University Place

Visual Art and the Wisconsin Idea

[Jason A. Smith, Communications Director, Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters]

My name is Jason A. Smith. I’m from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. Thank you for joining us for this evening’s talk, A Glimpse of the Wisconsin Regional Arts Program Story with Maryo Gard Ewell. For those of you who don’t know about the Wisconsin Academy, we’re a lifelong learning organization created by and for the people of Wisconsin. We work to connect Wisconsin people and ideas through free and low-cost programs that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture.

The Academy believes that participation in and public support for the arts is an essential component of a thriving community and economy alike. Communities brimming with the arts and lively creative cultures make our state a better, brighter place for all to live. That’s why we are so very pleased to co-host tonight’s talk with Maryo.

Maryo Gard Ewell has done ground-breaking developmental work in community arts for more than 40 years, working in leadership positions in the Colorado Council On The Arts, the Illinois Art Council, the Westport, Weston, and Greater New Haven Arts Councils in Connecticut as well. Maryo currently serves on several boards and advisory committees, including the Gunnison Council For The Arts and the Robert Gard Wisconsin Idea Foundation. She has won many prestigious awards for her work, including the 2003 Arts Are The Heart Award for service to the arts in Colorado and in 1995, Selina Roberts Ottum Award from Americans For The Arts, their highest award for community arts development.

I’m excited to hear Maryo talk about what she calls the symbiotic relationship between arts programs and community development and the role that the Wisconsin Regional Arts Program has had in shaping Wisconsin culture, both past and present.

Thank you, Maryo, for joining us tonight and thanks too to Wisconsin Public Television’s University Place for taping and rebroadcasting tonight’s talk. WPT’s virtual lecture hall series, University Place, covers a wide range of subjects, including science, economics, the environment, health, art, culture, and more, so let’s give them both a hand.

[applause]

If you haven’t picked up a copy of our magazine, there’s a few in the back there for – for people, please do. And so now, without any further ado, I’ll turn over the podium to the – the current regional – Wisconsin Regional Arts Program Director, Liese Pfeifer.

[applause]

[Liese Pfeifer, Director, Wisconsin Regional Arts Program]

The Wisconsin Regional Arts Program, W.R.A.P. as we call it, has a rich history, but also a unique and sustainable model of providing exhibition opportunities for both emerging and late in life learning artists. We reached each corner of the state, connecting community to campus with lifelong learning. W.R.A.P. today is positioned to grow, which is a key goal of mine as the new director of this program. I’m trying to ensure a legacy for the next 75 years. We’ve come through 75 in the past.

Since 1954, W.R.A.P.’s ongoing nonprofit partner organization in this work is the Wisconsin Regional Arts Association whose chapter mission is to support W.R.A.P. W.R.A.P. closely works with W.R.A.A., along with 24 arts community organizations, venues across the state and local volunteers, exhibit workshop coordinators, all of us working together to continue to advance the Wisconsin Idea through the visual arts.

This past year, 2015-16, W.R.A.P. served 425 individuals from age 14 to 94. A third of the participants receive award recognitions that entitle them to show in, participate in an annual W.R.A.P. state exhibit and this exhibit closes with a conference luncheon and awards ceremony. Thanks to our W.R.A.A. partner, exhibiting artists are eligible to close to $5,000 in award money that’s selected by a professional juror of artists.

So, join us next week to view this year’s culminating 2016 W.R.A.P. Exhibition that runs August 12th to September 23rd in the U.W. Pyle Center here in Madison. The state day conference starts with the Evening of the Arts Reception on Friday, September 23rd and continues through the conference on Saturday with speakers Christine Meinke, who’s a former Wisconsin – person for art coordinator, and Helen Klebesadel, a former director of W.R.A.P. on the September 24th. And with that, I’ll introduce our main speaker tonight, which is Maryo Gard Ewell.

[applause]

[Maryo Gard Ewell, Arts Administrator, daughter of Robert E. Gard, Founder of the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association]

Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. Thanks to the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters for making this series possible and thanks to Wisconsin Public Television for recording it and archiving it. It’s an amazing story. I hope you’ll agree by the end of this talk and one that I’m glad is now going to be there for the people of Wisconsin to be able to find out about again and again because so many people simply don’t know the rich history of the arts in the Wisconsin Idea and the University of Wisconsin.

I’m so happy to be sharing this story with you and in advance, let me thank my colleagues, Karen and Norman Goeschko, Rebecca Herb, Anne Katz, Helen Klebesadel, Liese Pfiefer, and George Tzougros for assisting me.

The Wisconsin Regional Art Program and the Wisconsin Regional Artists Association have an amazing history. So, I’m from Colorado. Why on earth am I talking to you and what do I know about this topic? Well, I do know something. My father, Robert E. Gard, was doing for the literary arts and drama what many of the practitioners that you’ll hear about tonight were doing in the visual arts and he founded a sister organization, the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association, which is still going strong today. And I’ve looked through his papers, talked with his colleagues at the university. I’ve – Ive talked to people about the role that the arts have played in building the State of Wisconsin and so I think I’d better start at the beginning.

It was about the turn of the last century. Robert La Follette, Fighting Bob, and President Charles Van Hise of the University of Wisconsin, who had been Fighting Bob’s high – college friend at the university, got together and they hatched something that became later known as the Wisconsin Idea. And I should say when I say the University of Wisconsin, I fully realize it’s now the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but at the time, it was the University of Wisconsin and so that’s how I’ll be using the term.

La Follette was a populist. He believed deeply that the people, the ordinary folks of Wisconsin, should participate in and shape the democracy that is, was, and would be Wisconsin. And he also believed that in exchange for their participation, the state should serve their communities. La Follette and Van Hise hatched this vision, the Wisconsin Idea.

As I interpret it, it had two key parts. First that the newest ideas in agriculture, engineering, economics, land use, science, water, or the arts should directly serve Wisconsin’s communities and second that the University of Wisconsin would serve all the state’s individuals. In 1901, Governor La Follette said this:

[George Tzougros, as Governor La Follette]

The state will not have fulfilled its duty to the university, nor the university fulfilled its mission to the people until adequate means have been furnished to every young man and woman to acquire an education at home in every department of learning.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

Van Hise stated it even more strongly:

[Liese Pfeifer as UW President Charles Van Hise]

The greatest waste in our nation is not economic, but rather the waste of human talent.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

Van Hise was a geologist, not especially known as an arts supporter, but still he said this:

[Liese Pfeifer as Charles Van Hise]

I would have no mute, inglorious Milton in this state. I would have everybody who has a talent have an opportunity to find his way so far as his talent will carry him. And that is only possible through university extension, supplementing the schools and colleges.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

So, you see WHA Radio flourishing, designed to help deliver an education, the awareness of new ideas, useful ideas, big ideas to the people of the state in places large and small. You see university extension working in parallel with cooperative extension in delivering classes in person, by correspondence, to rural places on just about every possible topic. In the arts, it was no different.

You see, the Wisconsin Dramatic Society, founded in 1910 by Professor Thomas Dickinson of the English Department, who encouraged plays written by Wisconsin people. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, not so easy to say, Zona Gale, emerged from this movement. Extensions Community Theater Department’s Ethel Rockwell directed a pageant in Sauk City in 1914, attended by over 4,000 people. Most everybody who lived in Sauk City or Prairie du Sac I suspect was in the cast as participants. The pageant was described by the reporter from Harper’s Magazine, who came out from New York to see it as – as richly significant as the rifle shot at Concord or the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The script for this 1914 pageant called A Social Center Pageant said on the cover that the pageant, quote, Signalized the perception that government is no longer merely the selection of agents for repression but is the all-inclusive and living fellowship of citizens in a creative process of self-education. 1914, that’s the Wisconsin Idea coming to life through drama.

Production of locally written plays was aided by the university’s Lyceum Bureau. The Bureau of Dramatic Activities loaned scripts and offered help in playwrighting, acting, producing plays. The Speech Department worked with the extension service to provide judges for rural plays. And theater produced for county fairs was common throughout Wisconsin as early as the 1920s. I believe Vernon County was the first to introduce drama at the county fair.

You see the formation of the Bureau of Community Music, later the Bureau of Community Music and Drama in 1913. its director, Professor Edgar Pop Gordon, crisscrossed Wisconsin by train in the 19 teens and ’20s to help form singing societies. The purpose was good music, yes, but Professor Gordon said this:

[Norman Goeschko as Professor Edgar Gordon]

I see in community music and drama a means of combating juvenile delinquency and family degeneration.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

How contemporary is that?

In communities where there was religious conflict, such as De Pere at the time, he thought music could be useful to help a community move towards resolving conflict and create a setting for conversation. He helped form an ecumenical choral group that sang in a Presbyterian church under the direction of a Catholic priest.

Much later I might note in 1957 in Madison, Robert Gard’s Wisconsin Idea Theater and the Women’s Club of Madison pulled 500 people of all the 24 faith groups in Madison at the time together to create a pageant, Man and His God, explicitly designed, quote, To help draw the people of a fragmented community together as they shared the idea of their creator.

And remember, this was all tied to La Follette’s idea of a democracy. In 1912, playwright Percy MacKaye said this:

[George Tzougros as playwright Percy MacKaye]

The Wisconsin Idea involves the full scope of popular self-government and popular self-government without indigenous art forms is incapable of civilized expression.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

The College of Agriculture was in a particularly fine position to serve rural Wisconsin of course. Chris Christensen was Dean of the College in the 1930s and he believed that the Danish folk school movement, blending cultural learning for farmers with agricultural learning dovetailed nicely with the Wisconsin Idea.

In a history of the folk school, Irish poet, economist George Russell is quoted as saying this:

[Anne Katz as economist George Russell]

A nation is cultivated only so far as the average man is cultivated and has knowledge of the thought, imagination, and intellectual history of his nation. Governments do not build up civilizations. That is done by the citizens, using the creative imagination about life, trying to make the external correspond to something in the spirit.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

Dean Chris explicitly felt that education in our agricultural colleges must be broad and must include good literature, art, music, history, the cultural side of life as well as practical training for better farming. He said this:

[Rebecca Herb as Dean of the Agricultural College at U.W., Chris Christensen]

In emphasizing the social or cultural values arising out of the improved economic conditions, it is well to keep clearly in mind that this will come about only if the economic process operates in some kind of cultural framework. The achievement of wealth itself contains no guarantee that it will become the means to more significant living. As a matter of fact, wealth in careless hands may be a two-edged sword, wielding destruction to its owner and to society.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

He hired John Barton into the Department of Rural Sociology and he and Barton invented the notion to have a visual artist on the staff of the College of Agriculture. The artist would help enhance the broad economy of the State of Wisconsin, as well as help people understand their own culture. Barton said this:

[Karen Goeschko as Professor John Barton]

It was a country tavern in Portage County which first gave public recognition to a young Polish painter for his series of native landscape murals. And the tavern keeper said it was good business. If it is good business for the tavern, it could also be good business for the local library, school, or community house. If the work is competent, it would seem more appropriate to recognize native talent than to hang a conventional print of three horse’s heads, a blind muse playing a harp, or of some other worn-out picture from a bygone age.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

But consistent with the beginnings of the Wisconsin Idea, the artist in residence idea was linked with democracy. John Barton again:

[Karen Goeschko as Professor John Barton]

The rural art movement cannot properly be understood apart from the democratic movement. It was inevitable that the democratic revolution, still in process through universal education and today, adult education, should call into being among others a rural people’s art.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

This would be a revolutionary idea today and this was 1936.

The country’s first artist in residence not in an art department, but an agricultural college linked to the idea of democracy, not only to art theory and history. Where to get this extraordinary individual, who would be an excellent artist, who would understand the rural scene and who would inspire ordinary people to paint the word as they personally saw it? Christensen knew Grant Wood and he went to Iowa to visit Wood to float the idea. Wood liked it and suggested that John Steuart Curry of Kansas, who was at the time working in Connecticut, would be just the person, given his rural background and populist ideals. The dean hopped a train to Connecticut to broach the idea to Curry. Curry would have no teaching responsibilities. Just as researchers work in their lab to advance knowledge, so would Curry work in his studio to advance creativity. Curry’s studio is still I think standing today for a little while longer anyway. I’m afraid it’s been scheduled for demolition. If you know the agricultural college area, it’s the little white house that stands next to Babcock Hall. That was Currys studio.

Well, Curry jumped at the chance. He assisted the university in new ways, such as sketching the football team during scrimmages; he was quite a Badgers fan. And he assisted the people of Wisconsin in finding their talents. The university president at the time, Glenn Frank, explicitly believed this and he said this:

[Norman Goeschko as U.W. President Glenn Frank]

There is poetry as well as production on the farm. Art can help us to preserve the poetry of farming while we are battling with the economics of farming.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

In announcing Curry’s appointment in 1936, President Frank said:

[Norman Goeschko as U.W. President Glenn Frank]

In launching this new educational venture, we are – we are undertaking to give emphasis to regional art as a force for rural, as well as urban culture in the Middle West.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

Curry started traveling and everywhere he went, he discovered farmers or their family members who wanted to make art. He looked around him and he saw art in the hills of farms, the farmers, the animals, the air, the earth of Wisconsin and he believed that everyone has the ability to paint what is most alive to him or her. That it was just a matter of enabling them to do so. He emphasized personal vision over technique. As a result, paintings by farmers who worked with Curry are dramatically, breathtakingly vibrant. Curry said this:

[Helen Klebesadel as first Artist in Residence at U.W., John Steuart Curry]

The feeling inherent in the life of the world cannot be ignored or trifled with for the sake – for the sake of theory.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

This doesn’t mean that he blew off art theory and history and the deep learning of technique, but the purpose of these was to go beyond. It was the means to achieve the end that was an understanding of life, to paint the thing most alive to the artist. Curry said this:

[Helen Klebesadel as John Steuart Curry]

I do not despise the classic and accepted forms of our civilization, but it is time that people realized they have a more magnificent life to use and view in our creative efforts. If you feel the significance of the life, the design builds itself.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

He envisioned a statewide exhibit of art by farmers and family members and the first exhibit was held in 1940 at the Memorial Union on the university campus with 30 artists from 17 counties participating. Next year included a junior show with 28 youth in the first year. By 1946, there were 101 artists exhibiting.

Curry offered a critique of each of the pieces. Local clubs began to form. The Rural Rembrandts of Wautoma was the first such group. And the local shows led to regional shows, which connected with the state show that Liese was talking about at the very beginning. The Independent Wisconsin Regional Artists Association was ultimately formed working closely with and complimenting the university’s art program.

After Curry’s death, Barton continued supporting rural artists and for the Wisconsin Centennial in 1948, the Department of Rural Sociology produced a book, Rural artists of Wisconsin.

Aaron Bora was Curry’s successor as artist in residence and by 1963, Wisconsin boasted 12 regional art shows and its sister group, the Writer’s Association, had 1,800 members from each county in Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, James Schwalbach, whose title was initially Extension Specialist in Rural Art, had come into the picture. He traveled the state constantly, working closely with local artists and their exhibits and many in this room I suspect will remember his voice broadcasting Let’s Draw into the schoolrooms of Wisconsin over the airways of WHA Radio. He did this from 1936 to 1970.

Here’s a snippet from just published Wisconsin On The Air by Jack Mitchell. Perhaps the most surprising use, says Mr. Mitchell was the Let’s Draw series on radio, which taught visual art without visuals. James Schwalbach, a teacher at Milwaukee’s Washington High School, tapped into student’s imaginations to inspire them to create their own art, rather than copying what the teacher showed them.

In the spring of 1939 for example, he led a unit on capturing feelings in pictures, the feeling of coldness for example and the feeling of love, the feeling of gaiety, the feeling of night and darkness. Abstract concepts more challenging to convey in pictures than a house or a tree. Unquote.

I remember my teachers at Edgewood Elementary tuning in Let’s Draw, which Edgewood had no art teacher, so Mr. Schwalbach was our art teacher. We would listen to instruction for about seven minutes and then we’d begin painting or drawing, often to music. I remember being told to paint whatever Smetana’s The Moldau made me feel, that wonderful orchestral piece and I still have the drawing that I made.

[laughter]

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

We were urged to paint our own ideas just as Curry urged his students to do. Indeed, I should say especially because this is being televised, that Schwalbach briefly tried out the new medium of TV on WHA-TV, rejecting it after just a few sessions because he was afraid that students were just copying him, copying what they saw on the screen, which was he felt the antithesis of investigating their own creativity. So, he went back to the radio.

Like Curry, Schwalbach offered critique as well as teaching. Students selected five representative examples from their class which were sent to Mr. Schwalbach who critiqued them and then selected exemplary work that circulated among the schools in Wisconsin during the rest of that school year.

Now Schwalbach had a sabbatical year and went to Scandinavia to study the home crafts movement there. He returned feeling that such a movement was possible in Wisconsin. His colleague, Tom Eichner from Milwaukee, recalls the foundation, the formation of the Wisconsin Association of Crafts. They worked with the county extension agents on a bold program for improving the economic well-being of rural people, as well as the beauty of people’s homes. They’d ask the extension agent to identify somebody who was unemployed or underemployed, people in their county who might be able to design things, whether they’d be place mats or curtains, puzzles, salt and pepper shakers.

Schwalbach was in contact with firms that manufactured these things and marketplaces nationwide to sell them, so for a time, Wisconsin extension was helping rural craftspeople to make a living.

Schwalbach became Chair of the U.W.’s Center System Art Department, and he was a big thinker, like those who had gone before him. He believed that it was essential to eliminate the archaic distinction between the so-called fine and amateur arts, to resolve the, quote, “unnecessary breach between the amateur and the professional, and to recognize multiple standards. This would not be trifling with concepts of excellence but would be building a whole new kind of artist with a new role in society. He said this:

[Rebecca Herb as James Schwalbach]

The community needs the artist, but an artist who accepts some responsibility towards the community, an artist who can hold forth a vision of the future that is built on the past.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

In 1973, I worked for a year as secretary to Emmett Serig, who was Chair of the Extension Art Department at the time. The number of artists in all disciplines on several campuses in this merged department had grown to 28 by then. Helen O’Brian of Spring Green, nearly blind, crisscrossed Wisconsin by Greyhound bus, working with youth drama programs across the state, many of them within 4-H. Ed Hugdol created a program to help rural organists improve their music and performance. Marvin Rabin created a program to ensure that Norwegian fiddling was kept alive and flourishing and his name as well as that of Dick Wolf was synonymous with the Wisconsin Youth Symphony and the many band clinics done year after year after year in Wisconsin for high school kids.

Robert Gard’s Wisconsin Idea Theater helped people statewide create and produce their own drama and as I mentioned, he created W.R.W.A., which encouraged thousands of writers. Karen Cowling of U.W.-Green Bay urged people to dance and create their own choreography. Harv Thompson helped raise standards in high school drama statewide and later ran the School of the Arts at Rhinelander. David Peterson directed touring troupes that brought Wisconsin history to life at county fairs or in state parks with his original musicals.

I will say one of my odder jobs as my father’s daughter was driving Miss Alice in Dairyland to countless county fairs that particular year to watch performances of Hodag. Miss Alice didn’t drive. I had just gotten my driver’s license, so as two high school girls, we went to all the shows at the county fairs. Being Bob Gard – Bob Gards daughter was often fraught with stories.

[laughter]

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

In the visual arts, you had Ken Kumerline, Joe Bradley in Madison, Jim Schindler, and Tom Eckner in Milwaukee and so many more. In 1969, Schwalbach wrote something that probably all these artists would agree with, that arts extension was difficult to define, but he said:

[Liese Pfeifer as James Schwalbach]

We stand somewhere between reality, needs, and the challenging tempo of our time and the academic towers of a major university.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

And so, it was through many years. The university was working with people, offering instruction, inspiration, opportunity for critique and exhibition or performance, and the uncovering of a personal talent and vision. Only in Wisconsin has such a program grown. No other state has had the commitment of its state university to its artists and its people for the century and more that Wisconsin has had.

Gard quoted a woman in 1955. She was a writer, but what she has to say applies to the visual arts too and really embodies the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea in the arts. She said this:

[Anne Katz as a Female Wisconsin Writer in 1955 speaking to Robert Gard]

If the people of Wisconsin knew that someone would encourage them to express themselves in any way they chose, if they knew that someone would back them and help them when they wanted help, there would be such a rising of creative expression as is yet unheard of in Wisconsin, for the whole expression would be of and about ourselves.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

So, as we express ourselves, as we think about what life is all about, as we participate creatively in Wisconsin’s democracy, Governor La Follette and President Van Hise will be cheering.

I’d like to close with words of my dad, Robert E. Gard, who in 1969 ended the Arts in the Small Community book with these words, a prose poem that was later set to music by Malone/McLaughlin of Amery, Wisconsin.

I think Fighting Bob La Follette, Presidents Van Hise and Frank, Ethel Rockwell, John Steuart Curry, Aaron Bora, Jim Schwalbach and so many, many more through the decades would approve. If you try, what may you expect? First the community, welded through art to a new consciousness of self. A new being, perhaps a new appearance. A people proud of achievements which lift them through the creative above the ordinary.

A new opportunity for children to find exciting experiences in art and to carry this excitement on throughout their lives. A mixing of peoples and backgrounds through art and a new view of hope for mankind and an elevation of man, not degradation. New values for community and individual life and a sense that here in this place we are contributing to the maturity of a great nation. If you try, you can indeed alter the face and the heart of America.

[Maryo Gard Ewell, Karen and Norman Goeschko, Rebecca Herb, Anne Katz, Helen Klebesadel, Liese Pfeifer, and George Tzougros singing the words of Robert Gard by Malone and McLaughlin]

If you try, what may you expect First a community Welded through art, a new being Of people proud of achievement A new opportunity for children A mixing of peoples A new view of hope for mankind New values for community life If you try, you can indeed Alter the face and heart You can alter the face and heart Of America.

[Maryo Gard Ewell]

You can indeed alter the face and the heart of America. Thank you.

[applause]