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

Interview with Marjorie Schick
Conducted by Tacey A. Rosolowski
At the Artist's studio in Pittsburg, Kansas
April 4-6, 2004

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Marjorie Schick on April 4-6, 2004. The interview took place in Pittsburg, Kansas and was conducted by Tacey A. Rosolowski 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.

Marjorie Schick and Tacey Rosolowski have reviewed the transcript and have 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

TACEY ROSOLOWSKI: This is Tacey Ann Rosolowski. I’m interviewing Marjorie Schick at her studio at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas. This is the 4th of April and I’m doing this interview for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is disc number one of session one.

Marjorie, let’s just start by saying that you’ve been known since the ‘80s at least as a maker of very large wearable sculptures that defy categorization, with color, with amazing ranges of materials. You have a very signature approach that everyone recognizes and I was wondering if you would start by telling us about the aesthetic goals that have preoccupied you during all this time, what your aims have been, and what you believe your work is about.

MARJORIE SCHICK: Well, actually, since I finished graduate school at Indiana University with Alma Eikerman, I made up my mind at the end of my program that what I wanted to do was build sculptures to wear because my jewelry was already pretty sculptural; and so actually, I was looking at an Art in America issue that was devoted to David Smith at that time. And I, of course, love his work and – but I thought, ooh, how exciting it would be to be able to go put your arm through a hole or your head through a hole or whatever, so that was what helped inspire me to begin building body sculptures.

And I’ve stayed pretty well focused on that all these years. I build pieces for – that are non-wearable occasionally, but the vast majority of the pieces have been wearable. Now I work at a scale that makes the work – I’m called – I’m in the jewelry field, but a lot of people don’t even call it jewelry because it’s so large. And so therefore it sometimes is difficult to define and so sometimes instead of calling myself a jeweler, I’ll say that I build body sculptures. I think it fits – it fits the idea of what I’m doing better. So I build these large scale forms that are – that I think are wearable, but some of them are – most of them are sort of pushing at the boundaries of wearability and making us question why we wear what we do, why we don’t wear these kinds of things, and anyway, so I’ve stayed focused all these years in that respect – in keeping and continuing to work in that direction.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: When you say that you’re pushing the boundaries, because at one point you said you wear them and at one point you say you don’t wear them, what does it mean to work in that boundary? What does it mean to put on one of these large sculptures and to have it on your body and to move with it for a while?

MS. SCHICK: Oh, obviously it makes you reconsider how you move in space – how others see you – because it takes a great deal of nerve to wear such a large piece. And then there’s the weight of it and you can’t move through a doorway maybe. You might have to turn to get through the door. Obviously you couldn’t put a coat on over most of these pieces. You couldn’t – you couldn’t get into the car with a lot of them on, so that means you’ve got to carry it with you and then put it on when you get there.

So anyway, yeah. And then some of them are quite – mostly they’re not so heavy, but I have a new one that is so heavy it verges on that brink of being unwearable. I have a very wonderful, gorgeous model – a young woman who models for me – Kathlene Allie – and she didn’t complain, but after the photo session for our new piece called Ode to Clothespins, which is about 45 inches long and about 30 inches across and filled with large and small clothespins and they’re on lines of – it’s on a wooden frame and all the pins – clothespins have been painted and they’re on lines of clear plastic and tubing – rubber tubing – and such, and it was heavy.

I mean, she could stand with it and she’s quite tall and so she could manage that, but actually we did have it photographed on her sitting. And she said – she was very polite. She never said a word about it being uncomfortable until – until I asked her later. So that piece, I think, is just on that edge of being a bit – toward – it’s pretty close to being unwearable, but I still – I still hold fast to making them wearable even if for a very short period of time.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Why is that? Because some people have really gone and disconnected themselves and said, “Okay, I’m going to wear jewelry that really is just to be displayed,” but you want that physical interaction. What’s – why –

MS. SCHICK: Oh, it’s much more exciting to be able to have that because you put the piece on and as I said, you become more conscious of your movement in space, of how you relate to the piece. You set up a dialogue, and there’s a new kind of intimacy that occurs that we’re not used to when wearing a sculpture that doesn’t occur when you wear a smaller piece of jewelry because you might be conscious that you’ve got it on and maybe you’re not conscious at all of it.

Years ago, when I used to lecture – I love to lecture, but when I first started lecturing, I spoke in it about different lengths of time that you could wear jewelry. And like a wedding ring, you hope that you’re going to wear it forever, or 30 years, or 40, or 50, or whatever it might be, and it – it’s a symbolic piece of jewelry and it also is one that normally doesn’t get in the way of your everyday activities. You can drive with it on, you can go to the grocery store, you can fix the car, change diapers and do all those kinds of things.

And then there is – so if we’ve got like – if we call that 30-year jewelry, then we’ve got maybe three-hour jewelry that you might put on, a special watch for scuba diving or things that maybe have function to show what religion you are and there are so many different ways and reasons we wear jewelry. And you might wear it often, but maybe you take it off at night.

And then I think there’s not quite, but almost 30-second jewelry, right? [Laughs.] So mine would be more in that category. These things that you put on and you wear probably for a pretty short period of time and then when you take it off then you’ve got – also you’re left with the memory of how that piece felt, how it affected you, because you’re obviously changed when you put one of these pieces on. It’s not an accessory that you can forget about because you become part of the piece – the piece becomes part of you in a big way. And yeah, so that’s why I’ve stayed with the body. I – as I say, I’ve done some pieces that aren’t body related, but I much prefer doing those that are.

I – you know, my colleagues here at the university, we were all here for a very long period of time and so some have just retired, but when we’d hang faculty shows they’d say, “Oh, Marj, why don’t you just close up those neck holes and those arm holes and admit that you’re a frustrated sculptor.” And so I’d think hard about that – you know, each time we’d do that I’d think about why I was doing this, but I see the body as a challenge, not as a limitation and so I’m intrigued. I love making these things and I’ve got a couple mirrors in my classroom, which is where I make my things. I’ve never set up a studio, so I’ve always built them here in the classroom.

And yeah, I do try them on. I’ve been accused of – I was accused early on of never trying these things on or else I’d know, being a woman, how uncomfortable they were, but that’s not true. I always try them on and then I enjoy seeing others come in and put them on because you get a whole new – obviously – feel and look for the piece when you see somebody else turn with it on or twist it or put it on in a different way even than I might have intended, so that makes it a lot more exciting.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Well, I think it’s wonderful that you have your eureka moment or ah-hah moment was with David Smith, who is a sculptor – a very large – works on a very, very large scale and you’re really weaving, if you will, threads between the jewelry world and the fine art world, between large scale and between smaller scale, between body and between object – the art object that we usually think is completely independent from the body, so you’re trying to bring all those categories together.

MS. SCHICK: Definitely. And I’ve always, always aimed – I don’t know. I can’t say whether my pieces or whatever would be accepted as fine art, but that’s been a goal of mine all these years. And normally I try – I know some pieces are better than others and that’s going to be true of anybody certainly, but generally I try to make a piece of museum quality if I can; one that I’ll really be proud of and so –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What do you mean by museum quality?

MS. SCHICK: I want it to be the very best it – that I think it can be. I don’t want to sell or stop short and so I’ve got – I’ve had this luxury of being married to Dr. James B. M. Schick, who has supported me all these years in giving me huge amounts of time – letting me be up in the classroom or studio night after night and all days on the weekends, and we’ve given up a lot of time together and I’ve made family sacrifices, obviously, for my work because we have one son [Robert]. And so I couldn’t have done any of this without him, where I’ve been allowed to work on a piece, if necessary, to make it what I thought was going to be museum quality if it took a year or more of time, which some of them have, then I’ve been able to do that.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: That is quite a luxury. And having an academic position, too, in combination has also helped I’m sure.

MS. SCHICK: Oh, definitely – definitely. I – in fact, now that I’m 62 I don’t want to retire for a long time, and why should I? Because here I’ve got the best of it all, don’t I? I live in Pittsburg, Kansas, which is a small community and it’s a pretty easy community I think. You know, it’s what – ten minutes to get home or 15. And I’ve got this big classroom where I can store, all around the edges, my cardboard boxes for shipping and fill that table over there up with all my wood – new wood for pieces. And I can clear off the tables and get things into boxes or I can hire, which I’ve been doing because I’ve overworked my hands and I need help, so I’ve been hiring students to work for me and help me both in the constructing as well as the packing of the pieces.

So – and I find being with students really exciting. I think if – obviously, some day I probably will retire, but I don’t want to do it until I’m absolutely sure because I can envision that I will miss that interaction with students enormously – just being with them. I love being with young people and people of all ages, so I’ve already – already talked to people at two schools – two other universities where I might live when we do retire – if I couldn’t come and take one hour of credit, if they’d give me space to work so that I could still be around others, because I have been for my whole career.

I haven’t – now I enjoy – I must say – you know, Jim had pointed out to me that we all need our private time, and so definitely my work – my work is my private time and mostly I’m alone in the studio – not always. I mean, some nights before a due date, you know, it might be full and I’m having to answer questions of students and that sort of thing, but I’ve had a lot of quiet time to myself, which I’ve needed.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What do you think you get from students? What is it that – how do they energize you?

MS. SCHICK: Well, maybe one thing I have to – you know, I love to construct lectures almost – slide lectures almost as much as I love to construct a piece, so I have enjoyed lecturing – come to just love lecturing and it’s exciting seeing students sort of change and develop and get their own ideas and I think I get a lot from students. Right, see, somehow it’s a wonderful, I think, dialogue back and forth and I teach mostly non-art students, and so sometimes the first day of class I’ll bring out pieces I’m working on and because they’re so large, I think they’re – it’s – the work startles them. Yeah, I think “startle” is probably the right word.

Because I think I’m just an ordinary-looking woman in town and older now, but friends came back and I didn’t know that they were here and they – a past student and his girlfriend and they were sitting out in the hallway – this was a long time ago – during the first day of class and my class exited, you know, and this girlfriend of my past student said – one girl said, “Boy is she weird.” [Laughs.]

So maybe they have a different opinion of me than I do, but I think I’m ordinary and fit in, but I think maybe, and I didn’t realize it until recently, it’s good for them to get to see what I’m working on, and when I do show them, I like to tell them about my aesthetic problems that I’m having on my work because every piece is a challenge and if it’s not – if there’s not a huge aesthetic challenge to it – if I don’t pass through this period on it when I think I’ll never be able to pull this one off, then I don’t think it’s – it usually works so well. I don’t think it’s one of those really – one of those pieces I might be really proud of.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Can you describe a piece that was particularly challenging so we can get an idea of what are those aesthetic challenges that make you know you’ve made it.

MS. SCHICK: Oh. I have to think. Well, I don’t know that it was – I’ll go back to the clothespin piece and the clothespin piece is part of a new series of autobiographical necklaces I’m starting on and they’re about everyday things. I mean, I live in an everyday life, don’t I? In an everyday little place in the middle of the U.S. and so they’re ordinary things, but all these years I’ve always thought, you know, our bed sheets smelled better if I would hang them outside and so I’ve done that all these years. Every week or so Jim says I’m obsessed about whether the weather on the weekend is going to be rainy or sunny.

So – and then in ’90 – I think it was ’94 I was part of the Winter Olympics in Norway as an artist – part of one of their workshops and I had just this most incredible 10 days there making a piece.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: This was where?

MS. SCHICK: It was in Lillehammer. Well, no, we were in Hamar. We were in Hamar.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: But it was attached to the Lillehammer Olympics?

MS. SCHICK: Right, and so we – they all rode bicycles. I’m not a bicyclist, so – and they saw me ride the first day or so and they said, “We think you better not ride bicycles here,” so everybody else was riding bicycles but me to go to the local grocery store or stationary store to get what supplies you might need – that sort of thing. So I would walk, and there was this wonderful, big grocery store that I’d go to so I bought colored clothespins. So this clothespin necklace is sort of my ode to colored clothespins. The ones I bought were plastic and I used wood ones on this piece.

But my original idea had been to have this huge frame – and it is huge, like 45 inches long and 30 inches across. And then we strung up lines across it leaving an opening that you can get your head through but there’s not a circle there, it’s – they’re all diagonals. And I had intended only to put the clothespins I guess around the borders – make a border of them; never to put them through the middle. And then I put a few on for the heck of it and then a few more and a few more.

And thank goodness we had a big snow and somebody parked us in at home. A car was stuck in the snow in front of our [driveway] – so I couldn’t get out that day, so I got to stay home and paint more clothespins because it demanded twice – at least three times more than I thought I was going to need, so I could get it ready for the photo session, and so it’s now – the whole interior and – is filled up with clothespins. It’s almost – there’s hardly much space left, and then – and then of course there’s the border.

Now that’s where it’s been sort of neat working with somebody who helps me because I’d never heard of – isn’t there a phrase for – in football about you’ve been “clothes lined”? Well, that’s what my students said. I’ve never – I don’t follow football, so I don’t –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Neither do I, so I’m at a disadvantage too.

MS. SCHICK: And it was – I wish it was my idea, but it was my helper’s [Jared Webb] idea to make the clothespins around the border go in waves – wave shapes. They’re rippled. So I thought, wow, well, let’s try it. So I tried it in a timid way and then of course that is the best way to do them, so it wasn’t a huge challenge, but I guess I’ll say that I changed my mind about the piece, and then I was always working – always having a deadline, so I had my photo session as a deadline. I thought, oh my gosh, I’m not going to get this solved in time, but as I – it worked as I got more and more and more – that’s the secret of my work and it – it’s always more and more and more. So I got more and more clothespins on it.

Then I began to work with runs of color in the – on the clothespins and it began to develop a whole linear pattern that I think I would have missed if I’d left it just empty except for these lines across the center of the form. Does that make sense?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: It makes sense. I’m also struck, as you’re describing this, that new problems emerge or issues emerge –

MS. SCHICK: Oh, yes.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: – as you’re working and then you – the piece changes so it’s –

MS. SCHICK: Oh, definitely.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: – a very process-driven kind of evolutionary piece.

MS. SCHICK: Exactly. I don’t – I think it’s bad, but I don’t normally predraw. Recently, I’ve [done] a few because there was this wonderful young man [Jared Webb] who does the wood for me and so I need – I’ve got to give him shapes and tell him what I want. So I’ve been doing more predrawing in the last couple of years than before, just for that reason. But, oh, there are enormous numbers of changes that take place and I’ve always thought it was interesting because I know that there are so many different ways of working and one is no more right than the other, though sometimes I’ll always say, oh, I do it the wrong way, but that’s normal for me to think that, isn’t it?

But I know others – I know of one jeweler who will predraw all of her ideas and then she makes it to absolutely match those drawings and I’ve heard her say that if they don’t match up with the drawings, then it doesn’t – it’s not a success for her.

And so also when I was in London as artist-in-residence – this is at the Sir John Cass [Sir John Cass School of Art, London Metropolitan University] one summer – in 1984, I was doing the Dowel-Stick [This term refers to a body of work created between 1982 and 1986 using painted dowel sticks. These pieces are part of a larger group referred to as “drawings-to-wear.”] pieces and I did not predraw those, but all those students had to predesign all their pieces so I was sitting there with my hands sort of under the table and in that leather apron that’s under the table sort of trying to put my things together, hoping that their students aren’t seeing how I do it because then of course they would want to ask their tutors if they couldn’t also build on the spot rather than having to predesign, so I tried to be secretive. They all found me out. It wasn’t such a big secret.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Do you think there’s a difference between jewelers or any kind of craftsperson who predraws as you call it, or design – comes with a preconceived idea and someone who lets the form evolve as you do? Is there a difference in the work as a result?

MS. SCHICK: Oh, I’ve not thought about that. You know, David Smith predesigned and he spent his evenings – I show a wonderful old filmstrip now – video – I shouldn’t call it filmstrip – video sometimes to my graduate students and in it he’s shown making three-dimensional models or maquettes with liquor boxes from the liquor store and he’s all upset because somebody has put one into the fire.

And of course he would draw – make these incredible drawings at night and I don’t know how closely he stuck to those. I – there probably is a difference. I’m sure there is a difference, but I don’t know that – I don’t know what to say.

I think that – and I don’t want to make one way sound more correct than the others, so –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: No, that wasn’t really what I was asking. I guess one of the things I thought – think about – and I’m just looking around your studio here and seeing many of the different pieces that are around us right now. It seems you have a real fascination for color and for surface and it seems as though that process – your love of getting into that process of working with the piece and letting the ideas evolve really blossoms in the way that color patterns evolve and surface textures develop.

I mean, is that correct? Is that a correct reading?

MS. SCHICK: No, the color patterns are – that’s the most challenging part of the work. I love doing a three-dimensional form and I won’t say it’s easy, but it’s easier than the color, though probably when people look at the finished piece, that the color is what obviously is going to draw them to it.

My work is about the form. The content of my work is the form and also the scale of it, so I work really hard at the aesthetic qualities of the piece. And you can’t tell when you see the finished piece, but many of those, even the Dowel-Stick pieces, would have three or four layers of paint on them before I had arrived at what I thought was going to, quote, unquote, “work” on the piece.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: You mean adding layers of color or –

MS. SCHICK: Experimenting. Experimenting trying to work through various color relationships until I thought I found one that was going to work. So you see just the final result, but – and you don’t see – often on the color there’s a big struggle and there are a lot of changes of my mind. But I don’t think that it’s any more right or wrong to predesign and make your work match up to that design than to do it the way I do.

Sometimes I think maybe doing it the way I do there’s – you feel more out on a limb maybe and like I might saw that limb right off and fall down, so sometimes I think maybe it’s living a little bit more dangerously in this way to make the pieces, but I can’t – I don’t think I should really say that either because you could live dangerously through your drawings as well.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: But you seem to thrive on that kind of living dangerously in ways.

MS. SCHICK: I guess. I hadn’t thought about it as thriving, but yeah, obviously I like that. I don’t – I hadn’t thought about saying I liked that challenge, but yeah, I must.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Sort of the private way of going out on a limb.

MS. SCHICK: Well, it is. I always tell my students that, you know, entering shows is a way of gambling, isn’t it? And so why not? And I said it’s so easy a way because you just send it in. You know, you fill out the forms and send your money and you send it away and then if you’re rejected, you know, you might be mad for a moment and then you say, oh well, I’m going to turn around and send it to this one next and keep on. And it is a way of gambling and taking a risk, but the work – yeah, and that’s one of the things I want my work to have. I want it to have a sense of risk. Even there’s a sense of risk about, I guess, about how safe or comfortable you’ll be when you put one on, right?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: The scale.

MS. SCHICK: So this – the sense of risk that maybe I’ve had – yeah, I would like that if that sense of risk is still in the piece when it’s finished.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: I don’t think there’s much good art that doesn’t feel like it has a sense of risk.

MS. SCHICK: No, that’s true. You wouldn’t get anywhere if you always played it safe. Yeah.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What does it – do you think for your students to be so – have such close proximity to your work, and maybe we should talk a little bit more in detail about the space where you have your studio space because as you mentioned earlier, you don’t have a home studio and many people need a very private home studio, but you’ve taken a very different route. Maybe you can explain a little bit more about that.

MS. SCHICK: It is. It is different, and in fact my office is a mess – you’ve seen that – because I have more stuff than will fit in there and I’m not good about putting things away, so one semester – I always had –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: More is better. That’s the Marjorie Schick way.

MS. SCHICK: Well, it seems to be. So I always kept these tables clear and then one semester I had for some reason – you know, it just changes from semester to semester – really small classes and I started leaving my mess out. So look: the end of this table up here is my mess where I work. My chairman [Dr. Larrie Moody] is an Art Educator and I love it. She referred to it as my “teaching table.” Well, that was being very polite. That was putting a very good face on it.

So – but I don’t know how much they pay attention. I really don’t know. Maybe they do. Now, years ago I had somebody – well all along I’ve had some amazing students and there was one who Cale Kinne – and I’ve set up a scholarship fund in his name because he died a few years ago, but I’d asked him to write a recommendation for something I was needing one for – a promotion or something like that – and he very nicely said something about how he thought it was exciting to be able to work in a classroom, you know, next to an artist. And so I don’t know. Maybe some have taken more note than others.

And of course I’m begging this incredibly wonderful young man [Jared Webb] who’s doing my woodwork for me right now if he’d work for me. He’ll be here one more year as a senior and I said, “Oh, I hope you’re going to work next year, too,” and he said, “Well, it’s the difference between me and the construction company” – and so of course I’m sure the – I don’t know. You know, he’s going into construction.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Right.

MS. SCHICK: So I can understand. And that’s what he’s doing in the summers, but he said this was more fun, and then he did add that he’d probably not have the chance again in his future to work with an artist and he’s – he has a wonderful sense of aesthetics and is incredibly creative, and so I’m hoping that I’ll win out over the construction company.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Is that part of the energy that you get? I mean, knowing that there’s students coming by regularly and just even glancing at your work. You were saying – you were talking earlier about how you get a lot of energy from dealing with young people. Is that part of the appeal of continuing to work in the classroom space – to use that as your studio?

MS. SCHICK: I’ve just always done it and I – maybe it’s been easier. No, maybe it’s been harder. I don’t know, but in my head I think, oh, probably it was easier to do it this way. I don’t know. I think to a large extent they may not pay much attention and I’m lucky to teach where I do because I’ve got all this stuff sitting out and I mentioned to you I have these 34 rings that were almost all the way painted; each one on a pedestal standing right over here – right out in the classroom and I remember mentioning them to my students the first day of class and I’m just lucky nobody took any of them. Every now and then I’d go over and count to see if I still had 34 there, but aren’t I lucky that they don’t think so much of it that they want one of those.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: That’s interesting.

MS. SCHICK: And I leave my stuff out while I’m working on it until it’s almost finished and then I think, oh, you know, I wouldn’t want somebody else to want my piece, so then towards the end when they’re enough finished that they look like they’re about there, then I put them in my office.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And then they really become private. They become yours.

MS. SCHICK: Well, I don’t know if they’re private because I’ve made them out here, but at that point I think – oh, then I get a little more nervous about whether somebody would want it.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Well, I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit about the path that you took to get here because you’ve had a very long career and very interesting beginnings. Maybe we can talk – start by talking about where you were born and when you were born and how that – your early experiences began to shape your decision to become an artist and the kind of artist that you became.

MS. SCHICK: Well, I was born in 1941 in a small town probably not so different from Pittsburg – they’re both mining areas – Taylorville, Illinois. And my mother and father were divorced. I was probably still a baby. I don’t know if I was one or two, but I was still pretty young. So my mother raised me and she did it alone on her own and was truly remarkable.

Now, my mother’s an artist and so she had to earn money for us so she started teaching and at that point she had gone to the University of Illinois and I think Normal – I’m not sure – Normal, Illinois [Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois], but yet didn’t have her degree. But evidently she was able to teach. I think it was a one-room or small little school and I can remember she had this old coupe that she would drive – little. It would just hold the two of us and then sometimes we must have lived with my grandparents in the early days.

And then when I was of kindergarten age, she took a job in a very small town called Blue Mound [Illinois], teaching second grade and I didn’t go to kindergarten, but she would take me with her sometimes for the week. Sometimes I would stay with my grandmother and I remember that the house where she rented a room – this woman had these incredible Fiestaware dishes. Oh, and I always loved it if I got to eat on the bright red-orange plate or the dark blue, and they were the bright colored ones. They were great.

And also when I was with – I remember about – I must’ve been four when my grandmother cut a Brenda Starr paper doll out of the comic strips for me and I did paper dolls for years and years and years – for years. And they were adult, you know, paper dolls, so I designed clothes, cigar boxes full of clothes for my – career clothes for my paper dolls.

But anyway, so my – I’ve been thinking about how these things might have influenced me, so there was a church – a truly gorgeous church in Taylorville – a Catholic church. I was – my mother was Catholic and I am. And I remember the stained glass windows. It was a new church. I don’t know, but it was very modern, especially for a small town like that. And the stained glass windows were very long with clear glass and the only place there would be color in them, there was a little bit of red. And then the figure on the altar – it was all mosaic with very elongated – everything was elongated. And I can remember looking at those, and I don’t know that they would have influenced me, but they were certainly ultramodern for a little kid who is four years old sitting in church. My mom was beautiful and she had a blond muskrat fur coat and a purple feathered hat and I can remember, you know stroking the texture of the fur and loving when we’d get home to feel – run my fingers over those short, purple feathers on that hat.

So years later when I was in high school I did a term paper of some sort on stained glass windows and those stained glass windows were in a book. I was so excited. So they must have been designed by somebody – I don’t know now, but some quite remarkable designer. So that might have had some influence, but my mother kept changing jobs and then we moved to Decatur, which is a bigger town in Illinois and she taught second grade there and I would take summer school and not remedial, but I remember during the summer school in Decatur we went to places like a potato chip factory and a dairy and neat things like that. I don’t remember doing them during the year, but we did them in the summers.

And then she went back for her Master’s – oh, I forgot. When I was in first grade she went back to finish up her undergraduate degree and needed money, of course. I look at all our students, so many of them have kids they’re raising and are single parents and going to school and working, so my mother was a sorority housemother that – and she just needed one more year to finish up her degree, so when I was seven, in the first grade, it was a glorious year in Charleston, Illinois, because she went to Eastern Illinois University – East – what is it? Eastern – I can’t remember the full name. It’s a big school now.

So I loved being the little kid in the sorority house. I was on the float at homecoming and all these girls’ dates would entertain me while they were waiting for their dates to come out. And I had a big speech impediment. I had always talked – it’s hard to believe it now, but too quickly and so there was a – you know, I did a lot of speech classes and then there was at least one girl living in the sorority house who was a speech major so she would work with me. Probably she made it seem like great fun to go through these exercises. So I just – I had a glorious time.

And my mom had this huge dictionary that had endpapers of these Art Deco figures. And my mom was studying art. I mean, she was getting – finishing her degree in art, so she was doing her art things and even working on a big mural then. So then when we moved to Decatur we were there a while; through sixth grade maybe. And I remember in the post office, it was probably a big WPA [Works Progress Administration] mural and now I’m turned on by Art Deco for a new piece I’m doing, so I think that there were Art Deco things in my grandmother’s house that – I don’t know that they influenced me.

But then my mother decided she needed her Master’s so she – during the summers, we would go to Greeley, Colorado. I think that’s Northern Colorado State University [University of Northern Colorado] in Greeley. And again I’d go to summer schools to pass the time – the lab schools and she was doing all these – she took it in Art Education, so she was doing all of these amazing art projects and doing color theory and all that – and fell in love with Colorado, so we moved to Colorado.

And I was then in seventh grade and we lived in Longmont and she taught high school there, so when I got into high school I didn’t want to take art, though I think that was where my heart was, but I didn’t want to take art because my mother was the art teacher, right? So I took home ec and at that time I was starting to learn how to sew. In fact, my mother got me a sewing machine that I simply wore out. And I’ve got pieces of – you know, when I made my first thing – a skirt – I had bought this ultramodern pattern. This was the ‘50s.

And then in high school I bought this fabulous fabric. I fell in love with Bates fabric because we had some kind of movie about Bates. I thought it was the best. And it was so wonderful and it was optical a little bit and my – my home ec teacher must have been a little conservative because she said, “Oh, why did you ever buy that?” And when you spread it all out to lay the pattern down, it really just vibrated. I would –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So it’s like op art.

MS. SCHICK: Well, I’ve got a piece of it here and I brought it recently because I’m going to use it in a necklace, and my model, Kathlene, said, “Oh, it looks just like you.” So here that’s from like eighth grade – ninth grade and I was already picking out things.

And the other neat thing that happened in Longmont – my mother was good friends with a woman named Kay Wells, who was living with her parents and her mother was showing me how to quilt and crochet and I was enjoying all of these hand things, but on the weekends Kay Wells, who had studied fashion at Parsons School of Design in New York – they were all from New Jersey – she and my mother and I would do metal enameling, so that was what we’d do on the weekends.

So looking back, I kind of grew up with it. And then also –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: When was it not there?

MS. SCHICK: It was always there. [Laughs.] And also about that time the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis came out with – I don’t know if it was a series of magazines or what, but my mother had one and it was devoted to contemporary jewelry [Design Quarterly, no. 33, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1955.]. Now, the jewelry that was shown in this was by Margaret De Patta, Harry Bertoia, and I’d have to find the – I still have that magazine today.

And I didn’t realize probably till I was in graduate school or teaching here the importance in the history of jewelry really of those magazines. And here I’d sort of been looking and studying what I thought then was this really different kind of jewelry, and my mother was making some out of wood and hammered copper wire and that sort of thing, way back as a teenager.

Well, then – well, to be honest salaries were pretty low in Colorado and my mother decided for her pension, she wanted to move back to Illinois, and she got this wonderful job then as Assistant Art Supervisor in Evanston, Illinois. And I was then in ninth grade, so we moved and I went and finished high school at Evanston [Evanston Township High School], which was the most incredible experience any young person could have. At that time in the ‘50s, because I graduated in ’59, it was considered one of the top 10 high schools in the country and all programs were wonderful and it was very much geared – and I always knew I’d go to college – it was very much geared to college prep. And there was a fantastic art department, right, with four teachers in it and the man who headed it was named Frank Tresise and loved fashion and so I took fashion design from him.

We worked on – my mom and I did a – helped me on a huge, big formal that I designed not to wear to a formal, but for the style show that we put on for class. And I couldn’t find a kind of lace I wanted, so we sat for hours cutting all the webbing out of lace for this dress. And then every Saturday I’d go to the Art Institute in Chicago and take classes that were there for high school kids, and through the summers, so here I was always sort of doing things in the summer that were pretty much art related.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So did you only take fashion and jewelry?

MS. SCHICK: I took – well, actually I had a jewelry class in high school, but I didn’t care much for it and it was mostly metal enameling, which I’d been doing as a teenager. And I don’t know, I wasn’t so excited about it, but I – I always thought from the time I was little and I would go to those Esther Williams movies and watch Marge and Gower Champion on screen and those gorgeous long ball gowns that I wanted to be a dress designer. So in high school I was – I knew I would be a teacher. I just knew I’d be a teacher, but dress designer had my heart and so some of the classes I took at the Art Institute for high school kids were fashion illustration and dress design and there was a wonderful dress design class where we were asked to go up into the galleries and take inspiration from something.

I remember doing one, you know, with big puffy sleeves. It has a name. It has a name [puffed sleeves with slashing].

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Is it the leg-o-mutton sleeves?

MS. SCHICK: Maybe, I’m not quite sure. Where they’re – it’s a puff and then it’s pulled in tight and a puff and slashing and that sort of thing.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: That’s not a leg-o-mutton. I don’t know the name for that one.

MS. SCHICK: Well, slashed was part of it, but so those were great and I can remember in the summers if I was going down and coming back by myself I would go down by myself, but then thinking, well, here I am in this great wonderful museum and I’d try to go into the galleries and learn the work of one artist each time. [This is what every high school student could dream of doing.]

But anyway, so I had good art history classes in high school and it was an incredible high school in itself and also the Art Department there, plus the augmentation of the classes at the Art Institute, so it was a rich thing and I had a variety of friends and one girl played cello with the Young Chicago Symphony, so she would go down to the Loop to do that on Saturdays. I’d go to my class at the Art Institute and then we’d meet up for lunch – [audio break, tape change] – and a style show at Fields – Marshall Fields. That was always fun. I always loved it most if she had to have one of her cellos repaired as I’d get to hold one on the subway going home and I’d think, everybody thinks that I’m a cellist. This is pretty neat. [Laughs.]

And then I had another friend who played classical lute and sometimes we would meet in the loop on Saturdays, and – for lunch and go home together, so it was a pretty exciting way of going to high school. And then I searched for what I thought would be the best art education department because I just knew I wasn’t going to be a fashion designer. I’d be an art teacher.

So the University of Wisconsin won and so I was four years at Wisconsin, but I should have worked harder. I had good people. I had good instruction, but I should have worked harder.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: This was in Madison, Wisconsin?

MS. SCHICK: This was at Madison, right. Four years there in Art Education. And what was great about that Art Education program is that it was part of the Art Department’s program and there was no sense of it being any different than the rest, so it was good, and I practice taught in a little town called Watertown and so – but the best part of going to Wisconsin was that I met Jim, who was studying art history – no, he wasn’t studying art history. He was studying – well, we did take art history together, so he did, but he was an historian – a history major and we took a few classes together – Shakespeare and I don’t remember what all. And so then – and he stayed for a Master’s there and then we were married when we finished our undergraduate time.

So I don’t know. Did I tell you enough about growing up?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: I think – oh, yeah, absolutely. It’s all important.

MS. SCHICK: I think –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: You’re rolling along.

MS. SCHICK: I think it did have a big influence on what I – I mean, even the sewing – learning to sew – in Colorado because I sew – I stitch pieces together today. I think all those things, obviously, helped make me who I am.

And the reason I kept mentioning the summer school is because I think all these years I’ve been fairly self-disciplined and I’m wondering how much, you know, not just playing in the summer, but being able to take those classes at the Chicago Art Institute or, you know, doing enameling with my mom and her friend on the weekends. I think that surely has had an influence on me today, my thinking, well, the weekends are for working and so are the summers, right?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Absolutely. Well, I’m also struck too with the way that you had your mother as this amazing role model. So many artists have – they describe a struggle that they have to go through when they become – in their adolescence, for example, when they decide they want to be an artist and they have so many messages coming from the parents or other members of their family saying, “Well, why do you want to do something foolish like become an artist?”

And you never had that. You always had amazing support and you had your mother as a very strong, independent woman showing you how to move ahead and become your own person as an artist. And that seems to me to be incredibly important as an effect – as an influence.

MS. SCHICK: It’s easy to take all that for granted, you know. And I obviously have all these years, but my mother being divorced, all of her friends were single women who were teachers, you know. Those were the ones that I would see. And I didn’t think about them as being role models, but obviously they were and my mother’s strength in doing all that she did – those step-by-step things – you know, to finish her degree and then get a Master’s and then – you know, each time stepping up in another job was truly remarkable and not easy. Not easy today and certainly not easy when she was doing it.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: No. And I’m thinking, too, just what the ‘50s were all about, which was for many, many women after the war years when women were going out into the workplace and they were very independent because there weren’t men around – the 50s were the time when women were going back to the home and they were becoming, you know, domestic goddesses in a sense with all of the perks of this now scientific kitchen and scientific home. You weren’t part of that. You sidestepped that very, very beautifully and didn’t have to buy into that and had a very different path laid for you by your mother.

Did you ever have contact with your father? I have to ask.

MS. SCHICK: Very little. Very little, and I guess in a way that probably was good because I didn’t have – and I think he probably did it partly on purpose, too, so that I wouldn’t be torn between the two parents. So when they were divorced, he stepped out of my life. Now, I saw him sometimes. I might be able to count on my 10 fingers the number of times I saw him in my life – maybe it might not even have been 10 – but he always sent me birthday and Christmas cards and often – always a gift I think, or sometimes a gift. And – or a check for $30 or something and so – and then he remarried and had two sons, whom I’ve met but I don’t know them, so we’ve stayed fairly separate, which I think was probably easier looking back so that I didn’t feel torn.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Yeah, and it certainly clarified who was the important person for you and made her much more of a central figure in your own development as an artist. What – and her medium was painting?

MS. SCHICK: As an artist, right. She has – she focused more on watercolor, but in first grade when I was – when she was at Charleston and she was [a sorority] housemother, I remember a wonderful pastel she did. I don’t have it now, but she called it a Candle Burning – candle – she’d say, this is my “Candle Burning at Both Ends.” [Laughs.] It was full of – oh, nonobjective shapes except for this one thing in the middle that had a flame on both ends, so I’m always thinking that I should do a piece that’s to her –a candle – obviously, she did burn a candle at both ends.

And do you know what my mother did? Evanston Township High School was a tough high school and I worked really hard and I’d stay up really late in high school studying hard, and my mother, with this big hard job – I mean, she would be going in and out of various classrooms presenting art, but also she would present workshops for teachers to teach them how to teach art, so she had – it was a huge job. And she’d say, “Now Marjorie Ann, when you’re finished with your paper that needs to be typed – I’m going to bed now, but you come wake me up.” So at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning I’d go tap on my mother’s shoulder. Can you believe that? And she’d get up and type my paper.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: That’s amazing.

MS. SCHICK: It’s incredible.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And that’s an amazing, supportive, figure in your life.

MS. SCHICK: That’s incredible. She was always supportive for what I wanted – and I mean like having me go down to – having me go down to the Chicago Art Institute. And also, often when I – I mean, it had to have been a big challenge for me to have moved from Longmont – a small high school – into Evanston, which was 4,000. And I wasn’t sure I liked it the first year, so I thought – I always wanted to wear a uniform, so we went to the girls’ Catholic school and we interviewed there because I thought this was what I wanted to do. I wanted to go there.

Well, it wouldn’t have worked and it was so good that I stayed where I was, but she would have supported me through that change if – you know, because she thought that’s what I wanted.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So you went to college at Madison – UW Madison – for art education.

MS. SCHICK: Uh-huh [affirmative].

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And what made you decide not to do a Master’s in art education, but rather to switch to jewelry?

MS. SCHICK: Ah, that’s a neat story because it’s always Jim, right? And he was going to apply for a Ph.D. program and we didn’t know where we would go, so my – his father was a professor of English at Purdue [Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana], so we knew that if we went to some school in Indiana, we could get in-state tuition, and we didn’t have much money, right? None really. So we applied to different schools and we applied to IU [Indiana University] and I remember the letter that I was written. It said – of acceptance – said, “Dear Marjorie, Your work is very ordinary, but we will accept you anyway.”

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: [Laughs.]

MS. SCHICK: I’m so lucky. But how did I apply for that was – well, Jim was going to go for this Ph.D. and I thought, well, I think I’ll go for an advanced degree too, so I wrote off also for applications and I was so dumb because on the application it asked you to put a check by whether you wanted an M.A, an M.S., or an M.F.A. And I didn’t know the difference, but M.F.A. had three letters in the alphabet. The others had only two, so I put a check by M.F.A.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: More is better.

MS. SCHICK: So then the next question was – I had to focus in one area. I didn’t know what I liked better than anything else. I had no clue because I was having – actually, at Wisconsin it was Don Reitz’s beginning career as a ceramist and a teacher. So I had Don Reitz for ceramics. Harvey Littleton was there, but he was just starting a glass program, so I didn’t take glass, but – and I always missed printmaking because it was always full. It was such a great printmaking school.

But I took jewelry, so – from a man named Arthur Vierthaler and I did very flat, very two-dimensional work and I was a bit timid I think. I think I was, looking back. But anyways, so back to this application. I thought maybe to put a checkmark by painting and I’d had [Santos] Zingale for painting and had really liked painting, but I didn’t know where to put the check. Sculpture? Painting? I had a man named [Leo] Steppat for sculpture. And I didn’t know what to do, so of course I asked Jim and he said, well, watching me he thought that I liked jewelry better than any of the other subjects. So I put my checkmark by jewelry.

Now, it happened that my roommate at Wisconsin my senior year had studied that last summer with Alma Eikerman, who taught one summer in Madison. And she showed me the jewelry she made, which I thought was unusual. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it. And the only other thing I knew, being very naïve, was that this was the woman who would leave the windows open, which were at ground level. The Jewelry Department was sort of half in and half out of the ground – would leave those windows open so the students could sneak in to work extra hours. That’s all I knew.

So anyway, I sent off my application and I got my letter back saying – and it wasn’t written by Ms. Eikerman. It was somebody else and she said, “Your work is very ordinary, but we’ll accept you anyway,” so I was happy and not happy, right? [Laughs.] Mostly I was happy.

So we went off to IU and that changed my life. I mean, I’d had a great life so far, hadn’t I? It was pretty focused. It was pretty direct.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And very rich.

MS. SCHICK: And rich in its way, yeah. But boy did it change then when I met Alma Eikerman. Jim always helps me with any writing I have to do for a publication and so he helped me write the obituary for her for American Craft and he started saying “quaking in my boots” and that’s how I was when I met her – quaking in my boots going into her studio to meet her for the first time and I misspelled her name and – you know, I’m sure I was greatly tongue-tied. I obviously felt her presence then, didn’t I?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What was she like?

MS. SCHICK: Oh, she’s – she was so remarkable and, you know, she taught us aesthetics and I think that’s my favorite part of everything, you know, figuring out how to put colors and shapes and lines together – or textures. And somehow – and that’s the hardest thing probably of all to teach. She somehow taught us aesthetics by making us really look at things. And for Monday night seminars, which lasted three hours, she would critique our drawings and our drawings were never of jewelry pieces, but we were doing drawings that we would have studied – Max Beckmann or Bonnard or Rembrandt or Vincent Van Gogh and we had to do tracings of these. Sometimes three hours it would take me to do a tracing. We were all in the studio Sunday night doing our drawings for Monday night’s seminar.

And she would talk about these drawings for three hours. I cannot imagine today having that ability. She was so incredible – so tuned into aesthetics in everything – everything she did. And she designed her own home, wore these amazing clothes, collected books, collected art. She was a true inspiration in every single way.

She taught us technique and we had – I’d never hammered metal in my life and so – and I had soldered, but always with a different kind of flux, so everything was new to me and I think in the beginning I just did mistake after mistake, but she put up with me.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Well, and obviously you moved forward.

MS. SCHICK: – put up with me. What happened was it was all so new and I hadn’t cooked much before, so here I was just newly married and it might take me three hours to do supper and the dishes and I was so slow. But I started going up to the studio every night and then she was – I was trying my best. I’m not sure I knew what I was doing, but I was sure trying my best to understand this three-dimensional approach. And then she was gone my second semester there. She was on sabbatical. And I also had a teaching assistantship, which was wonderful to have.

So the woman, Terri Illes, a weaver, who was in charge of us who were doing our teaching, had written her – had written to Alma because she was out traveling in New York a couple of times, and I think she’d said some good things about me, so when Miss Eikerman came back, she was ready to see my pieces and she was all fresh from her sabbatical and that was the beginning of it.

And what it did for me – it helped me get a grounding while she was gone on all these things that I’d been learning the first semester that were all brand new – like I just had never thought about jewelry as being a three-dimensional form. I never thought about all these things. So that gave me a chance to begin to then put into practice some of these things that I’d learned and I guess it was the perfect way. Right?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: When did you have your David Smith experience?

MS. SCHICK: At the end. At the end of – and I was lucky. We stayed in Bloomington three years and I’m sure I took three summer schools – [Laughs] – even after I’d finished and it was a fabulous – an incredible time and I don’t think I – if I had studied with anyone else it would ever have worked. Jim says that somehow she unlocked what was – whatever it is that’s come out over these years – that she was able to tap into that. He says that she unlocked it and let me go.

And – but she taught us even more than aesthetics because we each had a bench to sit at and a small top drawer over here like those have. And we had to keep an hourly calendar in there and we had to write down when we would come into the studio and when we would leave and if you had 30 minutes between a class you were enrolled in and one you were teaching and you were in the studio, you wrote that down.

And she would come around anytime she wanted and open that and count up and see if you were spending enough hours in the studio. If you weren’t, you heard about it through a friend – through another jewelry student and you’d know you better get your tail in there and get to working. And the other thing – Jim and I had started this routine where he would pick me up at the studio at school like at midnight. I think – it might have been midnight every night or it might have been 10:30 or 11:00 or whatever. But after 10:00, when we would leave the building at IU, we had to sign out with the night guard.

So Miss Eikerman loved music. I mean, she – she probably could have had a degree, or maybe she did have even a degree in music – big, huge interest in music, so she would go to concerts sometimes and come in after the concert in these incredible clothes and spike heels and all of this. We knew that when she would leave – she’d come in to chat – probably she was checking up to see who was there working, but she – and the – where the concert had been was the building next door, so she came in to be pleasant and we were her family, right? But we knew when she would leave the building she was going to check to see how late we’d all been staying.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So she really expected a huge amount of commitment from all of her students.

MS. SCHICK: Oh, yes. And that idea that she expected it made us grow. And I mean – and I think now, wasn’t I lucky in so many respects, and one of them was that she demanded this huge, as you say, commitment of time and thought and work from us. And she required a lot of work – I mean, a lot of pieces. And she’d say, “Well, you arrive at quality through quantity.” And she was full of exciting stories of her experiences. She had all kinds of travels and she’d worked as – for the Red Cross during World War II, and she had all these amazing stories. This gorgeous home. It was always such a treat to go. And she’d designed it and had it built, and at a time when I think the contractors didn’t want to listen to a woman telling them how she wanted it.

So I – yeah, I wanted to be like Miss Eikerman, right? Well, I can’t be, but she’s my mentor. She changed my life. We didn’t have a phone at first when we were first married, and then we got one because we just – we needed one, and so Jim would pick me up at midnight or whatever and then I had to walk around to the far side of our bed. We had a little two room apartment and shared the bath with a couple across the hall in this old house. And I had to walk by the dresser where the phone was – or I guess maybe he went that way. I guess he went that way. And the phone wouldn’t have rung, but he’d pick it up and he’d say, “Yes, Miss Eikerman. You’d be proud. She put in a good day – or a good night.” And so even when we moved here to Pittsburg he’d pick up the phone occasionally – it wouldn’t have rung – and he’d say, “Well, Miss Eikerman, she’s doing our – you’d be pleased.” Or if she did call, because she kept in contact, he’d say, “Marj, you passed the test last night because Alma called and you were at school working.” [Laughs.]

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So she haunts your life.

MS. SCHICK: It’s fabulous. Isn’t it the best?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: That’s wonderful.

MS. SCHICK: It’s so – yeah. Yeah. And you know, I did a piece after she died that’s a tribute to her and it’s these bumpy things [individual curved shapes] that are all bound together on a big spiral [symbolically bound by her energy] and then it all changes colors and I figured out how all these colors like the yellow in it because she loved yellow roses better than any other flowers, et cetera, et cetera. So – but what she did – she for years, would write these huge, long newsletters to all of her past students who were out in the field working. So although I had not met Lin Stanionis, for instance, for a long time, I knew exactly where Lin was, what she was doing, if she’d received any grants, et cetera, because Eikerman would fill this letter.

It would have information about what her travels had been and what she’d been doing, but then page after page would be about all the things that her past students had done. And she kept us together. We were – we’re a family. I go off to SNAG [Society of North American Goldsmiths] now and I think, how many people would I really know if I didn’t have this group of friends who were all Eikerman students even if we weren’t there at the same time? So again I took all those letters for granted and I’ve got most of them.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: That’s great to have that.

MS. SCHICK: Oh, I’ve got all her letters. But finally one day, Jim said to me, “Well, do you see me getting letters from my professor at IU?” “Huh-uh.” [Meaning no.] “And do I send out letters like that today?” “Huh-uh.” [Meaning no.] That was so – and she’d do this once or twice a year and they’d be both sides of the paper, you know, like page – pages of it.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So she really created and helped sustain a community that exists even today.

MS. SCHICK: Oh, yes. We are still – yeah – a part of that group – that family. We were her family, yeah.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: She was unmarried?

MS. SCHICK: Not married, right. And so I think that’s why she enjoyed coming in to see us after a concert. And of course she was working in the studio too and so we knew that we’d better – we had to be there Saturday mornings working because we knew she was upstairs on the third floor or fourth floor in her studio at work. We knew that.

So she was setting a beautiful example. She lived it. It was a total thing. It was not 9:00 to 5:00. It was a total, absolute commitment even in the choices she made for flatware, for – she wore her own jewelry mostly, but the choices she made. Like I didn’t know about Marimekko fabric and then she would wear these beautiful dresses made of Marimekko and so ever since I have just – I have collected and absolutely love Marimekko, but it goes back to Eikerman. I am who I am a great deal because of Eikerman, a huge amount because of Jim, who has guided me and supported me and given me so many ideas, helped write things, helped keep me on track. Yeah, and my mom. Yeah, I’ve had good support, haven’t I?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: You have. But what is it that – because you were a jewelry major. You were working in metals with Eikerman. What is it that made you turn after graduate school to papier-mâché, to wood, to all of these alternative materials that really helped you make your name as an independent person?

MS. SCHICK: Well, I think I was already at the end of graduate school. In the beginning of the graduate program – it’s funny because I used iron in my pieces – iron wire as part of the piece, and at that point, I didn’t realize how important – what an importance iron had played in the history of jewelry already, you know. I wasn’t the first one to do this, but I didn’t know that history and so iron wire is how – what we would use to bind our pieces together when we soldered, but I started using it as part of the material of the piece.

So there was a hint of that already in my metalwork and there was another hint of it because there was a – must have been a junkyard in Bloomington where I could get some metal and I had bought a piece of brass screen wire and I scrunched it all and reshaped it and it became a brooch – was – and then I put these little iron wires coming out from it and that was the first time I’d pushed wires out into space. And it’s very small, but it’s – I think – one of the most important signals of what I was going to do in the future.

And then at the end of graduate school I started playing with some other, maybe beads, and I hate to admit that. I don’t – I didn’t go anywhere with that, thank goodness, but this class we would teach as graduate students called Crafts Design, Budd Stalnaker was teaching that, and he was new there and teaching. He’s a weaver. And he came to me one day and he gave me one and he said, “I’m having my students make bracelets of papier-mâché.” And I think he had them start with a piece of tag board or that sort of thing and put plaster on it and then wrap it with papier-mâché. So he gave me this bracelet and it was painted all in a solid color and I didn’t think much about it.

And then we visited friends that I’d had at – we’d had at IU who were then in Iowa [Judy and Gary Springer] and she said, “Oh, let me show you. I’m making these papier-mâché things and I’m coating them with thread.” So all that long drive back from Davenport, Iowa, back to Lawrence – because we taught our first year out of school in Lawrence [the University of Kansas] – I was thinking about Judy’s papier-mâché and I don’t think I’d ever done papier-mâché but I watched my mother do this enormous thing for her Art Education class out in Greeley [Colorado State University] come to think of it, but I hadn’t done it. Well, maybe a little in grade school, but not much.

So when we got back, we had money for the – a little money for the first time having just gotten out of school and our first jobs, and there was this wonderful dress shop in Lawrence and the window was so neat. And I had this new dress with a – it’s beige with a very large tiger print in black on it. I still have it. I’m going to use it on a necklace. And so my first papier-mâché pieces were these enormous earrings that had a tiger print on them. And I sort of made up how to do it. I didn’t really know.

And the other thing about teaching in Lawrence that year – I taught with Carlyle Smith who is absolutely wonderful, and in fact he lives in Pittsburg, Kansas now. And anyway, I looked into a student’s toolbox and she had a little medicine vial – a plastic one – that was painted purple – this lavender color – and I said, “What is that?” And she said, “Oh, it’s acrylic paint and I put inside this medicine bottle.” I said, “Oh.” I didn’t know about acrylic paint, so I marched straight to the KU [University of Kansas] bookstore and they had a little starter set. I bought six colors or whatever came in it and then I was on my way, wasn’t I?

So I did the earrings and then I thought, oh, well, obviously I’m not an earring kind of maker. I’ve done some, but I – not a lot. And so I – somehow the idea of bracelets appealed to me. And in the beginning in our little flat there in Lawrence I would design how I would paint on them by cutting colored paper out – solid shapes – and I’d lay those shapes over my forms, but I kind of made up how I was going to do it.

And then when I came to Pittsburg, the man who taught sculpture here [Robert Blunk] suggested that I use Elmer’s glue, so for a long time I didn’t use any more wheat paste, but when we – when I first started the papier-mâché at the end of that year in Lawrence, Jim was going to do research in New York so we drove and we drove through Bloomington to see Miss Eikerman and I had made six papier-mâché bracelets. And I thought, oh, you know, she’s a metals person. She’s not going to like these, but I’ll show them to her anyway because when we would make trips back to IU I would always take her my new work.

So she loved them and she said to me, “You’ve got to take these to Paul Smith at the American Craft Museum.” I said, “You’re kidding. How do I even carry them?” And she said, “Well, get a nice nifty basket,” because she had such style – oh, such style. So I don’t know if I carried them in a paper bag or what, so when we – and she also said, “Not only will you go to the Museum of American – of Contemporary Crafts [now called the Museum of Arts & Design, New York, New York], but you will also go to the Museum of Modern Art” – I’m 25 years old – because they had just done a jewelry show and the curator’s name was Renée Neu [Renée Sabatello Neu, Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions, Museum of Modern Art, New York, directed the exhibition “Jewelry by Contemporary Painters and Sculptors.”] and she had put together a catalog and they had like a David Smith medal in it and a Louise Nevelson piece and they were all by sculptors and painters, so I cannot imagine doing it today, and I had less nerve when I was 25, but Miss Eikerman told me to do it, so I did it.

So I went probably first to the American Craft Museum and made my appointment and I was – you know, Paul Smith was there on that side of the desk and I was on this side and I pulled out my bracelets and he immediately took some of them in his hands and he was out of the room, and I thought, “Oh, my God. What have I done? Is this – you know, what have I done?” And he came back in and he said, “This is just great because we’re planning this huge show called ‘Made with Paper’” and he said, I want – I think he chose two and what was great – and so I must thank Paul Smith – he said, “Keep me informed of what you’re doing.” So on the rest of that trip Jim was doing research then in North Carolina or Virginia, I’m not sure – we went to the hardware store and I bought these big snips and more screen wire and wheat paste and I’d sit in the motel room doing papier-mâché – that was the start of it – while he was doing research in the libraries.

And I also – back to New York – I did make an appointment with Renée Neu at the Museum of Modern Art – can’t believe I did that. And she was very polite and very nice about the work, but of course she couldn’t take it or use it. And I was – I don’t know if I showed the paper pieces, but I went to Betty Parsons [Gallery, New York, NY] and I went to the American Federation of Artists – I’m not sure – and they were – he seemed really intrigued with the work and all he could say was, “You live in Kansas and you make this?” So then we were teaching and we made a trip or two back to New York in those early years and on my own I went to – oh, we bought a Lichtenstein print. We went to Leo Castelli [Gallery, New York, NY]. Can you believe I did that?

Well, I took him my papier-mâché and I – at that time the sculptor here was doing fiberglass, so I had coated one of my papier-mâché pieces with fiberglass and it was very rough and I remember – I think it was Castelli – saying, “Well, this surface was much too rough.” And he was exactly right, and of course he didn’t take the work, but I don’t regret that I did those things. Yeah.

[Audio break.]

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: This is Tacey Ann Rosolowski. I’m interviewing Marjorie Schick at her studio at Pittsburg State University, Kansas, that’s located in Pittsburg, Kansas. Today’s date is April 4th, 2004. I’m doing this interview for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. This is disc number two.

Marjorie, we’ve been talking about how you moved from metals to discovering a love of papier-mâché and working with more, quote, “alternative materials,” which were very new on the scene in the 1960s and ‘70s. And I was wondering how these new kinds of materials allow you to express yourself differently. What did they offer you as an artist?

MS. SCHICK: Well, I for years – until the ‘80s – thought that my important work was my metalwork and I continued all through the ‘80s – the ‘70s up until the early ‘80s to do metalworking, but the other side of me absolutely fell in love with papier-mâché, so whenever we’d hang a faculty show, I’d say to – I was the only woman in the department, so I’d say to the men, well now here – this is my important work right here, which would be the showcases filled with the metal pieces, and I’d – and then they’d say, “Well, how about this over here, Marjorie?” Which would be my papier-mâché and I’d say, “Well, I do that just because I have to do that.”

So it took me a lot of years until I was well into the stick – Dowel-Stick pieces in the ‘80s to realize that my serious work had been both of those. Now, in a slide lecture I give I think I can show a relationship in the forms between what I was doing in metalworking and what I was doing in non-metal. And then I have to go back to Jim helping me again because when we came to Pittsburg and it was so great that Paul Smith had said, “Keep me informed of what you’re doing,” so I started doing these big things that would go from your shoulders down to your hips and I sent him maybe just one letter that might have had sketches of this kind of work in it – that I was doing in papier-mâché – and I was always working with planes.

So anyway, I think it was a good thing that Paul Smith had asked me to keep him informed because I obviously had this urge to do larger things than just bracelets, and I felt that his show was going to be a good place for those. They chose just the bracelets, but that’s all right. I started the others anyway.

So what happened is that with the papier-mâché I could make really large forms and not have the weight of metal, so the weight became a factor. And I discovered also that I just loved building a form to receive paint. It’s really important to me to be able to paint that surface. Now there were – I started to mention Jim because in the beginning, all of my papier-mâché things had to do with planes, and I was building them over chicken wire and screen wire and that kind of thing, so I was having curved and also straight planes, but Jim said, “Well, why don’t you look back at your metalwork and in your metalworking.” Right at that point not only was I doing things with planes, but I was doing things with wires, so he said, “Can you do linear? Why can’t you do linear papier-mâché?”

So I said, “I guess I can.” So I went to the Salvation Army and I bought old coat-hangers and I brought them back up to the studio and being a – trained as a metalsmith, I cut them and I hammered them all straight on the anvil and then I used that as the material, and I would silver solder these rods together. It took me several years of approaching it that way before a student clued me in and said, “Why don’t you go to the welding store and buy welding rods Mrs. Schick?”

But anyway, so I started in that way, and then I would wrap the coat-hangers with papier-mâché and I fell in love with working that way. I did a number of linear things and I called them “drawings-to-wear.” I would call them “three-dimensional drawings-to-wear” because, you know, you think of lines as being on a piece of paper, but mine were suddenly surrounding your shoulders or “The Cage” surrounding a larger part of your body, so I simply had a great time in expanding my vocabulary of papier-mâché to do linear pieces as well as the others.

And it was those linear pieces that I say – because I was striping them with paint – became a precursor of what I did in Dowel-Sticks 10 years later.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And describe that look. How did that – how did you move into that?

MS. SCHICK: Oh, well, I did papier-mâché and metalwork all through the ‘70s and about mid-‘70s I did a shoulder-to-floor body piece – it took me a year – of scrunched newspaper – my Tubes piece. And it came out on a metal armature and we used it for dance performances, so unfortunately it died, but it was – it was a huge piece and after maybe ’75 or so I just grew tired of papier-mâché, so I had – I started – I had this 40-ply cardboard and I did a necklace of trapezoidal kinds of shapes and dowels. Maybe that was one of my first uses of dowels.

And then I did a series of bracelets, and I gave one to Ms. Eikerman, of the cardboard drilled with the dowels holding it – them apart. I did a necktie. I did a series of men’s neckties for fun and moved into painted cardboard and dowels.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Now weren’t those – some of those pieces were used in some really interesting exhibitions that – in which a choreographer collaborated with you?

MS. SCHICK: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Why don’t you talk about that? That was at a pretty exciting time.

MS. SCHICK: It was very exciting because a woman named Mary Ann Bransby, who taught jewelry at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, and her husband taught drawing, contacted me [1976], and they – I don’t know, maybe we already knew each other, but she asked how I would like to loan my pieces to a group of dancers from UMKC – modern dance students – who would perform with our pieces, so that sounded great. And what she was interested in was both the papier-mâché objects and the large metal pieces like my Blue Eyes piece and Pectoral and I had a belt that unfortunately has gotten lost, that was a great noisemaker, and they just did great. And the Slats piece – I did one that was dress length before the performance started, but when the dancers performed with these things it was so exciting; like the dancer who did the slats piece would – the slats would stand up almost by itself and she would hunker down on the floor inside the slats and then she would rise up through the piece and then she would hit the slats together to make – let it – the piece make the sound.

They did improvisational kinds of performances and The Tubes – it took me a year to make that tubes piece, but I never ever had visualized what would happen if you put it on and moved other than for me to walk up the hall to have Jim take a slide of me wearing it. So one of the dancers was a guy – a fellow – and he put The Tubes on and he started to spin with it. Well, it was so remarkable. I’d never seen it in motion like that, so, you know, I’ve also had to teach weaving here and I got interested, once the performance was started, I think – I don’t know – remember the dates any longer, but I did – we used my paper – my older papier-mâché pieces, but I also did some woven body pieces made of string – just ordinary string.

And we have a school supplies store in town and I must have absolutely fallen in love with a mop that was for sale. All these great – well, because I was doing linear work – had done linear work for years then – these incredibly crazy lines of this mop that were a little bit stiff. It had never been used, so it was not limp, the way it would be in water. So I took – I bought two of those and took them apart and then I liked doing Rya knotting on the floor looms so I would string up a floor loom with string and did these body pieces.

And I did another – a third one of foam rubber at that point, thinking about how the dancers moved so that this is string – woven string – with foam rubber around the shoulders that I cut on the bandsaw and dyed and so when the dancers would move, this foam rubber would bounce up and down.

Eventually I did another big piece, I’ve not looked at to know the condition of it after all these years, with a lot of foam rubber down to your knees and cords of all kinds.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: How did – oh, excuse me.

MS. SCHICK: No.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: I was going to ask, how did the experience of seeing the dancers move in the pieces influence your thinking about other work you were doing at the time and later?

MS. SCHICK: What intrigued me, was that at first I didn’t know if I liked it, but they would put a bracelet on it – on their toe. As long as it didn’t hurt it, it was all right with me that they did that. And they were beginning to show me that they were interpreting the work in new ways. But the first dance instructor who came with them was an older woman. Her name was Winifred Weidner and she had been a friend of [Isamu] Noguchi’s sister – the sculptor. And she was very savvy – very tuned in. And she would say to these young dancers, “Now, really look hard at that piece and make your movements and your body echo the shapes that you see in the piece.” So I found that just truly exciting to see what they would do – how they would interpret the work.

Now, how it affected the work I did. Other than the string pieces, I’m not so sure that – unfortunately I’m not sure that it really made me go off other than just in a few pieces, and what I liked about the string pieces, which is something nobody else would have noticed but me, but as the dancers would twirl and spin with these string pieces on, they were – the lint that was coming off the strings was filling up the space of the room – of the floor where they were performing and I thought, oh, is that crazy? I loved how that happened. So the piece would swing out and fill up the space, but then so would this lint that I could see in the bright spotlights, also was coming off.

Also, my tubes piece – sometimes the tubes would fly off, so then I’d think, oh, no. I’d have to go home and repair that piece. Those weren’t meant to fly off, although in reality it was not so bad to see these – you know, it was kind of exciting to see these things fly off.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: They’re filling negative space in a whole new way.

MS. SCHICK: Yeah.

[Audio break, tape change.]

So that was quite exciting. We took it on the road. They did it here; of course we did it at the Kansas City Art Institute. We did it in a wonderful little school outside of St. Louis – Lindinberg – Lindbergh College, or Lindberg [the Lindenwood Colleges, St. Charles, Missouri]? I can’t remember exactly – and we did it at the Bronx Museum [of the Arts] in New York [in 1978] when the College Art Association meeting was meeting New York. That was really not so easy, but it was exciting to do it and Joan Mondale was there, I remember, so you can sort of get the time period of that.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Right. And wasn’t there at least one of these exhibitions that was really a stylized experience for the visitor because –

MS. SCHICK: Oh, yes. What we would do – and this was Mary Ann’s idea, not mine, and it was a beautiful idea – she said what we would do is we would go in and we would hang all of our work for a show because there would be one dance performance and the exhibition might be up for several weeks, but then sometimes the performance would be in the same room, sometimes not, but if – you know, we would take the pieces down just before the performance, so the performers would do their thing with them and then in the background we were all busily trying to hang them back up so that when the performance was finished, the exhibition was then hung again.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So it was really installation as part – as performance?

MS. SCHICK: It was great.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Performance as installation.

MS. SCHICK: It was great.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Yeah, which is exciting.

MS. SCHICK: I guess we also did it north of Kansas City [at the Albrecht Gallery, St. Joseph, Missouri]. I’d have to think of the town, but we – it was wonderful.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Well, I’m struck, too, about how you were talking earlier about how for the wearer it’s so important to put on the piece, to feel the physical challenges of a piece against the body, against the skin. And for the visitors of this particular exhibition, they didn’t actually put on the pieces, but they were able to witness someone else wearing – wearing the pieces, perform them, and then take the sculpture off, put it on the wall. Then they had that memory – at least vicariously – of what it meant to be on a body.

MS. SCHICK: They could really take away from that experience a greater understanding of the work, because today I often put a photo of it on a model or a mannequin next to the object in the exhibition, but to have seen those pieces actually performed with and in motion – they weren’t designed for that except maybe the string ones might have been. I’d have to check dates, but it was a thrill for me to see them used in that way. Yeah. So they performed with her [Mary Ann’s] pieces and with mine and it was a great experience. It was very exciting – a lot of work, but very, very exciting.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And so the – we were talking a little bit earlier about how you moved from that body of work to your “drawings-to-wear.”

MS. SCHICK: Okay.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And I’m just wondering how that transition occurred.

MS. SCHICK: Well, at the end of the ‘70s I think I really floundered, or I was experimenting because I grew tired of doing papier-mâché. I was doing these woven pieces on the loom. For a while I even thought I’d be a crocheter and I was – I crocheted – I threw it away unfortunately and I think it was really kind of neat – a huge mask, but I didn’t like the look of the stitches, so crocheting was not going to be for me.

And I audited a ceramics class here at PSU and I did a whole series of ceramic jewelry pieces that only a few people have seen and they’re not bad. I combined metal with some of them and there was a huge one I did that lays on your shoulders like a big, broad collar that was all clay, all tied together. And I also audited or took – no, I enrolled in and took a plastics class here because we have a plastics area in technology [the School of Technology], and plastics was not for me, but I did a whole series of plastic jewelry pieces, and at that time I fell in love with white paper.

And you know, I mentioned I’ve not had any printmaking classes. And I don’t remember just what inspired me to do it, but I did – for instance, I did some cut-out flat bracelets – armlets – big ones. I did a pair of brass ones. I did a pair of sterling ones. And then I took that up to the printmaking studio and I ran them through the printing press, so they embossed the paper. [After the embossings were completed, I then hammered the flat metal shapes into three-dimensional armlets.]

Well, I fell in love with this thick, white paper and I started piercing it and I did what I called drawings of – with pierced holes – I pierce from the back into something soft like felt and then I started looking in antique stores and all around for thread that would come off the spool and in different ways. Sometimes it was wire that had been put around a piece of cardboard so that it would come off at an angle thing. So I did all – a series of large drawings. I used the full-size sheet of paper and – but in the lower half would be this set of dots and then there are all these threads that come out.

Well, I was doing the thread drawings and then I think a year or so later I’m still doing metal pieces and I told myself I would never do non-metal again. I was straight for metal. This was about ’80 or ’81. And then I thought, hmm, is there a way to make thread and paper jewelry, which of course there was. And I had this idea to use dowel sticks. And there was a man in a community not far from here called Coffeyville and he asked me to show twice [at Coffeyville Community College], and one – the second time I wanted all new work and he had no showcases, so I thought, well, I can do these new paper and thread pieces and mount them on the wall and I can do dowel stick ones and I mounted them on the wall for him. So he had a small show.

And at that same time I saw and had an entry form for a show in London called “Jewelry Redefined” [“Jewelry Redefined: First International Exhibition of Multi-Media Non-Precious Jewellery” at the British Crafts Centre] and it was for alternative materials. So I went ahead and entered the show. It was so exciting because I sent off three paper and wire pieces actually – colored wire from Radio Shack – and three Dowel-Stick pieces and of course it takes a long time. It was an international show and it was in London and they fit in a pretty small box for me. Those are small things. And I – that summer Jim called me at school and he said, “Did you order anything from Europe? Somewhere – Amsterdam?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, you’ve got a packet,” so he – I said, “Bring it to school,” and our vice president, who is a friend from many years, had looked out his window and later he said, “Boy, why was Marj pacing up and down the street?”

So I was – couldn’t wait to find out what this was and it was a letter from Paul Derrez, owner of Galerie RA, in Amsterdam, and he was one of the judges for the “Jewelry Redefined” show, which hadn’t yet opened, and he said he was interested in my work and he’d like to see more. Well, my God, I didn’t have any more. He was looking at three paper brooches, three Dowel-Stick, and I’d only done six of each I think. And I – it just looked too good. I thought I can’t write him back and say, “You’ve seen it all.” And so I wrote back and said, well, “I was so excited that he was interested in the work, but I had no slides right now and would he wait – if he could please wait until mid-summer I would send him slides.”

So I worked like a dog. I did my first dowel necklace and some other brooches and I sent off slides of them and he wanted them in his gallery. I was just – I couldn’t believe it. Plus, of course, I got in the show and we were – we had a sabbatical leave coming up and so I also had just won $500 on a metal piece that’s in the Kohler Collection up in Wisconsin called Art of the Bath [at the Craft Alliance Gallery, St. Louis], and I had $500 in my pocket, so I thought should I go to London for the opening of the “Jewelry Redefined” or not? So last minute I decided I’d go, so that meant that I could meet Paul Derrez, I could be there for the opening, and I was so thrilled because Lloyd Herman [Director of the Renwick Gallery] was giving a lecture from the Renwick [Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.] in London for this and – oh, there were all kinds of lectures. I was in seventh heaven.

I found – l looked around for flats for us to live in because this was in the fall and we were going to be in London on sabbatical in the spring coming in January – starting in January. So it was pretty wonderful.

So here I had pieces then in the gallery in Amsterdam and also before the show ever opened I had gotten a letter from Sharon Plant, who owned Aspects Gallery in London, and she said she also was interested in my work, and you’d think I was receiving these letters every day. I wrote back and I said, “Well, tell me about your gallery.” I can’t believe I did it, but I did. So she sent me – she’d just been in a – in a British crafts magazine, so I sent work. And actually, when I went to “Jewelry Redefined” then, I had built some big pieces and took this enormous box that just barely fit in the back of a black cab, but I got it from Joplin, Missouri, to London, delivered my pieces, and we had this great sabbatical and I enrolled as a metals student – to study metalworking. That was ’83 in London at the Sir John Cass.

And I had also just won an award in a show on my paper pieces in Japan [International Jewellery Art Exhibition, Isetan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Fine Works Award], so things were – I mean, my life was changing. The Japan show was interesting because Americans were going to pool together and send their work abroad to Japan for the show and I thought, okay, but what happened was they had such a high insurance rate on their pieces because they had gold and precious stones and mine was paper and silver – paper and bronze. I think they were brazing rods. I’m not sure. Paper and silver I guess. And I thought, “Oh, I could send them for practically no money at all.” And we were going to have to pay shipping back and I said to Jim, you know, I think what I’ll do is I’ll send them myself and then I’ll tell them to just throw those pieces away rather than return them to me. And he – because I thought I could make more, and he said, “You won’t do that. That makes them think that they’ve put worthless work in their show.” So of course he was right. So I did it the proper way and I won an award on one of those.

So things were great. So we had our great time in London and I was studying metalsmithing. That was what I thought I should be doing was metalsmithing. So our term ended in March or so and Jim planned this wonderful trip for us going – starting in Amsterdam because we hadn’t been there to see the gallery and then going on to – I don’t remember – Rome and maybe Greece then. I don’t remember all the trip – where all we went. But we got to Amsterdam and we found the gallery [Galerie RA] and it had this sign on it – but Jim reads German and so he could make out the Dutch that it said something about having moved and it gave that very day’s date.

We went, we found the new gallery, and he [Paul Derrez] was having this enormous international party that evening for all these jewelers.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: What luck.

MS. SCHICK: Can you believe it? And he had sent me an invitation, but it was in our box here in Pittsburg and we were in London, so I had not known about it. So I met Paul and went to this party. I was so intimidated, but all these jewelers were there – mostly Dutch jewelers, but some others too – and I just couldn’t believe what was happening. So then I guess that afternoon when I’d met him he very politely said – and this was just before Easter – he said, “Well, on Monday” – the day following Easter – he said, “Why don’t you come to the gallery and I’d like to talk about your work with you.”

So of course I’m thinking he’s going to critique it and tell me how terrible it is, so we go – our son is with us and we go to the gallery on Monday and Paul said that he had a show that fell through in June. Now, this is March isn’t it? March or April. And we still were going – we still were traveling in Europe until May 10th and so he said would I like to have that show date for a solo show?

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: A solo show.

MS. SCHICK: And I said, “Yes,” and I always will remember that we stood and we all drank a little, wonderful glass of sherry to my show and I looked at Paul and I thought, I think he looks a little uneasy. [Laughs.] And he might not have, but who knows? He might have, you know. So I did this show for him and what happened was I started doing some paper pieces on the trip. I couldn’t do dowels while we were traveling. We came home. I worked like a dog. We even went to California and visited Jim’s parents. I set up a card table out there and painted like crazy, came home, and finished up and my mom went with me. We flew back for my opening in Amsterdam in June.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: How exciting. So what was that opening like?

MS. SCHICK: Oh, it was wonderful. It was an afternoon opening and I met some wonderful people with whom I’ve stayed friends all these years. Suzanne Esser – I think she had my – came and picked up my mother and me and took us to her home for a beer or a cocktail or something and Eleonoor van Beusekom, and of course Paul. I don’t know. I can’t remember all – well, the other person who came to my opening, but I think he just happened to be there, was Giampaolo Babetto from Italy.

But no, I don’t remember who else I met. Since then, I believe Charon Kransen said that he was – he met me at my opening, but of course I wouldn’t have remembered. I was in this kind of a daze and every name was a foreign name and new to me, so – and I’m not good at names, so that was wonderful, wasn’t it?

So that was validating these Dowel-Stick pieces and I had changed my mind about sticking straight with metal, but my last metal pieces had resembled a bit the dowel pieces, so – and Paul had shipped or he had carried them from London – the big necklaces I had taken over in the fall. So I had a show.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: You had a show. And so was it at this point – did you begin to think, ah, I think this material – working in wood, working in papier-mâché – is the way we ought to be doing?

MS. SCHICK: I wasn’t doing any papier-mâché. I had stopped that at the end of the ‘70s when I said I was floundering, and I had done ceramic jewelry and that was how I got to the paper and thread pieces. I would do these wrapped Venetian blind and clothesline – cloth clothesline neck forms to hold the ceramic parts and all these embroidery thread ends I would cut off. I loved what I threw away. So that was what inspired me to do the paper pieces and I did paper pieces for a while but I felt maybe Paul had said – and I think it was right – how could one person do these really subtle white paper and thread pieces and turn around and do the real brightly colored sticks? And so finally, I think one person can do it all, and I did do it all, but finally I dropped the sticks – I mean, pardon me, dropped the paper and retained the sticks.

And actually, I fell in love with creating linear forms with dowels and everybody would start to mention my necklaces, so pretty soon I was just doing predominantly neck forms – not entirely.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Now you worked with the stick forms for quite a long period of time.

MS. SCHICK: from the early ‘80s – probably about ’80 – probably I did my first ones in ’81 and I – about ’86, it was wonderful. I was getting in European shows. Everybody seemed to love them and I thought for all those years preceding that my pieces had been so often rejected from shows and I thought, I think there’s something wrong here. This can’t be. There’s something wrong that everybody likes this work, so maybe it’s becoming not enough on the edge. Maybe it – I want my work to have a vitality to it – to – an intensity. I want it to be exciting. If it’s on the edge, it makes you uneasy. That’s good. And I thought maybe it doesn’t have that any more.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: People were getting used to the forms.

MS. SCHICK: And also I felt that I’d had at that point said about all I wanted to say with sticks in that manner, so I started first with introducing into the stick pieces – of a folding body piece for instance – big planes of shapes; semicircles and such. And I was cutting those out of masonite, but I hated masonite. It was so dusty and all. So I could find at that point quarter-inch plywood in town and I thought it was such a thrill to be a jeweler and to go to the hardware store – hardware – yeah – no – a lumberyard and buy my material in four-by-eight foot sheets. I thought that was fabulous.

And by then we had a station wagon, which we always have to have I always say because we have to have a big car so that I can get my necklaces to UPS to ship. So then I didn’t know how to work with plywood and even dowels. They’re all riveted together because that’s a metals technique, so when I turned to plywood I had so many nails and dowels in my pieces to keep them together and the man who teaches – taught sculpture [Robert Blunk] here showed me and proved to me that wood glue was even stronger than the nails were, so I guess I sort of felt my way through the wood pieces – how to make them and –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: It comes up again and again that you experiment with a technique or experiment with a material and then explore that for a while and then move on to something else. And would you say that there’s an element of play in that for you?

MS. SCHICK: Oh, I hope that people see an element of play. In one lecture I used to give I’d refer to a quotation by Giacometti that he made about Alexander Calder and he said, “What do young animals do? They play.” And he said, “What’s this wonderful element in Calder’s work?” He said, “It’s that element of serious play that makes it what it is.” So I don’t want people to think that my work is a fluff or just frivolous or that it’s only that I’m having a good time, because the work is – has been a challenge for me and I – it’s more – it’s not just fun. But if you see an element of play – serious play about it, then that’s all right with me.

But certainly the work is experimental. I’ve – I think it’s always been experimental, so I think experimental is a good way to describe it and so I experimented with plywood after the dowels, and still then used dowels, but now in a new way where they would – I would mass them together to create a line of dowels on top of the plywood or I would start to make a drawing with them, but now on plywood.

And so I did the plywood pieces – well, I’m still doing plywood pieces. That’s – and I’m still doing dowel pieces, but they’re different from before. I haven’t totally forgotten. It’s still – it’s still part of my vocabulary.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: As I look at your work from the very beginning to the work that you’re doing now, I see certain shifts over the years and I’m wondering how you would look back and describe changes in the kinds of problems that you’re interested in aesthetically, for example, or the weight, the kind of vocabulary that you use.

What are some of the changes that you see over the entire course of your work?

MS. SCHICK: Well, the main one was starting to do – the main one was doing alternative materials in the late ’60s, right? Starting with papier-mâché, but thinking it wasn’t important. And then the end of the ‘70s sort of – I say floundering, but it was searching for what I – searching for something new wasn’t it? Taking ceramics, taking plastics, trying clay jewelry, trying plastic jewelry, throwing away the threads and falling in love with what I threw away, doing thread and paper, and then the thread and paper, then the dowels, and then moving into the wood.

And I think that – I hope that my work has changed and developed and I’ve always wanted the changes. I’ve hoped that the changes would have occurred naturally and never have been forced – not forced so – you know, so – “well, it’s time to change now.” It hasn’t been that. I’ve worked through till the end. My color palette changed. You know, I used to do all bright colors, and then I did this piece, because the dowels are all straight and I wanted some curved ones, so I started using reed along with dowels to give them curves.

And I did the quivers that go in the back of a – are inserted into a back sculpture, but I did a lot of short little reed pieces that were ground down to points and I did this armlet – a huge one – that it’s like a fetish and it’s also a bit architectural. And I painted it grays and blacks and there were a few little hints of blue on it, but copper and it laid in my office and I didn’t work on it for a while and a colleague of mine [Alex Barde], whom I’d asked sometimes about my work – I’d say, “Alex, this is so ugly. This piece is so ugly.” And he said, “Well, now what is ugliness, Marj? How do you define ugliness and what makes this ugly?”

And actually I think it was – it was a new direction.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: Yeah, I think so. That’s the Fetish Armlet, isn’t it?

MS. SCHICK: Mm-hmm [Affirmative.], and it wasn’t so much that it was ugly; it was new to me and not only was the form a bit new – I had tied it together with threads. The threads coming back from the paper pieces, but I had this new color range with lots of black and lots of dark colors and it – and it just looked different, and then a piece that Paul has in Amsterdam was one that I had done – one of the first ones of plywood and I – and I thought, how am I going to paint this? How will I paint it? Because I’d been painting with stripes and I put some striped sticks on it so that people would recognize that it was my work, and I thought that was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life, so I obliterated the stripes with texture.

I painted every kind of texture I could think of on the front and back of that piece and so – yeah, all those helped me, but they’re difficult steps to make.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: I was struck – we were talking a while ago and you were telling me about how most of your pieces go through what you call an ugly phase.

MS. SCHICK: Oh yes.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And I just was connecting that up with what you said about Fetish Armlet when you first looked at it. Oh, it was ugly, but actually you were finding a new direction and it just seems that it’s part of that struggle that you go through; always working it out on the piece in process; experimenting your way toward what is right. And often that is very different from what you’ve done before because you were always taking on new challenges.

MS. SCHICK: I worry that maybe I’m not, at the moment. But what was it, two years ago when I did the shadow for the scoop and the shadow [Shadowed by the Light of a Full Moon: A Scoop for Moonbeams] I was starting to explore, and it’s not a good material to use. It’s not safe I don’t think, but fiberglass screen wire – so I stitched – there’s the sewing again – I stitched it with colored aluminum wire, which gave it more body and stitched all this thing together and it’s painted and it’s – it has aluminum wire in it and thread hanging off and it’s the shadow for the scoop. And it was this Alex [Barde], who is retired now, but he saw it and he said, “Oh.” And I really appreciate it because he said, “Oh.” He was pleased to see that I was still experimenting and he thought that was very experimental.

Now at the time, you know, it was a scoop thing, and it was rejected from the show because it wasn’t spoon enough – spoon-like enough, but I still think that that soft kind of shadow was an exciting thing to do against the hardness of the scoop.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And it’s an example of those companion pieces that you’ve been doing for quite a while. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that whole phenomenon.

MS. SCHICK: I don’t know how far to go back, but probably in the mid ‘80s when I was doing both dowels and plywood, I did a wall relief that holds an armlet – holds a bracelet. And then when I switched just to plywood, I did these three very flat necklaces that I thought were so dull and I thought, gosh, they just lay there – like I had thought about Blue Eyes years before. They just laid there, and I thought, what if I make a painting to support them? It took me six weeks to paint it and the necklace is a reversible. It’s like a puzzle. There’s a blue side of the work and it fits also on the green side. And I thought – oh, I was so excited. I thought, you know, I’ve crossed over into somebody else’s territory. I don’t belong here at all, but I’m going to do it anyway, which was painting [Painting with Three Necklaces].

And so that became a structure to hold those necklaces, and I’m still dong that kind of thing; even these new ones I’m working on right now that are inspired by the Chrysler building. You know, I decided Friday that they can’t just hang on nails. They’ve got to have this wood center that’s like a tiered – kind of like a cake that will come out from the center of each one that will be the holder.

So I like this idea because the pieces are not going to be worn on the body for very long, right? They’re mostly going to be on a wall. I don’t want them in a drawer, so if I make the mounting to support the piece, or if it is like in Dunloe – if it’s the armlet – I loved making that companion and when you have the two on the table, it’s the space shape – the negative shape between the armlet and its companion sculpture that for me is the most important part. Now that’s not the most important part for everything – everybody else. And that was also an experimental piece, Dunloe, which was preceded a year or two before where I took my paper – instead of laying it flat and pushing all the bubbles out to do papier-mâché, I wrinkled it up.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: That has an enormous amount of texture in it.

MS. SCHICK: And I –

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: The piece.

MS. SCHICK: – wrinkled it up on the teapot brooches [1997] that I did that go on a tray – a friend in a presentation. And I don’t remember the dates of that. But then when I got to Dunloe [2000] I started doing it [the scrunched paper texture] a little and pretty soon I was doing them a lot. In fact, even putting light cardboard in under some of those squiggle forms. I don’t know, but that has a very, very built-up surface.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: And that’s evocative. That’s part of your sense of place series, isn’t it?

MS. SCHICK: Yes.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: So it’s evocative. Maybe you could talk about the inspiration for that particular pair of arm – the armlet and its companion.

MS. SCHICK: Well, that was Jim’s idea again, because we’ve been really fortunate on our sabbatical leaves here at Pittsburg State, but we had a dean, who when our first sabbatical came up said, they’re never going to have – because my husband teachers here too. He’s in the History Department. “But they’re never going to have their sabbatical leaves together.” Well, we did and he obviously signed off on it, but that meant that we were always nervous every time we would apply for sabbatical leave because we would always want them together. If we were going to travel, do it together, not one one semester and one the next.

So it came time and Jim said – to apply for sabbatical leave. I guess that was in ’98 and he said, you know, he had a great plan and he thought his would go through fine, but he said, “You better have an equally good plan” and he – and we wanted for him, and for me too, to go to Mexico and we had planned this – we went on a tour and we visited eight sites, Uxmal and Palenque and – anyway, eight wonderful historical sites – because his minor field had been – how do I say it? – pre-Columbian and South American history, so we wanted to do that, but we also were going to spend five weeks in California and we were going to go to Europe too. And I had a show in Amsterdam then, so it was his idea. He said, “well, you know we’re going to do all this traveling. Why don’t you relate your pieces through color, since color is so important to you, to the places we’re going to be?”

So it was a great idea and I had just touched on that already when – we take the Sunday New York Times and so there had been this amazing photograph of a mud palace all painted bright colors – Yemen. Yemen. So that inspired me to start Yemen Windows. It took a long time to do that piece, but then – but then the sabbatical leave – I did a whole series of pieces that were related to our travels and I would refer to that as A Sense of Place, so yeah. I did number – a number, because, you know, all those trips down to the Loop when I was in high school, riding (when the train was elevated) by the Mies van der Rohe apartment buildings on North Shore Drive there, that I did a piece – a wearable – long wearable inspired by that, mostly because at night I always love it because you look at a skyscraper of apartments and each one is different, so that’s what mine – it’s all held together in this structure of black windows, but each – inside each window it was painted differently, so I had a great time doing pieces [Chicago Windows].

And that was different for me, too, to be so literal because all those previous years my works were just very much about the formal elements, and as I said before, the content having to do with the scale, but not ever relating them – not very often to places or events. Years ago, there was a show in Wichita at the museum and I was invited to be in that and the theme was “bestiary,” but that’s just when I was doing the sticks and I said to her – I said, “You know, I don’t work with a theme of animals.” I said, “The closest I could do would be worms.”

So Jim has always loved games and he had a book at home on the history of games and I found Snakes and Ladders, so I did these two ladders, these pieces are for a pair of people. One’s four foot-long and they’re very narrow – only a couple of inches wide. And then all these snakes that you put on you as pins to go with it. So that was probably the very first time and that was in the early ‘80s [1986] that I made such a literal approach in my work.

And then I didn’t do it again until I was part of Mobilia [Mobilia Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts] and she has all these theme shows and she was doing a teapot show, and I thought, teapots? I can’t do teapots, but that’s when I did those brooches that – with the crumpled – crumpled surface and I’ve really – at first I thought I was being bad by following all these themes. And after doing it now for a number of years, I’ve loved it and I think I’ve come up with pieces that I would never have if I hadn’t had that theme. So I quite like it. The Chrysler Building Necklace is for this show where the theme is Art Deco.

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: One of the things I like about the teapot is you did teapot bracelets, you did teapot brooches, you have your Yellow Ladderback Chair – is that they really play with the idea of functionality, which is a central issue in craft. And I’m wondering how you see yourself playing with that idea.

I mean, here you are. You’re making jewelry, which many people would say it’s not functional as jewelry at all.

MS. SCHICK: Uh-huh [Affirmative.].

DR. ROSOLOWSKI: But yet you’re making an interpretation of a Shaker hang-on-the-wall chair – a Shaker ladderback chair and then you’re turning it into a necklace, so you’re blending functionalities. You’re blending the functionality of the chair with the functionality of jewelry. How about that idea of functionality as you take themes and mix it with jewelry?

MS. SCHICK: I love it. I love it, and it started when Paul Derrez, in a show I had in Holland, set my Folding Body Sculpture on side – on its side and stood it up like a folding screen. Well, from that – and I’ve done very few commissions – like two in my whole life, but I had a commission from a couple in Utrecht to do a folding screen. Well, I thought that was exciting, but I could not get into this folding screen, and pretty soon my time was about to run out, and the piece took me six months to build, and it’s three sections that were the biggest I could manage without help to lift it up on the table to build.

The only way I could get into making that folding screen was to have the screen hold jewelry pieces. So the jewelry – that screen holds two necklaces and