, it didn’t seem like –

MR. LYON: It went through a bad spot.

MR. JAMES: – there was much of value that I could say in that medium. I think I was a better printmaker in some ways. I think I did more interesting work in screen printing probably. I think maybe because I did more of it because it was a medium that allowed me to produce more and work through ideas a little more prolifically. But in any event, I guess I also started to question the value of making abstract art that had no bearing on much of the average person’s experience.

Probably the reasons – you know, probably make a list of a hundred reasons why I made a switch in that period of time. Some of the reasons that I’ve used in explaining this in the past included the fact of being a new parent and wanting to be doing something that would allow me to be close at hand, so that I could be involved in raising our son and able to do creative work that would not be dangerous to a child in close proximity. So the issue of toxic agents that were common to painters and printmakers was at least something that conditioned my thinking about textiles when I started thinking about doing work in textiles, but initially I never thought about doing that work professionally at all, or even seriously, because when I started making quilts, the first quilt that I ever made actually I made in undergraduate school, so there was a precedent before I even got to graduate school, although it was a one-off thing. It was nothing that related to any of my undergraduate studio experience, and it was sort of just, you know, something that was pushed aside and forgotten until later when I got – when I was working on my graduate thesis at RIT I needed something to – I just wasn’t passionate about it and I needed something to be passionate about, and I wasn’t thinking – now, you know, I look back on it and I see this now. I wasn’t thinking of it that way when it was happening, but it’s what essentially is going on.

So how did I get interested in quilts? I don’t really honestly – the honest truth is I don’t really remember what made me want to pick up some fabric and start sewing bits of cloth together to make a reproduction of the traditional quilt pattern, but in 1972, late 1972, just after the birth of my son, and early ’73, I started doing this –

MR. LYON: Whose name is?

MR. JAMES: Whose name is Trevor. But Judy always had fabric around the house. She’s always sewn since she was seven years old. My wife also – Judy has a BFA degree from Southeastern Massachusetts University. She got hers in graphic design a year before I did, so she graduated in ’72 and didn’t go to graduate school until the last two years.

MR. LYON: She graduated in ’70.

MR. JAMES: Yeah, in ’70. I’m sorry, ’70, that’s right, and I graduated in ’71 from U Mass. And she got her degree in graphic design, and then she taught as a substitute teacher in high school for a year. And then we sort of hooked up in the summer before I went to graduate school. We had known each other before that through mutual friends, but we didn’t start what we didn’t think of as dating, but what you would call that, I suppose, until the summer before I went to graduate school. And then when I came home from my first semester of graduate school back to Massachusetts for Christmas, we hooked up in a serious way, and at the end of that school break she moved back to Rochester with me. And we lived together until May, when we got married, by which time she was already three or four months pregnant.

And so, all of this – I mean, I wanted to be home. I wanted to be in that domestic situation; I didn’t really want to be in a studio. So I finished my graduate year – I did want to get – I guess I did want to get the degree out of the way because it wasn’t where my real – my heart and soul’s focus was. That was on my family. And so I think that choosing to make patchwork was both a way to be doing something creative while I was taking care of the baby and tending to family matters, although I did have a studio in the attic of the apartment of the house in which we had an apartment in Rochester. I had a studio which I used to draw and paint and print through the year after I got my degree, although as that year progressed, I did less and less there, and I was doing more and more around a quilting frame that had been set up in the living room downstairs.

So at the end of that third year I had essentially stopped painting – that third year in Rochester, which means that the first two years were in school, and then the last year was spent working at a job as a – at a paying job. I was actually cooking lunch – I was making lunch for 60 kids and 20 adults five days a week for a year in a daycare center. So it was institutional sort of – mostly frozen food that was brought in and that I basically heated up, although I did some real cooking, including a big turkey dinner for all these – and a lot of these kids – not all of them, but a lot of these kids were from poor, inner-city families where some of these kids came to school without having had breakfast and without – you know, their lunch was their big meal of the day and the best meal that they’d have in the day, so it was significant for those kids.

MR. LYON: Did you try getting work with your degree?

MR. JAMES: I did, actually.

MR. LYON: I ask this question because I went that route, too.

MR. JAMES: I applied for a number of jobs and they were – I mean, when I think back to it I think, what was I thinking? You know, I had no experience at all, I knew nothing, and I applied for – at least I didn’t apply for any university jobs. That, I realized, was way beyond the scope of my skills and my experience and my level. But I applied for several – see, I hadn’t gotten a teacher's certificate because I wasn’t an art education major, so I couldn’t apply to the public schools, and I had no desire to teach in a public school at the time anyway, so I applied for art positions in private schools. And I interviewed at two – I got interviews at two, so at least I got interviews. I realize now, well, some people didn’t get the interviews. I got interviews, one of which was in a private school west of Boston. I’m trying to think of the town, but it was one of those poshy – west of Concord – a community.

MR. LYON: There’s Concord Academy.

MR. JAMES: Well, it wasn’t Concord Academy. It was a really –

MR. LYON: Weston Navy?

MR. JAMES: No, no, it was further west. It was really outside of the 495 – it was beyond the 495 ring. It was a small Massachusetts town that had this really good school. I can’t remember –

MR. LYON: Deerfield Academy?

MR. JAMES: No, it wasn’t – no.

MR. LYON: It doesn’t matter.

MR. JAMES: Well, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t get the job. I interviewed though. I actually remember that interview pretty vividly and – actually I remember both of those interviews pretty vividly. The second one was up at the Kents Hill School, Kents Hill, Maine. Judy and I both drove up there. By this time, though, we were – I should say by this time we were living back in Massachusetts, so this would have been in 1974 – it would have been in the summer of 1974 – for positions that would have started that fall. So we decided after I had spent a year teaching – cooking lunch at the daycare center -- that that wasn’t what – that we didn’t want to stay in Rochester anymore, that we didn’t like the weather enough; we had no reason to stay there. We decided that we wanted to raise our son close to his family so that he’d get to know both her family and my family, so we moved back to Massachusetts and moved in with Judy’s parents in June of 1974. And that summer I interviewed for these two positions, neither of which I got. Kents Hill School would have been a disaster. The other one would have been pretty nice, actually, if we’d gotten it.

But in any event, by the end of that summer I – well, I spent the summer working for Judy’s father – he was a contractor, carpenter-contractor, and I was working with him mostly doing add-ons and renovations, which is what he mostly did, although he built some houses, including ours. But we lived with her parents that summer, and it became a total disaster, and we knew we had to get out of there. We had to – I had to find something. And so, thanks to, actually, my mother, who heard about an opening at my high school in New Bedford, I got hired in September of ’74 to teach art in my former high school and in place of the nun who I had had, who was then terminally ill with cancer. She died, I think, during that year. I remember going to her funeral, so I know she died that year.

In any event, I took over her classroom and I taught art, and it was essentially a part-time job. I was teaching a total of about 30 hours a week, but they considered that part-time so they wouldn’t have to pay me any benefits. That was fine because at least I had a job that was something that – I hated doing the carpentry work. I liked working with Judy’s fathe -- he was always easy to get along with -- but I hated the work. So that fall I started a job, and we moved into an apartment in Somerset about a mile – a little less than a mile from Judy’s parents. And I – that was fall of ’74. And in addition to teaching at St. Anthony’s, I noticed in September of ’74 a small – there was a little small article, really a notice, in the Fall River paper that the community college – Fall River?

MR. LYON: It’s Fall River, the community college, yeah.

MR. JAMES: Is it Fall River Community College?

MR. LYON: That’s what it’s called now.

MR. JAMES: Well, then that’s what it was called then. The Women’s Center of the community college was looking for somebody to teach craft courses. Any craft areas they were looking for people to teach courses. So I wrote a letter in saying that I’d be able to teach a quiltmaking course. And so about a week later I get a call from this person at the Women’s Center at Bristol Community College, that’s what it is –

MR. LYON: Oh, Bristol, okay.

MR. JAMES: – saying that they’d be interested in having me teach this class and that they would give me X room in this building and the class would start on such and such a day; all I had to do was show up. So that following week, or two weeks, later I showed up for the class. They gave me a room with a banquet-sized folding table and about eight chairs, and 52 people showed up. So I immediately divided the 52 people into three or four classes at different times, different days of the week, according to people’s preferences and schedules. I had four classes set up, or three classes, instantly. And that was the beginning of my teaching quiltmaking, by which time I had been making quilts for – you know, I’d been making patchwork – I can’t say it was really making quilts, although I made a few small quilts. I was really, at that point in time, working on my first full-size, large bedsize quilts. And these were all traditional quilts, traditional patterns, copies of.

And so this was really – this tied in also – backtracking to grad school. When I started making patchwork in my second year of grad school, in Rochester, I was making these pillows as a hobby thing. Basically it was a just a pure hobby; it was something to do in the evening that I could do with my family. And Judy was doing it too, so we were doing it together. I started selling these, and this was the first time I started making some real money. I had sold some of my art in the past but never a whole lot, and this – this was like what people were just going nuts about. So I could sell these pillows – you know, everybody who bought one had friends who wanted them, and it was like suddenly I was making all this money making patchwork items.

And so that was a big motivation in a way, because I could see that I could generate some income by doing this. And so by the time I was teaching in ’74 – by the time I started teaching, I had already been generating some income from this, and the teaching added to that. You know, we started seeing that this was going to be something that would be viable.

MR. LYON: Like a way to make a living?

MR. JAMES: Yeah, yeah. And of course this is the time, just immediately before the bicentennial, so there was such a huge interest in Americana of all sorts that there was a big market for this stuff, so it was easy to sell it.

MR. LYON: And it was also like really having a whole generation kind of dropped quilting. I mean –

MR. JAMES: Well, yeah, in that part of the country anyway.

MR. LYON: Yeah.

MR. JAMES: Not out here [in Nebraska].

MR. LYON: No, never.

MR. JAMES: Definitely out there. So they were like in New England –

MR. LYON: It was novel.

MR. JAMES: – on the East Coast they were rediscovering it, yeah. And so, that’s when I think – in ’74 I really got going. I taught at the high school that one year, and then by the end of that year I realized that I could make a living just doing quilt-related stuff and I didn’t need to teach high school, so I quit that. I actually got the job for a friend of mine who’s still a high school art teacher today. But I –

MR. LYON: Does he bless or curse you for it? [Laughs.]

MR. JAMES: I think he’s quite happy, actually.

MR. LYON: Good.

MR. JAMES: But he got his teaching start in that school. But, see, I had a real problem – the reason I couldn’t continue with that school is because I had a real problem with the religious part of it. That was – it was still at that point when that school was still fully active – because it doesn’t have a high school anymore; it’s just an elementary school now. But it still had a high school then, and, you know, religious education was a big part of it, and I was, by then, a confirmed atheist. I couldn’t subscribe to that, and I felt hypocritical being – teaching there and, you know, having my silence to endorse it, so I had to get out of there.

So I – by 1975 – by summer of 1975 I was completely self-employed, and I remained self-employed for the next –

MR. LYON: Twenty-five years.

MR. JAMES: Twenty-five years, yeah, until 2000, yeah. So we’re missing some little details in here. I know that I can say that in 1975 I had my first inkling – my first sort of awareness that the medium of quilts had a potential that I hadn’t seen before then and that few other people were recognizing, although there were some artists out there who were beginning to develop their own work in the same sort of – coincidentally, we didn’t know each other yet; we would soon know each other.

But it was – you know, the quiltmaking tradition had really pretty much developed as a populist art form with very few, quote, trained, unquote, professional artists involved, although there were some through the history of quilts. But people didn’t look at quilts as an art medium; they looked at it as a hobbyist’s medium, you know, as – I mean, people didn’t even think of quilts in the same context in which they thought of weaving or ceramics or furniture or jewelry at the time, because those were already studio practices, but nobody thought of quilts as a studio practice.

MR. LYON: Quilting was a folk tradition.

MR. JAMES: It was a folk art. Yeah, it was a populist – it was a folk art. It was something that –

MR. LYON: I remember my grandmother’s quilting circles, and I remember neighbors with their – [inaudible].

MR. JAMES: There’s always been a folk art – obviously, there’s always been a folk art tradition in the ceramics area, there has been a folk art tradition in sculpture, but nothing as broad or expansive as quilts. And I think it’s curious that quilts could – quiltmaking could be practiced by so many people and yet only – it’s only in the last 25 years that artists have begun to practice quiltmaking as studio practice.

[END TAPE 1 SIDE B.]

MR. JAMES: There were a few instances of it before, but very few, and they’re not – they’re not instances that are like the instances today, because, for the most part, they were not art school educated or art school trained personnel. They were – you know, some were graphic designers, but primarily designers who were employed by the women’s magazines of the day to design patterns for a mass market.

MR. LYON: Right. That became very popular.

MR. JAMES: Yeah. So –

MR. LYON: Well, is it fair to suggest that your books provided that bridge between the two?

MR. JAMES: Well, I think that the book that did begin to do that was a book that was published before my book, that Gutcheon’s Perfect Patchwork Primer [Beth Gutcheon. New York: Viking Penguin,1975]. And I say that because that book – well, you know, that book was really still very much focused on the traditional practice of quiltmaking.

MR. LYON: So was your first book.

MR. JAMES: Yeah.

MR. LYON: The title of which was –

MR. JAMES: The Quiltmaker’s Handbook [Michael James. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1978] was the first book I wrote.

MR. LYON: Who was the original publisher?

MR. JAMES: Prentice Hall.

MR. LYON: Prentice Hall. That was 19 –

MR. JAMES: Seventy-eight.

MR. LYON: Seventy-eight.

MR. JAMES: Yeah. And then the other one was published in 1980. The Second Quiltmaker’s Handbook [Michael James. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1980] was published in 1980, also by Prentice Hall. Well –

MR. LYON: I was thinking they were slightly earlier, so okay.

MR. JAMES: I think by the time that book was published in 1980, the idea that a trained artist would take this medium and use it to develop original visual work, that was beginning to be understood, and it was beginning to be accepted in both the quilt world and in related – the related world of the studio crafts. But it didn’t exist before 1970, that’s for sure.

So I guess – and when this – when people like myself and Nancy Crow and Terrie Mangat and Jan Myers-Newbury, Jan Myers at the time, began showing the work that we were doing, it was controversial in the quilt world because, of course, we were unabashedly dangling our BFAs and our MFAs, you know, in front of audiences of people who – many of whom never even finished high school, never mind went to college, and who owned – who felt a sense of ownership of the craft and who saw us as young upstarts who were interested in tearing down everything that they had worked so hard to carry on, you know, so that there was definitely this antagonism that developed.

And I guess at first we didn’t understand the depth of feeling that most of these – most of the traditionalists felt about quiltmaking. For many people even today who are traditional quilt makers, that connection to the sort of idealistic vision of American life is still very important, that quiltmaking is an emblem in a sense of those values or is representative of all of those values that people associate with the traditional American vision. And so they – you know, we were coming at it from a very different standpoint, and those values didn’t even mean too much, at least didn’t mean a whole lot to people like myself. And then, you know, this ties into being a man in the field that –

MR. LYON: Yeah, you were one of the few.

MR. JAMES: – is a woman’s domain. That was doubly threatening, because not only was I coming in and saying that all these historical patterns had been done and there was no point in repeating them, but I was also a man saying it, and that was doubly insulting, I guess, and offensive to a lot of people. I didn’t really mean any harm by it. You know, I was then and still am motivated –

MR. LYON: Were you saying that?

MR. JAMES: Huh?

MR. LYON: Were you in fact saying that it had all been done?

MR. JAMES: Yeah, I had actually published a letter – well, I wrote a famous, now infamous, letter to a little magazine at the time called Quilter’s Newsletter, which still exists, but a magazine that basically promotes the traditional art of quilting, and I – it was the only magazine that existed at the time for quiltmakers. There are more today obviously. There are the fiber magazines today like FiberArts or Surface Design Journal. FiberArts existed at that time, and I did subscribe to FiberArts back in the '70s, but Quilter’s Newsletter was the only magazine that really covered the quilt world.

So I wrote them a letter in 1974 or ’75 – I guess it was ’75 -- posing this question: you know, why are you just always publishing more patterns that can be had in any of the books that are available, and why not put more focus on more innovative aspects of the medium? Well, that just created a huge hue and cry in the quilt world, and they had – for months after, they published letters mostly condemning me and my values that want to, as one woman put it – how did she put it? – that want to do away with everything that – well, everything that had come before. I can’t remember the exact quote, but I still have all those letters because Quilter’s Newsletter dutifully sent me copies of all the letters.

MR. LYON: That’s very nice.

MR. JAMES: Well, they definitely were siding with their vast majority of people, and yet they couldn’t ignore the question, because I wasn’t the only one posing it and I wasn’t the only one doing work that no longer fit into the sort of norm visually. So –

MR. LYON: That was also not a time when new quilts were getting a lot of exhibition play yet – not quite.

MR. JAMES: No, no. Exhibitions were still pretty much focused on traditional quilts.

MR. LYON: Even new traditional quilts weren’t getting a lot of – I mean, other than the traditional venues, were they?

MR. JAMES: Well, I’m trying to think now.

MR. LYON: Like fairs –

MR. JAMES: Well, you know, that’s not true because the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City had already done “The New American Quilt Show” –

MR. LYON: That’s right.

MR. JAMES: – in 1976 – I think it was ’76 – and I wasn’t in that show, but I was aware of it, and I knew – I didn’t see it, but I had seen the catalogue, so I knew that it had been shown and I’d seen slides of work from it. In fact, I bought the set of slides that the American Craft Museum sold at the time, and I have the catalogue, so that’s how I got to know all that work, and that was pretty innovative. That was really the first sort of artist work – trained artist work that I became aware of. And then there was the exhibition “Bed and Board” at the DeCordova in Lincoln, Mass. [DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA] in ’76, I believe. I have all the dates somewhere. I know this history because I was involved in it, but it was around that time.

And also, “Quilts for ’76” in Boston, which showed a lot of nontraditional quilts. There were quite a few – there were a lot of traditional quilts, but there were also quite a few of nontraditional quilts in that that included work by people like Radka Donnell and Nancy Halpern and Rhoda Cohen, all artists in the Boston area at the time whose work I became exposed to through that show. And then –

MR. LYON: People who were working mostly in figurative quilting at the time.

MR. JAMES: A lot were, but some were doing geometric stuff, and the DeCordova show was the most influential on me, because by the time it got hung, I knew a lot of the artists who were in it. Some had been in the "New American Quilt Show" in New York, including Molly Upton and Susan Hoffman and Rakda Donnell. I wasn’t in that “New American Quilt Show.” And I got into the DeCordova show partly because I was teaching there at the time. I had the two most traditional quilts in the show, as I recall. One was Meadow Lily, which is this traditional North Carolina lily quilt that we still sleep under, and it’s really just falling apart. It’s got holes in it and everything; it’s embarrassing. But it was made for that, so I don’t care. And Razzle Dazzle was the other one, which was one of the first non – it was the traditional style, but it’s not a copy of a traditional pattern. So those two quilts were the two quilts I showed in that show, and they were the two most traditional quilts in the show, absolutely, and everything else like – I mean, to me it was, like, eye-opening, you know, all the stuff that all these other people were doing. So that was a big push.

By that time, you know, I knew that this was what I was going to work in, this medium; there was no turning back. And there was obvious acceptance in the sort of world that I wanted my work to move into, which was the museum world, the gallery world. So, yeah, the shows were important.

I can’t remember where we were going before we got onto that subject.

MR. LYON: Well, actually we got a little off. Let me just stop this for a second.

[Audio break.]

MR. LYON: Okay, this is a continuation of – this is David Lyon interviewing Michael James at the artist’s home in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 4th, 2003, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. It’s the continuation of disk two in session one.

And I think, if I recall, Michael – well, actually we need to address a question more directly, I think, and that’s the one – the difference between the university-trained artist and one who’s learned his or her craft outside academia. And it would be – I mean, you were talking actually, in fact, about being part of that first movement of people with BFAs and MFAs in the quilt field –

MR. JAMES: Right.

MR. LYON: – and how, by posing the question to Quilter’s Newsletter, you know, should we be doing something different, and by being a man you were taking some guff for that –

MR. JAMES: Right.

MR. LYON: – perhaps even more so than some of your female compatriots. And we talked also about some of the early exhibitions of art quilts. I guess we can use that term, art quilts?

MR. JAMES: I don’t like that term.

MR. LYON: You’ve grown less comfortable with it over the years, I can tell.

MR. JAMES: Everybody uses it now, so it’s the accepted term.

MR. LYON: Quilts by – quilts outside the tradition. Maybe that’s a better way to –

MR. JAMES: Yeah.

MR. LYON: You didn’t come to quilting in a traditional way – I mean in the sense of having grown up with it, having –

MR. JAMES: Right.

MR. LYON: This way wasn’t part of your visual vocabulary really. It’s something you adopted.

MR. JAMES: Mm-hmm.

MR. LYON: Well, and you came to it after an academic training.

MR. JAMES: Right. I guess that partly – the only way I can explain that is to say that I was very much carried on the wave of interest in American traditional arts that the American bicentennial had prompted, and it was, you know, an opening into a whole realm of creative activity that I didn’t know a whole lot about before. So when I was getting interested in quilts as practice, I was also interested more generally in all kinds of Early American art forms, from traditional painting, you know, 18th- and19th-century folk painting, to furniture making, to architecture, gravestone carving, to traditional arts as practiced by minority groups or subgroups within that whole thing, like the Shakers and so on.

So one key influence, I guess, at that time – and this, again, is in the mid-'70s -- was the exposure I had through the DeCordova to a lot of this stuff, because in the year leading up to the bicentennial, the DeCordova in Lincoln did this year-long kind of celebration of traditional American folk art and had a lot of people teaching – they had a festival in the summertime that was a whole summer-long series of events built around traditional American folk art. So all of that, you know, fed into this interest that I was developing. So I was apprenticing in a way with myself in the mechanics of quiltmaking, but I was also researching in the whole sort of broader realm of American traditional art. And I really like the history that was associated with it, so I guess it was kind of escaping to the past, and it became a way to reconnect with the present, circuitous way I guess, but eventually that’s sort of what happened.

Now, one thing I wanted to say that I think is important to mention, and that is that the arrival of BFAs and MFAs on the fiber arts scene had happened a lot earlier in the post-World War II rush of GI Bill-supported artists in art schools and universities around the country and in those programs where they existed that focused on traditional media like weaving and ceramics and so on. Those areas had already experienced the sort of – what’s the word I’m looking for?

MR. LYON: Formal education –

MR. JAMES: Well, the arrival of people with formal education who were conditioning the way those arts were practiced. But it didn’t happen with quiltmaking because quiltmaking was never an academic subject.

MR. LYON: Yeah, it was always sort of outside [beyond] the pale.

MR. JAMES: Yeah – yeah. And so, it was probably the last of the fiber arts to be affected by people like myself, but it was the one that put up the most resistance, I think.

MR. LYON: Oh, that’s an interesting point.

MR. JAMES: But there were some people – I know weavers – in the fiber arts world -- I knew weavers who would probably debate me on that, because they feel that even in the weaving tradition there’s still a lot of resistance to innovative – you know, the work of innovative makers like Lia Cook or Cynthia Schira or any number of people that you would name.

So I guess, you know, the quiltmaking field, from a traditional standpoint, is one that sort of nurtures them and insists on the status quo, and so any challenge to that is going to be resisted. And I think that that’s basically what happened in the late 1970s. By the 1980s there was a short-lived – I mean, the resistance broke down fairly quickly because so many people came into quiltmaking at that time that there was bound to be a constituency that would support innovative work. And once that happened, once it started getting accepted, at least in some circles, then the resistance of the more dogmatic and the more sort of fundamentalist makers would start to break down. So I think that today there’s a lot better coexistence and less suspicion and mistrust on both sides I think.

MR. LYON: So at this same time you were – when you were – really, you’d have to pick what? Was it about ’78 when you started making quilts as a –

MR. JAMES: I started making quilts full time in 1975.

MR. LYON: Seventy-five.

MR. JAMES: Full time in the sense that I was devoting all my energies to work that was somehow connected to quiltmaking, and that included teaching lots of different courses related to quiltmaking in lots of different places. So for five years I taught all over the eastern Massachusetts area.

MR. LYON: In other people’s sort of venues, so to speak.

MR. JAMES: Well, I would teach – like, for adult education programs pretty much I taught at the Boston Center for Adult Education, I taught as Mass. College of Art, I taught at DeCordova for five years, I taught at Bristol Community College for five years, I taught at the University of Rhode Island extension in Providence for three or four years, and at, you know, umpteen guilds and quilt clubs and all over New England and craft centers like Brookfield Craft Center. And I did that –

MR. LYON: So this was really before you developed what I sometimes think of as the Michael James road show that you also did later on, you know, where you would go and you would do intensive workshops that were around the world.

MR. JAMES: Yeah, exactly. I started doing those in the late '70s, but I really got full speed ahead with teaching, like, short-term workshops beyond the range that I could drive to in, like, 1979 and 1980. It was in ’79 I stopped teaching at all those venues like the DeCordova, like Bristol Community College, where I had to teach semester-long courses.

MR. LYON: Right.

MR. JAMES: I got rid of those because I could make as much or more money just teaching a three-day – well, I could make more money teaching a three-day workshop than I could make in a whole semester.

MR. LYON: Right.

MR. JAMES: So it was a no-brainer. And then also, once I could stop teaching all those weekly classes that I was teaching, I was able to devote myself a lot more intensely to my own work, so that if I went away and taught a three-day workshop once a month, which might involve a day of travel on either side of that so I’d be gone for five days, the rest of the month I could spend in my studio making my work. And my work started selling real well in the early 1980s, so I was able to support myself.

MR. LYON: Okay. Moving away from the strictly chronological now, could you talk a little bit about your view on the importance of fiber as a means of expression? I mean, you started out working as a painter, as a printmaker – you’ve done a lot of different things, but fiber is what you settled on.

MR. JAMES: Well, you know –

MR. LYON: Or the quilt is what you settled on, I don’t know.

MR. JAMES: Right, but I would say I like the notion of textile, and I have to connect it to the ubiquitousness –

MR. LYON: Ubiquity.

MR. JAMES: Is it? Ubiquity. Yeah, I guess ubiquity is the word – of fabric, of textiles, and no other material is so closely connected to the human body. And I think that essential quality is what gave me a rationale for adopting it as an expressive medium, because I felt that anything that was so closely connected, so necessary for human, you know, functioning, had value, a kind of essential value that to me legitimized it as an artist’s material, as a material at least with potential creative value. And it had always been used that way, historically.

And so – I mean, I made peace with the notion of working with textiles as a medium a long time ago, early on, but I think that its problem has been that it’s been associated over the centuries with women’s work, and women’s work has been so devalued for so many centuries that that all played into the reasons why this medium could be marginalized as it was, and still is, actually, to some degree – less so now than it used to be, but still to some degree it is marginalized. So that sort of explains it, I think.

MR. LYON: What are some of the strengths of – well, you sort of talked about some of the strengths of it, I guess. What are the limitations of working in textiles? I mean, do you feel –

MR. JAMES: Well, you know, I actually don’t feel any limitations, because I can see now the incredible range of expression, the malleability and the incredible sort of adaptability of the medium that – of fabric and textiles. It seems to me that in many ways other media are more limited, more constrained in some ways, I guess.

MR. LYON: You mean you can’t drape a painting over your shoulders?

MR. JAMES: Well, I don’t know. Well, you know, painting is – painting has always been associated with textiles too, but one of my arguments – and I make this argument to students – is one of the reasons why textiles have always been sort of marginalized is that in the art world, the function of a textile in the high-art world was as a support. The art went on the surface of it and hid the textile substrate, but that textile substrate was what made possible the art that ultimately presented its face to the viewer.

And I think I started to realize this, honestly, in art school, in graduate school, because when I was finishing my graduate work I was painting washes of heavily diluted color, acrylic color, on unprimed canvas, and at first I covered the entire canvas, but as I developed my work over those few years that I was in grad school, I started leaving more surface unpainted, and so that the unprimed canvas, the textile, became a critical component of the composition – of the abstract composition that happened to be placed on that surface. And I started to recognize that the textile area that was visible had its own sort of inherent beauty – the weave itself, the directional aspect of that weave and the texture that resulted. And so I started to kind of appreciate textiles as beautiful materials in and of themselves, and that had something to do, I guess, with my accepting – you know, accepting this for myself as a worthy pursuit.

MR. LYON: Now, sort of historically your work has been – your textile work has been in quilts. A lot of what I know you’re doing now is still in that mode, but it’s several steps removed from the assemblage of existing fabrics into quilt form. We probably ought to talk about that at another point but –

MR. JAMES: Well –

MR. LYON: I need to have you define a quilt for me.

MR. JAMES: Well, you know, what a quilt is, technically, is a textile sandwich: three layers held together with some form of stitching, usually a top layer and a middle filling or batting area and a backing. And that pretty much qualifies anything you would call a quilt, no matter what the surface is like or what the backing is like or what the middle material is made of. The fact that those three things sandwich – are sandwiched together and held together in that sandwich with stitches -- is what makes them a quilt. It used to be that you’d associate a quilt with a function, and that stopped in the 1970s, really, that quilts no longer had to function as bed covers, although they could scale – they could still relate to that function, but that wasn’t necessarily what they were being made for, so that in a sense many people thought of quilts as flexible canvases. You know, instead of being stretched on the rigid frame they could be draped or allowed to fall across a surface or expanse of a wall.

So in that sense they’re very, very closely related to painting. And then the question arises, why not just paint? People ask me that: why don’t you just paint the images that you do? And I could have done that, but they would have been something else. They wouldn’t have been a textile; they wouldn’t have been informed by the work of touch is, I guess, what I would call it, because it’s very important to me and to everybody who makes quilts that the process of handling those materials and of forming with one’s fingers the surfaces that compose the objects, I think, is what separates it from painting; the different approach to the laying on of form and, I don’t know, the different sensibility, I guess, about the act of manipulating materials.

Or maybe I should put it another way, that the materials require a different form of manipulation, and you either connect to one form or another, and I connected better to the processes of sewing than I connected to the processes of taking a stick and dipping it in paint and applying the paint with the end of the stick to a canvas or a roller or whatever it was. The only difference – there’s no difference in my thinking when I’m creating a quilt, but I am creating something different than – at least as an object – than I would if I were working on a panel – a wood panel or a stretched canvas panel or a piece of metal, or whatever.

MR. LYON: Well, the mechanical requirements, certainly in some respects, have dictated some of your compositional [pairings?] it seems like.

MR. JAMES: Well, I think that when I started out, I was very much a traditionalist in design too, not just in terms of the form that the object took but the surfaces themselves were very traditional. And my work stayed essentially traditional, at least formally, until the early 1990s, I would say – at least through the 1980s, because my work was always conditioned by the presence, either visible or insinuated, of a grid. The grid is always, you know, the underlying structure in most quilts. And until I was able to get rid of the grid – you know the story very well –

MR. LYON: A bit.

MR. JAMES: – I thought of my work as being very traditional, even though the designs weren’t copies of traditional designs.

MR. LYON: People didn’t respond to it as being traditional.

MR. JAMES: No. But I thought I was very traditional because the presence of the grid made it very traditional. Of course, in textile pattern design the grid has always been a component of it, because all repeat pattern design is grid based. Some form of grid, you know, determines the distribution of the forms across the surface. So that’s been part of textile design tradition since textiles were first designed, so we’re talking about many, many, many thousands of years.

MR. LYON: Many thousands of years.

MR. JAMES: So in that sense there’s nothing new with this particular textile tradition.

Now, I don’t know if I should get into – you see, now I’m going to start getting into the whole digital thing, and that’s going to –

MR. LYON: No, let’s hold that back for now.

MR. JAMES: Yeah.

MR. LYON: We did touch on – do you feel you managed to – or do you even try to deliberately exploit the tradition of the quilt? I mean, aren’t those things that you kind of – are the associations that necessarily go with the quilt part of what you’re hoping for in the response?

MR. JAMES: Sometimes I have wanted that and sometimes – sometimes it seemed more important to me and other times less. I occasionally have had misgivings about having led the charge in a way to move the quilt off the bed and onto the wall, and I’ve even done – gone back and made some quilts periodically over the years that I thought of as bed quilts. The last one that I did – the last few I did around 1995-’96, I conceived of them as bed quilts, and I sized them so that they could function on a bed. Of course, they were not placed on beds when they entered into the private collections, but they could – they could function on a bed.

And I did that at a moment when I felt, again, this sort of misgiving that we have sort of subtracted from the quilt a key component of its nature. But I don’t think that that’s – I think quilts can function in lots of different ways, and if an aesthetic function is its only function, then that’s fine – it doesn’t have to actually cover a body or warm a body. So I guess I’m willing at this point to accept a variety of functions that might not necessarily overlap for an object that we would call a quilt.

MR. LYON: Okay, that’s good. Another sort of pick-up on what we were talking about before – when you first sort of came onto the scene, you were one of the very few men in the quilt world. Actually, before we even go that far, there’s a term you use all the time and I find myself using it too, and I’m not quite sure what one would call the “quilt world.”

MR. JAMES: The quilt world. Well, the quilt world is definitely a body of people who have a particular interest in or love of quilts. And many of those people make them, although not all of them. But all of them love them, and their interest is such that they’ll move mountains to get to them – maybe not literally, but figuratively – and that they hold them very important because it gives them pleasure in lots of different ways.

I suddenly noticed that that shelf is leaning a little too much. I’m going to have to prop it up. It looks like it could come down on you.

So – what was the question again?

MR. LYON: Who is the quilt world? [Laughs.]

MR. JAMES: Oh, who is the quilt world? Well, you know, I see the quilt world when I give a talk to the Lincoln Quilters Guild, for example, as I did in November – I mean in September. And, you know, the quilt world is middle-class America largely, women almost exclusively, middle-aged almost exclusively, because there are not very many young women getting an interest in quilts today. It’s still very much the domain of women who have a proprietary connection to the medium and who definitely feel very protective of it. And they also largely feel very connected to womanhood through it. They are home – well, a lot of them are professional women, but they’re homemakers generally, whether or not they work full time outside of the home, which most probably do today. They still largely value those activities –

MR. LYON: Hearth-makers maybe.

MR. JAMES: Yeah – yeah. So that’s who the quilt world is, but it also –

MR. LYON: But it has an institutional component too, right?

MR. JAMES: What do you mean?

MR. LYON: In the sense of – you’ve got all these newsletters and magazines –

MR. JAMES: Yeah.

MR. LYON: – and organizations and –

MR. JAMES: Yep, there is the, you know, whole group of publishers of magazines and books devoted exclusively to quilts and quiltmakers. There is a quilt – there is a whole commercial world of quilt – an industry really that’s developed around this quilt world by manufacturers of tools and machines and fabrics and every manner of material and –

MR. LYON: Kits and designs.

MR. JAMES: Everything, yeah. And that is most on display at things like the “Houston Quilt Festival” and “Quilt Market,” which take place each November in Houston, Texas, run by Quilts, Inc., which is probably one of the largest businesses that’s come out of this whole revival in quiltmaking, a multimillion dollar enterprise that organizes regional and this annual show, and also organizes a biannual show in Europe called “Quilt Expo Europa” every second year, that moves around. Last year it was in Barcelona, and the next one will be in The Hague, I believe.

MR. LYON: So this quilt world has – I mean, you’re part of it, too.

MR. JAMES: Yeah – yeah.

MR. LYON: I mean, for many years –

MR. JAMES: Oh, I mean, my reputation in it and my visibility in the quilt world was much stronger –

[END TAPE 2 SIDE A.]

– was known in that studio craft world. So it is – I mean, that world has been important to the development of my career, because then the support for all of the workshops and lectures that – workshops I’ve taught and lectures I’ve given -- because that’s where those people came from for the most part.

MR. LYON: Presumably those are the ones who bought your books, too.

MR. JAMES: Yes, many of whom bought the quilts, because most of my clientele has been what I would call quilt-world people.

MR. LYON: That’s interesting.

MR. JAMES: I’ve sold outside of the quilt world. I’ve done corporate commissions that went in corporate collections, and I’ve done – I’ve sold work through galleries to some collectors who are not necessarily quilt collectors and not necessarily people who knew much about quilts or came from the quilt world, but for the most part most of my work has been placed through exposure in the quilt world.

MR. LYON: So, in a sense, despite some hesitance or maybe even resistance by some people because you were a man, it hasn’t proven to be an enduring problem.

MR. JAMES: No – no. No, and I think that that worked the other way too, that the fact that I was a man had its advantages, because as an anomaly you get noticed, you know.

MR. LYON: Well, that’s true.

MR. JAMES: And so in that sense I think being a man in this field drew more attention than being a woman might have, although – and I’ve always said this, and I maintain this to this day that the quality of the work is ultimately what was the determining factor, and if the work hadn’t been good, the fact that I was a man would not have been enough to give me a career.

MR. LYON: Well, there are other men making quilts --

MR. JAMES: Some have come and gone.

MR. LYON: – and many – I was going to say, and many who have come and gone.

MR. JAMES: Right – right. So –

MR. LYON: Okay, so that’s not really a problem. We’re actually down to the point where I’d like to – probably a wrap-up question for this session – it’s a quarter after 6:00 – and that is, do you think of yourself as part of an international tradition or one that’s particularly American?

MR. JAMES: Oh, well, that’s easy to answer, because I definitely think of it as an American tradition, that the practice of quiltmaking as a communal – as a popular enterprise – I think while there are precedents in other countries, never – it never became as organized anywhere else as it did here – as it became here on a sort of national scope, I would say. There are traditions, you know, in England – in pockets of England there are particular long-standing traditions of quilt practice, but it never seemed anywhere else to become as widespread, as present a practice in the lives of huge numbers of women as it did here. And those numbers – I think the reason why the catalogue of quilt design that we refer to, or that we begin our first experiences of quilts with, is all quilt design that originated in this country, that was developed out of traditional practice in this country, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

For example, in England there is a long-standing patchwork tradition, but it’s almost exclusively one type of patchwork. There was very little experimentation, and certainly no experimentation on the scale that it evidenced itself in this country in the 19th [century].

[Audio break.]

MR. LYON: And we’re rolling. This is David Lyon interviewing Michael James, with questions prepared by David Lyon and Patricia Harris, at Michael’s home office in Lincoln, Nebraska, on the fifth of January 2003, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is our second session, and we’re going to start talking about sort of what made you who you are as an artist.

So, what were some of the more powerful influences in your career? You know, people, art movements, technological developments [inaudible] to you?

MR. JAMES: Well, since my career has essentially revolved around quilts, those influences, the strongest ones or the most important ones I think are connected to that work. So I would have to say that a really big influence on my work, on my pursuit of this medium, has been traditional American quilts, and specifically Amish quilts, which had a big influence at the beginning because they were the first quilts that I – the first traditional quilts that I looked at that seemed to me to convey the kind of originality and power, I guess – visual power that I associated with art, what I call art, at least in terms of two-dimensional art. And I did incorporate aspects of Amish quilts and Amish – not quilts but Amish sort of approaches to color and composition in some of my earlier quilts. So I think that was a very important influence and still remains important in the sense that I still admire and draw some amount of inspiration from Amish quilts.

Art movements that have influenced my work. I think I would say, you know, from a formal standpoint anyway, the Bauhaus has been pretty influential in – not always in specific works but in the works of some of the artists and designers of the Bauhaus, especially Albers and – both Albers, Anni and Josef Albers, and some of the textile designers like Gunta Stolzl, whose work I’ve studied and been interested in for a long time. I have read a lot about Black Mountain College [Asheville, North Carolina], which was a sort of experimental college to which Josef and Anni Albers went to teach in the 1940s, and I’ve been very interested in the sort of pedagogical history of the Black Mountain College, in the people who worked and studied and taught there and in the impact that that sort of art-oriented program had on arts and culture in this country.

Other influences on my career.

MR. LYON: I mean, when we’ve talked in the past, I think you and I both sort of found a translation of Paul Klee’s notebooks, for example, to be kind of a seminal moment, at least at one point in our lives.

MR. JAMES: Well, I read the notebooks so long ago now – I should reread them, actually; it’s time that I reread the notebooks. I’ve been interested – you know, anybody who’s interested in geometric design, which informed my work at least through the 1970s and 1980s, would have been interested in people like Klee and in the whole Russian Constructivist movement and the Op and the geometric art movements of the '60s and '70s. And that definitely influenced my work, but I’ve been interested in a lot of different types of artists and have read a lot of artists’ biographies over the years and have studied a whole range of different types of work by painters and sculptors and –

MR. LYON: Were some of those people less than obvious in the sense that – I mean, the examples you’ve given, certainly the Albers, one could see sort of a direct translation into your work, but I suspect that there are probably other people whose work you’ve looked at a lot who you may share very little affinity and obvious sort of artistic expression –

MR. JAMES: Right.

MR. LYON: – but that you took something else away from it.

MR. JAMES: Well, yeah. I would say, you know, people like Philip Guston or Joseph Cornell, that I’ve already mentioned, are artists whose work I admire immensely – did then and still do. Other artists that have had influences on my work – well, not maybe on my work, but on me as a person, as an artist person, artists like John Bellany, who is a Scottish painter, not very well known in this country; Jon Schueler – we have to double-check that name because I’m suddenly not sure – but whose journals and edited letters were published a couple of years ago. I have the book, and I’m trying to locate it as we sit here, and I think it’s upstairs in the library.

MR. LYON: Why don’t we double-check that?

MR. JAMES: But, well, you know, I have a very, very eclectic and –

MR. LYON: That’s part of what I was trying to get at.

MR. JAMES: – and catholic, I would say, taste – not Catholic –

MR. LYON: With a small c.

MR. JAMES: Yeah, with a small c. You know, Bridget Riley I admire a lot. I have to say I like her work a lot. I always have. I’ve followed it for the last four decades since the '60s when she first appeared on the contemporary scene in this country, the Museum of Modern Art show, “The Responsive Eye" [1965], and saw her retrospective show at the Dia Art Center [Dia Center for the Arts, New York, NY] two years ago, which I really enjoyed. I’m fascinated, you know, by interplays of color in all kinds of forms, so that has been a constant influence, as have artists that are of a previous generation, but people like the color synchromist painters, starting with the Delaunays and the American offshoots of the Delaunays [Robert and Sonia], like Stanton MacDonald-Wright and that group of artists, you know, of the '20s and '30s, who worked with color as a subject.

I mean, any artist that you could describe as a colorist is probably somebody whose work I’ve been interested in, in one way or another. So I put Ellsworth Kelly in that group for sure, and Frank Stella obviously. David Hockney’s work I’ve been interested in over the years pretty consistently. It’s interesting because when I start listing influences, I tend to be listing painters and people in the sort of fine arts mode, and I'm less likely to list artists who come out of the craft tradition, at least at the outset, although there have certainly been influences there too.

I have to say I’ve been very interested over the years in the sort of English Bloomsbury tradition, both literary and also visual, and interested in the work of people like Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry even, not that they were good painters particularly, but something there that was interesting in the way that they handled color. But I also, I guess, have been interested in their lives, the way that their lives wove through a number of artistic traditions, and that also would include artists in this country working at the same time, like William and Marguerite Zorach, whose work I’ve been interested in for a long time.

And I can’t say that many of these artists’ work had specific influences on anything that I’d done visually, but I think reading about their work and reading about their lives has always been a way to participate in the community of artists and in artistic history. So it was a way of getting some kind of affirmation, I guess – feeling.

MR. LYON: Understanding art’s place?

MR. JAMES: Yeah – yeah. So –

MR. LYON: That’s pretty good. We’ll get to technological developments in session three, when we start talking about your new work in particular.

MR. JAMES: We’ll probably have to go in the other room to do that – in the studio.

MR. LYON: That’s fine. Do you see your work falling into phases or periods? I mean, at some level it has to seem all continuous to you, but –

MR. JAMES: Actually it does fall into clear –

MR. LYON: Okay.

MR. JAMES: I would definitely – I mean, to me that seems very obvious, that from 1974 – let’s use that as a starting date, although I had actually started making patchwork objects a year or a year and a half prior to that, but from about that point when I started making actual what you would call quilts to about 1978, that four-year period is really a kind of apprenticeship period, and the work is very, very classic, I would call it classic phase in the sense that I was doing sort of take-offs on traditional quilts, and the formats were very, very traditional. I was also kind of hopping around at that point, stylistically, and exploring different types of surface constructs, kind of trying to find something that I could really dig my fingers into.

And then from 1978 to about 1981 there was a period of a kind of solidifying of my sense of myself as a quiltmaker and my sense of what I felt I needed to do artistically as I started to get more confident in using this medium to act as a structure to support the images that I was visualizing. And then I think from 1980 to 1990 my work pretty much was entirely using the strip-piecing process and had a particular look that was informed by that process but also informed by the grid, the skeleton of the grid that underlaid everything that I produced in that span of time. And then –

MR. LYON: Would you call Sonia and Robert Delaunay a phase?

MR. JAMES: Well, I think by that point I’d sort of gotten over the Delaunays. That influence was more evident in the late 1970s. But I think those – you know, I was doing something that was fairly original at that point, and all the previous influences that I had absorbed were coming out, but blended, you know, definitely digested and reconstituted as something that was much a more personal expression.

By 1990, though, I was becoming disillusioned. I felt that I had reached – that I had exhausted the possibilities for what I could do, certainly using the grid as the underlying skeleton, and I was actually very frustrated by the presence of the grid. And so I struggled for a couple of years to get rid of it, and one of the key factors that allowed me to do that was the three-month residency that I had in the South of France in 1990, thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave me an artist exchange fellowship to work at the La Napoule Art Foundation in La Napoule, France, near Cannes. And so for three months at the end of 1990 – in the fall of 1990 I worked with 14 or 15 other artists, 10 Americans, and five or six Europeans, including, among the Americans, Faith Ringgold, who was there at the same time.

And when I got that residency, I decided ahead of time that I would not work in fabric while I was there; I would just work on paper. I would basically spend three months drawing, both to distance myself from the work that I had been doing intensely for 10 years, and I had also just completed about a year’s worth of work for a show that happened at the same time in Switzerland. I had an exhibition in the Galerie Jonas in Switzerland. And so I had basically reached a point of mental exhaustion relative to my ongoing work, and it was a good point to do something different.

So I haven’t done really much work on paper since the early 1970s, and so it was like sort of stepping back in time to grad school all over again in some ways. And actually, the first couple of months were difficult in that respect, because I felt that I had to retrace a lot of territory that I’d sort of put behind me, even forgotten, and I had to kind of relearn, in a sense, how to draw. But after a couple of months I started then doing some work that was more exploratory for me and that involved using oil pastels and oil crayons, which I had never worked with before, at least not the type of oil sticks and so on that were now available.

And I spent quite a bit of money on these wonderful Sennelier oil pastels, these big, thick, greasy, wonderful, luscious instruments that let me manipulate color in a very different way. And the work that I did in that last month – and one of those pieces is sitting – it’s hanging on the wall across from us, that set of three drawings.

MR. LYON: Oh, yes, I remember those.

MR. JAMES: Those drawings were critical in my making the leap that I made within a year of coming back from La Napoule that led to the work that I did between 1992 and 1995, still strip piecing but totally disconnected from the grid. And it freed me up at that point to re-embrace strip piecing, which I thought I may have reached the limits of what I could do with it before I’d gone to La Napoule. It renewed my enthusiasm for the process and did let me create another body of work that stands apart from the work of the 1980s for its freedom of form and its flow and sense of movement that was unconstrained by comparison with the grid-based stuff of the 1980s.

It was a sort of last hurrah, however, because any work, I think, that is informed by technique and process, I think ultimately has to exhaust itself. And I finally did reach a point in the mid-1990s – 1995 -- where I definitely understood that I had reached the limits of what I could do with the strip-piecing process. Having divested myself of the grid, there was nothing else to divest myself of in that technical context. So I decided in 1995 to change completely, to really make an about-face. And essentially that really is like the end of the fourth phase of my work and the beginning of another phase that’s taken up pretty much most of the last six years or so – or that took up about six years, because my work took another about-face last year, which we’ll talk about momentarily.

Anyway, that period from about 1995 to 2001, the first part of 2001, I think I would sort of look at that as a separate body of work that had one kind of connecting thread, and that was the use of juxtapositions of totally disparate surfaces in one piece that create for me a kind of tension that’s akin to the tensions that exist in our lives constantly as we try to negotiate a physical world and political worlds and social and cultural worlds in which very conflicting ideas and circumstances exist side by side. We make peace with those things in one way or another; we accommodate them.

And so my feeling is that in my art I should be able to accommodate in single surfaces components that don’t initially seem to have much connection to one another, but in whose juxtaposition and sort of enforced cohabitation some sort of accommodation, visual accommodation, ultimately results. And actually, my work now is still informed by this idea. People I think find it difficult – they don’t think always that these works are logical visually, because I think that most of the people in the audience that my work has have a tendency to base their judgments on formal sort of rubrics, on formal qualifications, and I think that I’m less interested in the formal aspects now and more interested in content and the ideas, or the sort of philosophical rationales. I mean, I know I can compose well and I can handle color well, and I know I draw decently, so I’ve mastered those things, and it doesn’t seem to me that important anymore to address any of those issues.

So the final phase I’m in, or at least the most recent phase I’m involved in now – and this is a very different set of parameters because it’s informed by digital technology, and I’m certainly not unique in that respect, because artists all over the world are heavily involved in –

MR. LYON: And people say you’re a latecomer.

MR. JAMES: Yeah, exactly – exactly. I do feel that that is the case. But in a sense it has an inevitability, so at this point I’m rediscovering my work through the lens of the digital age, and the availability of technology that I would not have had access to prior to coming here to the University of Nebraska I think is significant. I’ve been designing and working with fabrics that I’ve created in Photoshop and that I have printed on a cotton substrate with a digital textile printer that the department got about a year ago – exactly a year ago. I was trained on this in February of 2001, and since then have been working intensively to explore both the possibilities of the CAD [Computer Assisted Design] software and the possibilities in terms of incorporating the output