Peter Marzio, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, since 1982, died on Thursday after a recurrence of cancer. He was 67 years old. Under his direction, the MFAH flourished, adding two new buildings and a sculpture garden designed by Isamu Noguchi, developing a vibrant educational outreach program, and growing its collection from 14,000 to 62,000 works of art.

In crafting such robust institutional growth, Marzio accomplished a rare thing: "a fusion of elitism and populism into what we might call the ‘elitist populist' outlook," Laurie Fendrich, professor of fine arts at Hofstra University, writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. The internationally renowned Marzio was the first in his immigrant family to graduate high school. "He dedicated his life to making his own particular, visceral experience of art available to all."

In 2006 Marzio spoke at "Shaping the Future of Craft," the American Craft Council's leadership conference in Houston, Texas. He spoke compellingly about the historical and contemporary role of art in American lives. He gave us insight into his unique institutional philosophy. And he articulated a vision for the future of art and craft not only at the MFAH, but in the culture at large.

"The only standard is excellence," he said. "It should not matter whether the artist used a paint brush or a wheel or an acetylene torch."

As a tribute to Marzio's life and work, we wanted to share his remarks from our 2006 conference, as published in Shaping the Future of Craft, a collection of edited transcripts from the event.

 

American Craft Council 2006 Leadership Conference:
Shaping the Future of Craft
Houston, Texas, October 19-21

Peter Marzio, Guest Speaker

Good morning. I think I belong to the wrong organizations. Yesterday afternoon I returned from Montreal for a conference of forty of the top international art museums. For breakfast, they served stale bread. The auditorium did not have a microphone, so half of the people who are older than I am couldn't hear anyone say anything. Compared to today's buffet and these fine facilities, I feel as if I have died and gone to heaven here. [Laughter]

Cindi Strauss and Sara Morgan asked me to talk a little bit about how arts institutions function and what role crafts play in those museums.

How do you make a success of an arts institution? And how can you be sure that crafts, decorative arts, applied arts, whichever terms you want to use, are included in a meaningful way? There are both simple answers and complex answers. I'd like to talk briefly about four points: One, historical, two, speaking from the point of view of the Museum of Fine Arts' history, three, the Museum of Fine Arts today, and four, the Museum of Fine Arts tomorrow.

First, historically, I think it's important to keep in mind that many of the issues you're facing in craft are not unique to craft. When this country was first settled, most of the people who came were conservative Protestants. They were against what was going on in European society. Even people in the same religious groups didn't want our founders in the group with them.

These new Americans were against "Popery." They were against the visual arts. They believed that making valuable objects and embracing them was a sin. All you have to do is spend time reading the letters from the 17th and 18th centuries to see that our forefathers took all this very, very seriously. They protested against royal patronage and against church patronage of the arts in all forms. They believed that "artistic" objects whether they were paintings or chalices or garments, were getting in the way of the individual's relationship with God. TO them, art and craft represented pride and greed, and, in an odd way, art became an enemy of the first Europeans who settled in America.

That suspicion of art and craft is still very much with us. I know America is much more diverse now. We're more open. We have lots of museums and so forth, but built into the American mind, I would argue, and I think I can give you endless examples, is still this notion among a large sector of the population that art is phony, that it gets in the way of logic and honest thought, and that it is an arena for only certain kinds of people who aren't truly American.

Those people who did care about art and craft had to wrestle with an important issue: If you don't have an established church, and you don't have a royal house, how are you going to have art and craft? Who was going to pay for it? Who was going to order it? And the big issue that came up right in the beginning of the 19th century was simple - how do you create an art life in a democracy?

That had never been tried before. And ultimately, it occurred in two ways. One way was rooted in the 17th century in Holland. You make art life part of the market economy. And the second way was philanthropy.

The market economy issue I think we understand. In addition to being commissioned to create works of art, a radical idea evolved: you made something, whether it was a cup or a painting or whatever, and you would simply put it out there to see if anyone would come along and buy it. IN early 19th century America, this market-driven approach began with printmaking, furniture, and crafts, but it didn't take hold in any serious manner until after the Civil War. Philanthropy is much the same story.

Modern philanthropy, as we know it today, was invented in America not just because Americans were generous, but because they had to practice it to survive. The first settlers arrived. There wasn't instant wealth to be found in North America the way there appeared to be in South America. In order to survive, the settlers had to stick together. They had to dig in. They had to help one another build each other's homes and public buildings. Everything had to be the result of a cooperative spirit.

Then, as life became crowded, and some of the people wanted more land or new opportunities, they moved west. And what they experienced in that first era they repeated in the second era. They had to stick together in hostile environments, they had to work together, share, give each other things in order to survive. And then they moved west again. This pattern occurs through five or six generations: giving and sharing. And, by the time the West is settled, that pattern becomes a normal way of living. All the tax did in the beginning of the 20th century was to codify, put into law, what had been established through practice. Even today you have about 10 percent of the U.S. economy that is nonprofit or philanthropic.

Although only a tiny sliver of that 10 percent - literally a tiny sliver - goes to cultural activity of all kinds, it is significant within the art world itself.

From the very beginning of U.S. history, art and craft have had to justify their existence. Imbedded in the American use of English are art words with double meanings. IF you look it up in the dictionary of Americanisms, the word design often has different meanings than it did in England. If you say, "This is a beautiful design," that's a compliment. But also in America, people would say, "Be careful, that man has a design on your wallet." That is not a positive comment about design. And there are many, many words all through the English language like that as used in America that betray, if you wish, this very early established notion that art may be something to beware of rather than to be praised.

A slow growing market economy for art and craft and America's instinct for philanthropy led to the funding of the first museums. There were a number of them established before the Civil War, only two or three of them stuck to survive to today. The real museum movement, which is what I'm addressing today, began right after the Civil War. If you look at their charters, then you will see that every one of them put education as the primary reason for the existence of the institution. Also, the museums were practical. They called for the application of artistic principles to everyday life. There was a great fear that the Industrial Revolution was going to dehumanize the objects that people used and was going to turn people into machines. What would prevent that?

According to this minority of art crusaders, museum would be the safeguard. And that, too, is written into many post-Civil War museum charters. It was called "industrial art education."

At the same time, many of those museums were also schools. That, too, was an American invention. The idea that one institution could be a museum and a school seemed normal to the American art people, yet it was foreign anywhere else. And what was the purpose of the school? The purpose of the schools was to teach what they called mechanics, that is, men and women who made things, the most beautiful designs. And many of the fairs and expositions of the 19th century all revolved around this principle. To bring together art, design, and industrialization.

Until roughly the 1880s, there was one broad ideal of art: utilitarian objects beautifully designed were seen as part of a broader world of art that included paintings and sculptures. The American drawing manuals of the 19th century insisted that art must be fully integrated into everything we do. Therefore, this distinction that we make today between craft and fine art was not common in the 19th century in America. It is a 20th century invention.

This separation of art and craft was caused by the simple fact of training time needed for people in industrial and mechanical pursuits. Which was more important, learning to draw or to understand how a steam engine worked? Clearly by the late 1880s and early 1980s, the industrial arts broke away and entered the field of engineering, while fine arts looked to academics and fine art museums. The worlds of utility and art were separated from one another.

The art, craft, and industrial design books published in the late 1890s reflect this trend toward specialization. Lessons on free-hand drawing and perspective were deleted from "training" manuals, while drawing books for would-be artists focused more and more on the production of beautiful objects for their own sake. Art schools, too, were changed.

Immediately after the Civil War, industrial art, craft, and fine art were taught in one school, which, as I noted earlier, was usually linked to a museum. The heart of the pedagogy was the belief that drawing was the key to success in each discipline. But learning to draw required years of training for most students. For those who sought careers in the industry, the time seemed wasted. So special industrial design schools were started. Again, fine art and utilitarian pursuits went separate ways.

The art school continued to focus on professional art education, modeling itself on European schools and academies. For a variety of reasons, the American schools began to break away from their museum associations, too. As a result, most of the major art institutions that were founded as museum/school complexes are now divorced.

"Professionalization," in an odd way, fractured the act of creation into tiny pieces, and this fragmentation is still very much with us. It also opened the door to the inevitable establishment of a hierarchy of creativity. Following the lead of European academies, which ranked painting and sculpture by the subjects being depicted (from portraits to historical themes), art schools and eventually museums placed the utilitarian creations at the lowest rung of the scale and paintings at the highest.

Obviously, there are numerous exceptions to these broad historical trends, and I think we are beginning to see a new attitude on the part of museums and art schools. There is a gradual movement toward a holistic approach to creativity that seeks to unite the bits and pieces of art that earlier generations created.

I know this is true in Houston. The question is, for me selfishly look at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, why are the trustees in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, so interested in craft and really working hard to integrate it so intensively into the broad collections?

Our museum started very slowly. It was founded in 1900. It didn't have a building until 1924, and it didn't have a full-time director until 1954. The permanent collection evolved slowly because Houston itself was a small city until the end of World War II. The post-war period was a time of great prosperity, but the number of people who supported the MFAH remained small.

There was an attitude of suspicion about art, which referred back to that older, Protestant ideal I mentioned earlier. High culture experts and Art with a capital "A" were things to be wary of.

The person who paved the way for this broader approach to art, the person who demystified it and made it seem right, was Ima Hogg. Her collections of American art, decorative art, and crafts are displayed seamlessly in her home, Bayou Bend. Donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1957, this treasury demanded a more open attitude to art that fitted so well with the values and ideals of Houstonians. While a large portion of the works at Bayou Bend might be categorized as craft, no one sat around trying to separate one object from another. The only standard that mattered was aesthetic excellence.

Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend placed the MFAH on a different plane from other museums. Because the museum collection was small, the institution was open to new ideas and attitudes. The brilliance of the Bayou Bend became of a model for the whole museum.

Here's one example: During the 1980s, the museum decided to explore the private collections in Houston. The result was a large exhibition, "The Private Eye," which contained over 900 works of art. At least half of those works would be considered "craft."

That really told me a lot. What did it do for the museum? Well, first of all, it taught me a lot about the values of the people in Houston. One example, a man whom I didn't know well at the time, although he was on the board, was Mr. Alfred C. Glassell, Jr. When he heard we were doing this show he mentioned he had some gold works from Africa and a few things from various pre-Columbian cultures. So I'm thinking we'll do a case - maybe divide the case into three parts. Indonesia and pre-Colombian and African. Well, to make a long story short, we now own, thanks to that show and his generosity, over 1,200 works of African gold. In addition, the MFAH has by far the largest collection both in promised gifts and in actual gifts of pre-Columbian gold. And I've been told by people who know the field of Southeast Asia that our Indonesian gold is second only to the national museum in Indonesia.

I can remember when we put these works on view, one visiting museum director said, "Well, it will appeal to the people, but it's not really art." And that institution just recently paid almost a million dollars for an African gold pectoral. I love that.

This idea of community embracing you and being open to what is there is what lead us to understand and to deal with, once again, what you're calling craft.

As a print curator I understand what it feels like when someone looks at a title of a show and then says, "Oh, it's only prints." Believe me, I know your pain.

But the real question is how can you open your institution to a diversity of media and at the same time maintain high standards? For example, because the MFAH has exhibited quilts and the works of self-taught artists, the issue we have to deal with all the time is: Does the approval of self-taught artists or even trained craftsmen devalue classical standards? In other words, if you embrace the one, are you devaluing or thumbing your nose at the other? Does this openness reflect a lazy thought process? Does it signal the inability to create a grand aesthetic scheme, i.e., like Hegel or Kant? I ask myself this - why do we not flinch when we have all mediums on exhibit in galleries of ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art: pottery and adornment. Were the Egyptians better potters than you are? I don't think so. Were they great potters? Yes? Are some of you great potters? Yes. So why is that a double standard? I don't quite understand.

Or in the medieval period, we proudly display metal works including armor and religious objects. We call this art. Well, you do metal works. Why are the medieval crafts art? Because they are old? And look at the Asian tradition - that distinction between art and craft just isn't there.

The other question I ask myself is this: For craft to be accepted by broad-minded people, why does it have to be in stylistic sync with the paintings and sculptures of the same era?

I just have trouble with that kind of thinking. My experience in Houston tells me that if we are going to really win the hearts and minds of the American people, and overcome this suspicion of art, we need to look at the mediums that people feel close to and maybe tried to learn.

I think that the museums need crafts a whole lot more than crafts need the museums. I see the museum where eventually there are galleries of certain kinds of objects that fit into your category of craft. These galleries permit visitors to seen an artist in depth and to understand various movements and styles. These specialized galleries also would show the evolution of form, the evolution of medium. But then I also see galleries where what should happen is simple integration of all mediums. The only standard is excellence. It should not matter whether the artist used a paint brush or a wheel or an acetylene torch.

What is the result of this philosophy? In Houston it has meant a steady growth in audience, membership, collections, research, publications, and education programs.

Long-term growth can occur only if the community loves you and believes in you. I believe that that has happened simply by opening the place up, by welcoming the diversity of mediums, by looking for the best without getting hung up on predetermined categories, by trusting your own vision and mind, and by being willing to take the knocks that come with doing anything new. The museum spoke in a language that diverse communities could comprehend. That is the Texas spirit, and as a result has manifested itself in the growth of the institution.

Image by photine, licensed under Creative Commons.