MIRO, INTERVIEW 1 Cass Corridor Artists Oral History Project Interviewee: Marsha Miro Interviewer: Hilary Maurin Date of Interview: April 21, 2010 Location: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), Detroit, MI Maurin: We are here at MOCAD [Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit] in Detroit, and this is Hilary Maurin interviewing Marsha Miro on Wednesday afternoon the 21st of April 2010. So, just to start, I guess we can talk a little bit about your background, where you were born, where you grew up, and what your education was. Miro: Sure. I was born here, at Hutzel Hospital, and grew up here, went to James Vernor Elementary School, and Mumford High School, and then I went to University of Michigan. And I got my bachelor’s at Michigan, and then I got my Master’s at Wayne State University, in art history. My Bachelor’s was a major in Political Science and a minor in Art History. So, that’s my training. Maurin: How did you choose to get your education in art history, how did you choose that major? MIRO, INTERVIEW 2 Miro: Well, I was at University of Michigan and for my junior year I went to London, to the London School of Economics, and they didn’t have junior year programs in those days, so I was part of the regular school, I wasn’t kind of in a separate program. And, I got really involved with the students, and protests, and the city, and I spent a lot of time in the museums, and I really got to know the whole scene, the punk scene, it was just starting, but it was really the swinging sixties, and it was -- so The Beatles and Mick Jagger used to come and play in the cafeteria, and it was really such an amazing place to be then. And, I felt like I was much more interested in the arts than I was in the political science, and there were great teachers there, some of the greatest teachers in the world, but, I kind of thought it paled by comparison, all this historical stuff and philosophical stuff, and you know, even though we protest and some of my friends got put in jail ‘cause they were Marxist, and some of them got put in jail ‘cause they were Conservatives, and I just felt like I wanted to be in art, and so I came back to Michigan, and that’s how I got my double major. Well, my minor (phone ringing). And I started working in an art gallery when I moved back here, couple years after college, and working on my Master’s at Wayne in Art History. It was a very good department at that point, a lot of amazing teachers, Art Schier, and Bernard Goldman, and Wayne Andrews, and I mean they were as good as art historians teaching anywhere in the country, at that point they were great. So it was a great education. Maurin: So were you working at the gallery while you were attending Wayne State? Miro: Mm-hm. It was the Gertrude Kasle Gallery in the Fisher Building -- MIRO, INTERVIEW 3 Maurin: Okay. Miro: -- which is a really fine gallery. I was the assistant to the director, the woman who ran it, and got to know some really amazing artists. She showed everybody, from the abstract expressionists, and a lot of great people, and I was just really committed to art. And then I graduated from Wayne and got a job teaching art history at Oakland Community College. Maurin: Okay. Miro: And taught there for a couple years, and we had a recession, and, so I was the youngest, and got thrown out. And there weren’t a lot of jobs available then, but there was an opening for the art critic at the Detroit Free Press, and I really felt like the community needed a critical voice, at both newspapers, and even though I was young and wasn’t sure what an art critic did, I figured I’d learn, I think I learned everything along the way. So, I applied and I got the job, and I stayed as art critic at the Free Press from 1974 til 1995, and I left when we had the strike, the big newspaper strike. And when I left, I was with my friend Susanne Hilberry, who owns a gallery, and we were talking and she really felt we needed a contemporary art museum in the city, and so the two of us started working on MOCAD, and at the same time I was working at Cranbrook. I got a job when I left the Free Press as architectural historian at Cranbrook, and my job was to document all the new architecture at Cranbrook, and there’s been some amazing buildings put up. And so, I was doing both at the same time, and I did a movie about the architecture at Cranbrook, and I’ve accumulated all kinds of oral histories and interviews and I’m halfway through a book about MIRO, INTERVIEW 4 the architecture at Cranbrook. And, the reason I’m only halfway is because I stopped to work on MOCAD. And we opened in 1996, but I really started working -- 2006, I’m sorry, but we really started working in earnest, and I stopped at Cranbrook in 2004. Maurin: Okay. Miro: Even though it was 1995, we started the idea in ’95, and then, finally got it up in 2006. Maurin: Wow. Miro: And then I was the founding director here, and helped really establish it with a whole group of wonderful people from the community. And then we hired a person to be the director here, ‘cause I’m not a art – I’m not trained as -- curatorial work or directorial work, obviously, I’m a writer. And so, his name is Luis Croquer, and he came and I stopped. And now I’m the president of the Board here at MOCAD, and I’m back finishing my book at Cranbrook, and working on a number of other books too, and a number of other projects, but that’s mainly the story. Maurin: Wow. Miro: (laughing) A lot of years condensed into a few minutes. MIRO, INTERVIEW 5 Maurin: So when you started working for the Free Press, you said there was kind of a lack of art critics in the Free Press and in the Oakland Press at that time, or? Miro: Well, there was one critic at the News [The Detroit News], Joy Hakanson Colby, who was wonderful, but I had a different take on how to be a critic than she did, and I felt like we needed a couple voices. People would come and go at the other newspapers at -- (interruption, tape stops). And there were other people writing around town, but the Free Press was a major forum because we had a circulation of over a million people in those days, and I felt like there needed to be a consistent voice, and when I interviewed, even though I had art historical training, they said that they’d be willing to teach me how to be a journalist because they couldn’t find any journalists who knew enough about art, so they decided to take that tact. So, that was how I got started in, you know, it was 1974 when I first started writing, and so really, the whole Cass Corridor explosion happened during my – a little of it started in ’71-’72 when Sam Wagstaff was here, but it really started growing then. And so I was writing about it, consistently, I mean, I would say, at least once or twice a month I wrote a story about an artist involved in that whole movement. And I wrote one story in the Sunday paper, and then a review in the Friday paper, and I did the art calendar with listings in it too. So that was what I did every week. And then if there were news stories, I would write the news stories about art, whatever. Maurin: Could you just describe the scene, I guess, a little bit? The Cass Corridor Artists? And possibly how they fit into the larger Detroit art scene? MIRO, INTERVIEW 6 Miro: Well, what was interesting was that, I think that the city was kind of in turmoil because of the rebellions in 1967, and there were a lot of people who had moved out and the -- it wasn’t that safe in the city, but it didn’t seem to bother any of the artists, I mean, and it never bothered me either, working at the Free Press all those years. And the artists found these inexpensive places to live on along the Cass Corridor, old -- it was the old, not City Hall, what was it, something like that, god I can’t remember, but they were living in the old industrial buildings and they could find inexpensive space, and I think that helped start things because they could live around, most of them went to Wayne State, and then graduated and could live in the area of Wayne, in Cass, and – Convention Hall, it was an old convention center where a lot of them lived and had studios. And for very little, they could be there and there was a lot of communication between them because you’d live on the Corridor and you’d meet each other and you’d go to, you know, the Willis Bar, and you’d go to all the stuff in the neighborhoods, and then the Willis Gallery opened, and then they had their own gallery space.