UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #500
MYERS, FRANCES

MYERS, Frances (1938- )
Undergraduate and Graduate Student; Professor of Art
At UW: 1956-1960; 1964-1965; 1986-

Interviewed: 1996	
Series: Printmaking
Interviewers: Warrington Colescott, Arthur Hove and Barry Teicher
Length: 3 hours, 42 minutes

Background; Undergraduate training; San Francisco "beat" experience; East-West House; Stanley William Hayter; Graduate training; England; Birgit Skiöld's basement workshop; Architecturally-inspired work; Frank Lloyd Wright; Color xerox machines; Computers; Wonder Woman; Feminism; Wonder Woman and major events in life of Christ; Linoleum prints; Monoprints; Morality of improvement; Woodcuts; Still life; Intaglio; Tandem Press; Photo- and collage-influenced prints; Print series on St. Theresa of Avila; "An Examination of the Phenomenon of Ecstasy"; Rodent and bird skeletons and hair as art material; Installations; Cloth and ritual; Computers; Her and husband Warrington Colescott's modes of work.

First Interview Session (June 4, 1996): Tapes 1-2

Tape 1/Side 1

00:00:21	FM discusses her background.  She is from Racine, Wisconsin.  Her niece is Dee Dee Myers, President Clinton's former press secretary.  The art teacher at St. Catherine's High School was a role model for her.  FM received a scholarship to Rosary College, a liberal arts women's college; she studied art there.  She transferred to UW in 1958 to pursue a major in art and art education.  In high school she was told that dialectic materialism and communism pervaded UW.

00:03:11	Racine was a decidedly blue-collar, ethnically-oriented community.  FM played basketball growing up.  

00:06:12	Her mother was musical.  Music was encouraged in her family and art was not really considered.  It was acceptable for her to study art as long as she earned her teaching certificate.

00:07:48	FM discusses her undergraduate training at UW.  She enjoyed printmaking from the beginning.  She was not as interested in painting during her undergraduate years.  She studied under Al Sessler.  Her first printmaking class covered woodcut, lithography, and etching.  Sessler was very knowledgeable about woodcut.  FM gravitated towards etching more than lithography; she liked working in woodcut and linoleum very much.  She spent almost all of her time working in printmaking because she enjoyed it so much.

00:10:36	FM discusses the printmaking room in the Education Building.  She chose to work in etching over silkscreen.  She spent a summer doing etching with Misch Kohn, a visiting professor from IIT in Chicago.  He is known for the process of chine collé, which FM explains.  He also had a reputation in woodcut and engraving.  Dean Meeker and Kohn worked together using a technique known as sugarlift, which she explains.  It was an auspicious summer as they did drip-squeeze drawings and brought new ideas into the intaglio mix.  Many conventional techniques were updated and used in new ways.  It was an exciting period of exploration that students took even further.

00:17:05	Artists either found their materials in the community or ordered them by mail, often from abroad.  The University Book Store was probably the only place to get art supplies in Madison at the time.  Specialized art stores are much more prevalent now.

00:18:32	FM worked with Sylvia Solochek Walters, a Sessler student particularly interested in woodcut.  She was a dean and is now chairperson of the Art Department at San Francisco State University.  They still keep in contact.  Walters now does very sophisticated reduction woodcuts and photographic work with the wood block.

00:20:20	FM went to San Francisco after she graduated from UW.  She talks about the San Francisco beatnik scene.  She wore the beatnik "costume," i.e. all black.  She found a great apartment which she shared with Sally Hutchison, a friend from the UW Art Department.  At the time, San Francisco was a drab, working-class city.  They lived in the exciting North Beach area and frequented the jazz joints and coffee clubs there.  At first they stood out as Midwesterners.

00:22:06	FM discusses the milieu of the early '60s.  At UW, she had sought liberation from her stolid, middle-class background; she continued this quest in the bohemian atmosphere of North Beach San Francisco.  Bohemians stood out in this conformist time.  

00:23:51	FM met interesting people akin to Timothy Leary.  Many were influenced by eastern philosophy.  She became casually associated with East-West house.  Gary Snyder, a beat poet, had lived there.  In 1960-61, FM was experiencing the residue of the big beat period, which was ebbing.  She knew Jack Spicer, an excellent beat poet.  At East-West House she first learned about the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII.

00:26:17	The San Francisco beat ambience had an effect on FM's work.  She painted at home and took printmaking classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, including a class from Stanley William Hayter.  Coming out of UW, her work was very realistic and canted towards the German expressionists.  She gradually shook this style off in San Francisco.  As society was rigid, so was art.  She talks about Bruce Connor, who lived around the corner from her and ran a gallery, as well as his work.  She discusses Jay Defeo, who also lived in the area.

00:29:43	She worked day jobs to support her art making, including cleaning test tubes, working in an import/export firm and as a bookkeeper.  The atmosphere in North Beach and East-West House made it all worth it.

00:30:52	End of side.

Tape 1/Side 2

00:31:02	FM talks about Chinese philosopher Ja Fu Phang and his "no-peek" rice, and Emy Drucker, who came to San Francisco from Madison.  There was a constant intermingling of people who were out to learn about life, art, and other cultures.  Our society and culture is rigid in comparison.

00:34:34	Art in San Francisco was moving from abstract expressionism back to figuration at this time.  Richard Diebenkorn brought figuration back into the structure of abstract expressionism.  Bruce Connor's and Jay Defeo's work was very individual.  Defeo created an immense image of a rose made of thick layers of paint and plaster.  She spent her artistic life on three pieces.  The attitude toward making art was very different then—artists concentrated on making, thinking about, and experiencing art.

00:37:03	FM had a show in a gallery in North Beach.  She talks about the gallery's director, who went on to become a curator at the Whitney Museum.  Her work also appeared in group shows.

00:37:55	FM's experiences with artists and the bohemian lifestyle "loosened up" her artistic style.  Abstract expressionism influenced her work, which had been strongly figurative in nature.  The theme was still the figure, but it was expressed in a different way.  She discusses working with Hayter for a summer.  He required his students to do an abstract technical and stylistic exercise; it was a canny teaching device to reorient them from their past work.  There was a hierarchy among Hayter's students.  He was an inspiring teacher with a great love for prints.  Hayter used a huge scraper as a drawing tool.  FM used this dry point technique, which necessarily made her work more abstract.  She deepened her technical knowledge while in San Francisco.  She also took a class in etching from Richard Graf.  The Art Institute was full of "real artists," as opposed to the "academic artists" of Berkeley.

00:45:13	Many of FM's friends were poets and writers; the scene in San Francisco was very literary.  She frequented Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio's.  The atmosphere was very exciting.  Those in the East-West House were mainly writers.

00:46:49	FM discusses Kohn and Sessler.  There were no women on the UW Art Department faculty except those in art education—it was very paternalistic.  She studied painting with Robert Grille and academic drawing with John Wilde.  It was excellent training.

00:49:55	The beat scene waned as time went on.  FM was impressed by Warrington Colescott's work in a national print exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art.  She decided to get an MFA and teach and thus returned to Madison to study with WC.  She finds his work very inspiring.  

00:52:04	As a graduate student, FM worked in painting and etching.  Hal Lotterman made painting enjoyable.  Still, she felt her work in etching was more original because she had a feeling for the medium.  Through Lotterman her work was influenced by abstract expressionism.

00:55:02	FM did not exhibit until she was out of graduate school.  She lived in London for two years after she finished her MFA at UW.  She taught printmaking at St. Martin's School of Art in London and at the College of Art in Birmingham.  In England, art schools were not in universities.  Schools there simply employed artists to teach a class or two.  Most artists, even fairly well-known ones like Dennis Rowen, supported themselves primarily by teaching; the pay was pretty good.  St. Martin's was a hot place at the time.  Gillian Ayers, who made a big reputation as a painter, and Anthony Caro, a sculptor, both taught there.  FM mainly knew those in the print area.  

00:58:48	While in London, FM worked at Birgit Skiöld's basement studio.  Skiöld was a Swedish woman who loved prints.  She taught FM lithography, and FM continued to work in etching.  Skiöld had "dues," big parties in her basement studio.  FM met many other artists interested in prints in Skiöld's studio on Charlotte Street, for instance Michael Rothenstein, a well-known print artist concentrating on relief prints.  

01:00:22	FM's work at this point concentrated on abstract interiors, especially furniture.  It was influenced by the European art deco she saw in London.  The furniture was made of early plywood (bentwood furniture).

01:01:43	End of side.  End of tape.

Tape 2/Side 1

00:00:06	There is a continuity of interest in her work—decorative objects, interiors, design, architecture.  FM discusses Frank Lloyd Wright's influence on her work.  The Johnson Wax Building was not far from her grandmother's home in Racine.  At the time, she did not understand the concept of a building without windows.  The Hardy House, located on the shore of Lake Michigan, was also incomprehensible to her.

00:02:36	FM regards Wright's work as very unique.  In England she noticed the connection between the art deco architecture there and Wright's later work (not his early Prairie Houses).  The stark, art deco elements came into her work in London.  The building itself was a very beautiful object that was the focus of a given piece.  She later worked on a series of Parisian buildings built in the same period.

00:03:58	Karin Johnson Boyd, daughter of H. F. Johnson, approached FM to do a print of the Johnson Wax Building as a gift for her father.  This was the first in a series on Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.  FM then did a series of six prints of Wright buildings for Boyd, including Taliesin West, Wingspread, Guggenheim, and the Civic Center in San Rafael, California.  FM had a beautiful box made for the prints at Elizabeth Nair's workshop in Chicago.  

00:06:03	FM visited the site of each of the buildings and took many photographs.  She approached each building as a stark, sculptural object.  She also did a print of Unity Temple in Oakbrook, Illinois, a Unitarian meeting house built in 1905.

00:07:19	FM continued working with Wright images for the next couple of years, but eventually moved away from them because her work was becoming too identified with Wright's.  However, she continued creating postmodern architectural images, such as the strange and marvelous buildings designed by the Japanese architect Aida.  She portrayed American art deco skyscrapers in New York, for instance the Chrysler Building.  Other objects of her work were the simple art deco Greyhound Bus Stations in Washington, DC and Bethesda, Maryland.

00:10:05	FM has no problem using the buildings as objects for her work.  She always reacted to her living environment and particularly buildings; thus architecture was a natural object for her work.  The angle she took of the buildings introduced a curious spatial-formal element into the prints.  The angle and emphasis are what made her renderings of buildings different.

00:12:54	Sam Johnson has asked FM to do a print of a school he recently built in Racine.  She chooses simple, graceful, quirky buildings as objects for her work.  This is the reason she was interested in art deco architecture.  Wright was a daring architect.  Sculptor David Smith refers to FM's work in his own; there is an odd weight and angle to his work.

00:16:27	FM discusses prints of Mexican ruins and sand dunes in Colorado.  They had the same look as the architectural prints.  She was working in pure aquatint, and thus there were no line elements but pure shape was rendered with a tonal technique used in etching.  She simplified the technical form of her work to suit the shapes.  

00:18:41	FM taught at Mills College in Oakland, California and lived in San Francisco.  She spent time in the Marina area, which is full of intriguing bungalows that provided her with more subject matter.  

00:19:53	FM taught off and on at UW.  In 1984, she had a student working in Xerox and became interested herself.  There was an early '70s Xerox color copy machine in the Humanities Building copy center.  She took some of the small etchings buildings in San Francisco and printed them off the color Xerox machine in red, yellow, and blue.  This enabled her to create with many layers, colors, and different textures.

00:22:00	FM spent two years working with color Xerox machines.  Things one can do so easily now on a computer were harder to do on a Xerox machine.  She is fascinated by technology.  Her color Xeroxes have not faded.  She fed Japanese papers through the Xerox machine as well as paper made of a very thin slice of wood; the latter set the machine on fire.  She taught at UC-Berkeley for a semester, where she continued her Xerox imagery.  She started a machine on fire there too.

00:26:02	FM is probably the first technology-oriented printmaker in this area.  She has used Xerox on and off ever since, and now also uses engineering copiers and computers.  William Weege has been very involved with computers in the last couple of years.  FM has a coterie of students who are very interested in technology, but others who are not.  She started integrating computers into her teaching a year ago and plans to do so more and more, for instance including projects using computer-generated art as a part of etching.  Jobs in college teaching increasingly require computer knowledge.

00:28:43	Toward the end of her Xerox work, FM taught a two-week course in color Xerox.  To demonstrate to the students how one can Xerox a three-dimensional object, she Xeroxed a figurine of Wonder Woman.  She then began experimenting with the image of Wonder Woman, putting her in strange situations.  This was a big change from the work she had been doing previously.

00:30:48	End of side.

Tape 2/Side 2

00:30:56	FM discusses a print she did for a portfolio of former Madison students.  The image was of Wonder Woman tied up with her golden lasso, taking the place of Christ in a temple with a crown of thorns.  This print started a series on Wonder Woman as a pseudo-religious figure.  FM did prints on Wonder Woman saving people from disaster.  This was her own Wonder Woman.  Working with the image of Wonder Woman brought back her childhood and Catholic education, and mixed in her contemporary attitudes and feminism.  This work was a return to figuration for FM.  She got a positive reaction to this series.  She talks about her Pieta Wonder Woman cradled by a bony Buddha.  

00:35:00	FM re-created biblical images to her own liking and made feminist statements with them.  Younger women do not remember the changes feminism brought about during FM's lifetime.  Students are not very political.

00:36:24	FM dealt with this theme for a number of years, and then around 1990 she started working with the persona of St. Theresa of Avila, a Spanish nun and mystic.  This body of work has more to do with the trappings of ritual in the Catholic Church than religion.  FM is now moving away from the relationship between ritual and the Catholic Church towards ritual in everyday life.

00:38:36	The field of art has changed wonderfully; it used to be more male-dominated.  She brings in women exclusively as guest artists in the print area, such as Phyllis Bramson and June Wayne, because the art program is still very male-oriented at UW.  When FM was an undergraduate, women students realized they had to be better than men to make any sort of impact.  It was a paternalistic, slightly sexual atmosphere.  Sessler treated female students differently than male students.  Not much was expected of female students other than that they would get married and have children.  The situation changed gradually, but it took the feminist revolution in the 1970s for things to begin to change.  Things did not change much at all in the art world.  In school her perception was that successful artists tended to be male, alcoholic, and in their 40s.  

00:42:46	The situation of women has not changed markedly in the UW Art Department.  FM is still the only female instructor in the graphics area, but she hopes this situation will change soon.  Things are improving slowly.

00:43:18	End of side.  End of tape.  End of interview session.

Second interview session—Studio (June 12, 1996): Tapes 3-4 

Tape 3/Side 1

00:00:01	The interview is continued in the Colescott-Myers studio in rural Hollandale, Wisconsin.  Some of FM's work was influenced by her interest in women's issues.  In the 1970s, the women's movement gathered force.  Wonder Woman was a positive symbol for this movement.  FM recounts how the figure of Wonder Woman was integrated into her artwork.  

00:02:43	FM talks about the Wonder Woman print she did for "Point of Departure," a portfolio of the work of former alumni of the UW Art Department.  Wonder Woman, tied by her golden lasso, replaced Christ in the temple.  FM "appropriated" a woodcut head by the German expressionist Schmidt Ruttlof and projected it onto Wonder Woman's body, thus referring to previous artwork that has used the human face to evoke emotion.  This was a successful image, so she continued to work with the image of Wonder Woman.  She paralleled various events in the life of Christ (traditional artistic subject matter), replacing Christ with Wonder Woman.

00:04:45	FM's next image was the "Pieta," with Wonder Woman descending from the cross to find the bony knees of a starving Buddha replacing the traditional image of Christ being taken down from the cross into the arms of Mary and Mary Magdalene.  This series of prints combines images and ideas of significance to her:  Wonder Woman, Catholic culture, feminist ideas, adult attitudes toward religion, and traditional images of Western art.  The same surroundings and events seen in much of Western art are portrayed in FM's work with different characters.

00:06:29	FM's art evolves naturally from one print to another.  She points out that the Wonder Woman prints are linoleum prints.  She had been working in etching since graduate school.  The linoleum prints were thus an interesting departure for her; the carving she does on the linoleum blocks is related to drawing.  

00:07:53	WC notes these prints heralded a technical departure from FM's earlier sensitive, impressionistic prints; her ideas also became more political.  He asks about "attack printing," the up front, readable, and immediate relief print.  FM concedes these thoughts were in the back of her mind when she made this shift.  Mexican artists, such as Possada, used relief prints with an up-front, direct quality about them for political purposes.  

00:09:29	In relief printing once a mistake is there, there is no way to erase it.  There is a battle for control between the artist and the medium.  An option to deal with errors is cutting the offensive section out of the print and reconforming the surface.  One prints whatever is on the surface.  There are battles going on in FM's prints between men and women, religion and skepticism, and artist and medium.  Relief printing is a powerful medium of contrasts and as such is appropriate for political messages.  She was working as an independent artist at the time she created the Wonder Woman prints.  

00:11:45	After the Christ in the temple and the Pieta, FM proceeded to the Resurrection.  These scenes in the life of Christ had been treated by artists for centuries.  FM was working with traditional subject matter and at the same time was denying, transposing, and transforming it.  Borrowing a description from a Cynthia Ozick novel, FM portrays Wonder Woman buried, with roots growing from her body, through an urn and up into a resurrected Wonder Woman.  Continuing in this series, FM did an Ascension and several other prints having to do with the life of Christ.

00:13:33	FM began working with more general images.  She tried doing monoprints for the first time, combining the qualities of print and painting.  She could be much more painterly with this technique.  These images, though they deal with the same subject matter and were created by the same artist, have a different look; they are more painterly or "brushy" while her previous prints are flatter.  For the first time FM increased the traditional size of the print by working in sections to be united into a larger work.  With each new print, Wonder Woman became more monumental.  She has grown to be an icon, a symbol of strength, and very powerful-looking; she is still garbed in traditional Wonder Woman costume, but she also emanates a sense of fragility.  FM wanted to show both aspects of the image of woman—strength and fragility—at the same time.

00:17:15	FM spent approximately four years working with the Wonder Woman image.  This was feminist work about power (and lack of it) and opposition of powers in contemporary society.  At a certain point, she felt she had said what she needed to say.  

00:18:57	At that time a new addition was being built onto FM's studio, and she began looking anew at objects in her environment; they prompted her to start new group of works.  She continued to work in relief, but began working with power tools on hardwoods with assertive textures, like oak.  So over the years FM worked first in aquatints with little surface value, moved to linoleums with a flat surface, and then to monotypes with a brushier surface—she was gradually moving into work with more activity on the surface.  Therefore wood was a natural choice at this time.

00:21:05	FM's thoughts become resolved as she creates the work.  She draws disparate elements together into her work to create something new.  She believes her job as an artist is to bring ideas together visually in unexpected ways and in order to accomplish something new and different, even though there is continuity within a group of work.  This is the morality behind her work—to accomplish more with each piece.  She includes moral tales in some of her images.

00:24:54	FM accomplishes her goal with a series, and then moves on to something more stimulating.  Her life as an artist has taken many directions rather than sticking with the same types of images.  In the past, modernism pushed an artist to take one stance.  Now it is easier to make moves.

00:27:28	End of side.

Tape 3/Side 2

00:27:35	When FM moves into a new creative period, her previous group of works seem old and irrelevant and her new work seems very different; later on, however, she can appreciate the old and see the links between the groups.  

00:29:35	FM discusses a large woodcut (32"x44") that includes images of stove pipe and power tools.  She was influenced by still life, a traditional art form, but threw out the idea that objects must be carefully arranged and interconnected.  She instead included odd objects, not to scale and used geometric devices to enclose them.  Power tools allow her to work in a painterly way on the wood.  She discusses her technique to create very vibrant images.  This was a very interesting, spontaneous, and confident artistic period for her.

00:35:37	FM shows a second print she did during the "building period," at "fencing time" on their farm.  In this print she includes objects used in fence repair, such as leather gloves, barbed wire, sunglasses, old tiles, and a lost key; she looked around her immediate indoor/outdoor environment to find meaningful objects with aesthetically-pleasing form.  Again, the objects are not to scale; there are wild colors with some overlay work and geometry controlling the whole.  

00:38:50	FM listens to news on the radio in her studio.  The next print makes reference to a tragedy she heard about on the Northeast Throughway when a bridge fell apart and vehicles plunged into the river below.  Various images suggest possible explanations for the accident—a genie rising from the water with a license-plate mask or a giant corkscrew breaking up the concrete bridge.  There is no explanation of who is involved.  

00:40:41	Many of the prints in this unnamed series deal with smoking, a seductive yet dangerous habit.  FM describes a woodcut that reflects her thoughts about this "interesting" habit.  There is also a lighter side to this series.  She describes "My Hawaiian Shirt," a print with images connected to a summer vacation.  FM discusses another print in this series, entitled "Exotic Dangers."  It also has to do with smoking.  There is a huge dayglow yellow-green hand holding a cigarette, among other images of exotic dangers.

00:45:33	FM turns to some etchings that are close in feeling to the woodcuts.  They are intaglio etchings on steel, instead of on zinc or copper.  Her work took on a more sculptural quality through her experiences with wood and the carving quality of tools.  Continuing to work with wood, she combined her experience with relief and added an intaglio component.  Other ideas she carried over from the wood group include an emphasis on edges, shape, and form as well as the use of magical images.  She uses such images in an etching with a top hat, the lucky number eight, a cross, and a rabbit.  The images are separate and overlaid, and are capable of different arrangements and relationships with each other.  

00:49:13	FM's interest in the idea of magic continued through this group of prints.  She talks about the next print, in which she overlays an "elegant" hatchet and a beautiful bud vase; she reflects on their properties, i.e. the inherent brutality of the one contrasted with the delicacy of the other.  She incorporates etching and relief, a commentary on the way she works.  Once again one can see the continuities from her previous work.

00:51:44	FM discusses another print of this group.  The techniques she uses are still steel etching and relief, and she again incorporates the idea of non-traditional still life of objects around her.  These include oversized, sculpturally-portrayed, and dynamically-arranged objects such as a leather purse, fruit, and an art deco pitcher.  

00:52:55	FM talks about her work at Tandem Press.  Her intaglio students acted as printers.  It was an opportunity to do more complicated, larger work than she could do alone.  She discusses the large body of prints that were produced in two weeks.  She worked on steel plates.  One of the prints was a memorial to a friend including traditional images in an intricate, textured, yet sculptural way.  She talks about some of the other prints, which were still very sculptural.  A large press and help made for a very successful and productive period.

00:56:28	End of side.  End of tape.

Tape 4/Side 1

00:00:05	FM talks about the change in her work from the large collage-intaglio Tandem prints to the work she is doing now, photo- and collage-influenced prints, mostly without color.  In 1991 she received a Romnes Fellowship, which afforded her a year off from teaching to work her in studio.  During this time she took a different path artistically.  The somber palate she used in these works is in stark contrast to the bright colors of her previous woodcuts and etching.

00:02:05	The first print FM displays is an image of St. Theresa of Avila.  She appropriated the image from a famous sculpture by Bernini, which presents a powerful image of St. Theresa in ecstasy, and transferred it to an etching plate by xerox.  Her print portrays many views of the sculpture chaotically overlaid and superimposed upon each other with a relief, reflecting the kind of life St. Theresa led.

00:03:22	FM was very affected by Bernini's powerful image.  In using this image she felt a responsibility to learn about St. Theresa.  St. Theresa (1515-86) was a Spanish Carmelite nun who reformed her order.  Choices for women at that time were either marriage and motherhood or the convent.  The convent was a popular choice among upper-class women because it did not entail handing over their inheritance to a husband or risking their life bearing children.  Nuns of the time led a comfortable life.  Theresa founded many convents and converted the idea of the Carmelite order to true spirituality and few human comforts.  

00:05:59	St. Theresa was a truly amazing woman.  She wrote prolifically about spiritual life.  She corresponded with popes, kings, and queens, as well as with the common people and was very revered by all during her life.  Theresa experienced ecstasies, i.e. her intense religious concentration resulted in out-of-body experiences and a close connection with the divine. This is one of the reasons Theresa was widely respected by contemporaries.  The Inquisition, a movement that was suspicious of women, placed restrictions on nuns.  Theresa, however, defended her writing to the inquisitors.  She is admired as an early feminist.  Her writings and those about her are very inspiring.

00:09:12	FM is not religious, but a large body of work has resulted from her interest in St. Theresa.  Theresa was made a saint soon after her death; she is the patron saint of Spain.  She is the first and only woman upon whom the title of Doctor of Philosophy has been conferred by the Roman Catholic Church, and then only in 1970.  "A virile woman, a manly soul"—the title was conferred upon her in masculine terms.  FM talks about a piece made up of 45 translucent, hand-made envelopes arranged in a rectangle, resulting in a pattern.  She drew the letters that together formed the above quotation in a style called Theresa Obelisk—obviously named for St. Theresa—onto the envelopes.  Thus each envelope bears a letter, and inside is a lock of hair which has various symbolic meanings.  The piece is done in the black and white of a nun's habit.  

00:13:52	FM talks about using color Xerox in her work in the early '80s.  She used the Xerox as printing press, a technique related to prints but using different technology.  She revived the Xerox technique in her work on St. Theresa.  She Xeroxed directly onto rag paper instead of transferring the image to a metal plate and then back onto paper.  She is still using the Xerox, and in addition the computer, in her work.  Some of the pieces in the St. Theresa group are done entirely with Xerox.  The first one, "Untitled Letter," is made from variously-sized Xerox images of an unattributed painting of St. Theresa.  The dove and pen symbolize her writing.  In the center of this dark image is a copy of one of Theresa's handwritten letters in a wax paper envelope.  The images of Theresa work as a backdrop to her words.  

00:17:48	Another Xeroxed image of another unattributed painting is of Christ offering food to St. Theresa.  Painted copies of the beautiful image are arranged irregularly, with a keyhole shape in the center of the piece.  FM turned some of the images upside down, consciously or unconsciously thinking back to feminist critiques of hierarchy as portrayed in paintings—men's heads are usually higher than women's; FM turned this image around so that Theresa's head was higher than Christ's.  

00:20:33	FM regards Theresa as the 16th-century equivalent of Wonder Woman.  Theresa was held in such high esteem that religious groups vied over her corpse.  It was mutilated for relics.  She was considered by contemporaries to be a very strong person who changed the Carmelite order, affected her time, and resisted the Inquisition.

00:22:57	While FM's subject matter remained the same, her technique became collage-like.  The previous St. Theresa pieces were in a 32"x44" rectangular format, and she put her Xeroxes together to create one unique piece.  FM now shows an installation made up of 44 separate items, each approximately 8½"x11".  She gathered information about St. Theresa and Xeroxed one item over another, for instance a page of a book over a page of reproductions of insects.  She did abstract finger paintings on some of these pages to create a visual symbol with a spiritual quality.

00:26:44	FM also did a subseries of small etchings of St. Theresa's face.  She describes how she manipulated the image in various ways.  This subseries represents an examination of Theresa's life through text and the printing process.  Another subseries, on x-ray film, refers to the mutilation of her body for relics.  

00:28:34	FM Xeroxed the text of attestations that made Theresa a saint and affixed to it the skeleton of a mouse.  She Xeroxed Theresa's letters at various angles over images of moths on waxed paper.  She covered the passage "Character of the Ecstatic Experience" with leaves because she does not agree with the author's "scientific" interpretation.

00:30:16	End of side.

Tape 4/Side 2

00:30:24	St. Theresa's spiritual writings and thoughts continue after her.  FM used a Xeroxed image of a beautiful silver heart and an arrangement of dried ferns in the same shape in the next subseries she discusses.  She collects the bones of small rodents and birds to use in her work; in one of these segments she embeds them in larch needles.  

00:31:55	The whole piece on St. Theresa is called "An Examination of the Phenomenon of Ecstasy."  FM presents the different parts of this work by putting them in "Plexiglas envelopes," flat boxes of different depths with open tops so that three-dimensional objects can be placed easily within them.  They work as transparent frames.  A wall of the 44 objects of this piece are arranged irregularly and in subgroups; the whole of these objects expresses the overarching idea.  In one place, for instance, locks of hair are deposited into a box, with bones embedded in six inches of larch needles.  

00:34:14	FM is using print and collage techniques with three-dimensional objects, incorporating elements of prints and books to create something new, which she refers to as an installation.  She has regrouped some of these items to make smaller installations, thereby making different associations.

00:35:47	On a Louisiana trip, FM visited antique stores and found many items made by women, particularly interesting cloths.  She found a box of handkerchiefs, and the idea of them and the way they were presented made her think about the beautiful and rich accouterments of Catholicism that had a "ritual" feeling about them.  She continued to look at cloths and other things which invoked this ritual feeling.  

00:37:14	FM found some embroidered handkerchiefs at her mother's home.  She shows an etching inspired by these handkerchiefs and the feeling of their ritual use.  She became fascinated with things people use on special occasions to evoke a certain sense of ritual.  

00:38:16	FM started working in an area between etching and Xerox.  She created a number of pieces from guest towels with emblems and decorative borders.  She looked around for these types of things, copied them, trimmed them, and put them together to make a larger piece.  When people see the copies on exhibit, many times they believe it is actual fabric.  In doing this work, FM is referring to printmaking; she sees photocopy and digital work as legitimate as creating a print in the "traditional" manner—it is a way to create an image and produce multiple copies.

00:40:50	FM takes pleasure in using cloths made by her mother and grandmother in her work.  She talks about one such piece, which is about 80" tall.  These are unique pieces.

00:42:33	FM discusses two exhibits in the last faculty show.  The first was an installation of cloths, eight pieces displayed in heavy wooden frames.  The second was a series consisting of 16 black wreaths and eight diamond-shaped frames, the latter integrating materials such as hair, metal, felt, and velvet.  The 24 elements together make up one "funereal" statement.

00:47:14	A year before, FM got a computer and scanner.  Given her work with the copier, the computer is a natural means for her to work with an image.  It gives her the freedom to make changes in scale, texture, lightness/darkness, etc.  She discusses a piece that once again deals with the idea of cloth and ritual.  It was created digitally and then enlarged in an engineering copier.  She uses the image of embroidery from the wedding dress of a Polish empress that was later used to make a priest's vestment.  The image deals with several layers of ritual.  It is a beautiful piece with much history and meaning attached to it.

00:50:28	FM continues to deal with the concept of ritual and the underlying reality, for instance she presents subtle images that show the process of creating a beautiful meal.  Some pieces are already finished and more are on the way.  They are all print. 
 
00:52:45	FM and WC discuss how they work.  They have plenty of available space to work in and print at different times.  Their work is very different.  WC's work never changes, but FM's is constantly changing.  WC clings to certain ways of working and reacts to the world around him; FM is much more internal.  She tries to find the right medium and material for the project she is working on at a given time.  WC and FM share space and equipment easily.  She needs more peace and quiet to pursue her work.  They are both serious and enjoy their work; they work all the time and anything else is considered an intrusion on making art.  They live in a rural area because it is important for them to escape distractions and have more space.  

01:00:01	End of side.  End of tape.  End of interview session.

END