COLBY INTERVIEW 1
Cass Corridor Documentation Project
Oral History Project
Interviewee: Joy Hakanson Colby
Relationship to Cass Corridor: Art Critic for Detroit News, 1947-2006
Interviewer: Jennifer Dye
Date of Interview: November 22, 2011
Location: Telephone interview from Kresge Library, Wayne State University and St. Louis
Dye: This is Jennifer Dye, and I’m interviewing Joy Hakanson Colby for the Cass Corridor Art
Project. I am in Detroit, and it is November 22nd, 2011, and Joy is in St. Louis. And you know that I’m recording this?
Colby: Yes
Dye: OK. I’m going to ask some questions, some of which I’ve already asked before in our conversations. Where were you born?
Colby: I was born in Detroit.
Dye: And did you grow up in Detroit?
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Colby: I grew up in Detroit and graduated from Wayne State.
Dye: Can you tell me something about your parents?
Colby: I was an adopted child, and my father’s family was born in Sweden and came over in
New York. My mother’s family belonged to the Detroit German community. And they were wonderful people. I mean amazing people. I have never looked for birth parents, because that seemed kind of a slap in their face.
Dye: Did you have any siblings?
Colby: No, no siblings.
Dye: You were an only child. When was the first time you remember being interested in art?
Colby: Well, my parents took me to the Detroit Institute of Arts. I kind of grew up in there. I always had lessons of all sorts. My father died when I was ten, and my mother devoted her life
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full-time to entering me in classes. So, anyway, I went to Saturday classes for children at the
Detroit Institute of Arts, and grew up in the museum. And felt that it was my museum. And I still feel that way.
Dye: I can see where you would. Did you concentrate on painting, or did you work in other media?
Colby: I was in love with painting, painting was my major at Wayne State. It was painting and drawing. I had minors in English and Psychology. But I don’t know how I got into the newspaper business. I had lots of mentors. I was lucky when I was going to college. And I had no experience, certainly, writing, and I was not trained as a journalist.
Dye: So it was your mentors that helped you get in at the newspaper?
Colby: Yes. The former critic at the Detroit News, Florence Davies, was women’s editor and art editor. And she had a house in Detroit in which professors and people like Dr. Valentiner, the director of the DIA, the great Dr. Valentiner lived there for a while. Terry Rathbone, who was the great director of the Saint Louis museum, lived in that house. And Wayne Claxton, the head of the Wayne State Art Department, also lived there. And I knew Flossie. I was in and out,
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visiting. I sort of grew up knowing people, and that was how I got into the newspaper business.
Which I promptly fell in love with. And it lasted a lifetime.
Dye: That’s good, that’s very good. So, I know you covered art [at the paper], but you weren’t able to cover art full time. And it sounded like you weren’t covering art the first year or so?
Colby: The first year, I was hired as a society reporter, which was kind of funny. I learned more about people and values, I think, by that experience. And then, when Florence Davies left the
News, I was appointed art writer. Well, of course, most papers, outside of the New York Times, don’t value art critics highly. I mean, it isn’t a beat that makes money, that brings in money, that has a big following. So I was assigned to two days a week. And then I had other jobs, writing women’s features, and I was even beauty editor for a while, working under a false name, Lucy
Carroll. But I loved every bit of it. It was great fun.
I had the advantage at the paper, by being educated and growing up in Detroit, because I knew people, whereas other people who were hired about the same time, you know, from the
University of Michigan or Michigan State, had to learn a whole new group of people. So somehow I hung on, by sort of teaching myself the business. And I’ve always had people who helped me, and that was true at the News. They had experienced newspaper people and I would stay half the night learning, learning the trade, if you will.
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Dye: That was a great opportunity.
Colby: Yes. But my love was art. It was a passion. And my husband [Raymond Colby], I met my husband in the Wayne State Art Department. He came back from World War II, where he was an officer and a pilot. And we were married in the fifties, and we had three daughters. All of whom are in art, and all of us are out of Wayne State. And when they gave me an art award of some sort, I can’t remember the name of it, I thought it was probably because I had bred more students for the department than any other living human being (laughter). We had a passion as a family, we were all interested in art. And my girls were, I mean, they never got involved with drugs or anything, they were busy with art, which was really wonderful.
Dye: Yes, it was. Can you tell me something about the art community in Detroit in the forties and fifties?
Colby: It wasn’t very active. I mean, we had some galleries on Livernois. I came to the News in
1946, and I was there working full-time for ten years. And then I free-lanced.
They allowed me to take the art beat out of the paper, which was the first person they had allowed to do that. And I did it, and it was great. I got $50 a column, and that didn’t include mileage or anything else, but it was just a love thing. There was sort of a gallery scene on
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Livernois near 8 Mile. There was a kind of a wonderful character, Anna Werbe, who had a gallery. She was quite old at the time, but she knew about art, and was kind of wonderful, because she was a real character. But that gradually grew. I got a copy of the book, which you may have seen, written about Bob Wilbert, Robert Wilbert?
Dye: I think I’ve seen it. I don’t have it here.
Colby: Well, he came in the fifties, I think it was. And he got things stirred up. He was really amazing and wonderful. He found a man who had a little frame shop, and liked art, and wanted somebody to make a little gallery in the front. So Bob did it. And it was really, he introduced young artists, and he was very young himself at the time. And that started something.
And then of course, along came, it was a bit later, quite a bit later, you know in the late sixties. I think it was the late sixties, the Cass Corridor group came on the scene. And that had the blessing of Sam Wagstaff and also Fred Cummings, who was the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts at the time. And these young guys, and I say “guys” because it was a guy movement, despite the fact that Ellen Phelan, and Nancy Mitchnick and Nancy Pletos, were a part of it, but they didn’t, they weren’t that kind of macho (laughs) guys. I mean, they were wonderful artists, each one of them. Very interesting, very different. But they did their own thing. At heart, they were not these
“guys.” And it was an amazing energy that these young people, Steve Foust, Douglas James,
Michael Luchs, Gordon Newton, those people were. And then of course the faculty at Wayne
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was a part of that, [G.] Alden Smith, the chair of the department at the time had a studio in the
Common Ground, which was on Cass Avenue, next to the funeral home. And I think Aris
Koutroulis was there, too.
I’m not sure of the date of the opening of the Willis Gallery, but they opened on Willis Street, about a half block off Cass. And that was where the public had a chance to see their work. And then there was John Egner, who was active with the Cass Corridor. He was a young artist on the
Wayne State faculty. He was very influential. He had a studio in Convention Hall, which has long since been torn down. And John was there, I think Douglas James was, too.
And a guy named James Pearson Duffy called me one day, and said he had read an article about these young artists, and wanted to know where he could see their work. I maybe had been a little enthusiastic about Doug James, because I owned his work, and I thought the world of him as a painter. But anyway Duffy followed up, and that was the beginning of his interest in the Cass
Corridor. And the work, the Cass Corridor work, looked wonderful in Duffy’s warehouse. It looked amazing. And it was the right situation. Later on, I’ve forgotten the date, but not too long ago, Wayne State had a show of the Duffy Collection in their gallery, and the work looked like outstanding graduate work.
Dye: I see.
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Colby: It came, it came back.
Dye: The environment wasn’t as conducive.
Colby: No. No. The work, I think, raw energy is the most attractive of this work had. It was interesting to me because these artists had Detroit, of course, you know, was the city, Motown, or automotive town. But they never, the Cass Corridor artists did not reflect an industrial center in their work. They reflected, they put together pieces of a dying city, instead of this energy which was— And of course in Detroit, there was a big change in the automotive industry, and that was on the way, only I certainly couldn’t see it at the time. But that was an interesting point, and they were like prophets in the sense that they sensed the city’s dying, and they loved it, and that was a part of the energy of the work.
Dye: Now were there artists working in the Forsythe Building as well? Was that the connection?
I noticed that the Forsythe Saga [exhibit] was [held] because the space was available. But were there artists working there?
Colby: Where is the Forsythe Building? I’ve forgotten.
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Dye: Well, it’s where— I don’t have the address here, but the Forsythe Saga art show was held there, and you mentioned it in your farewell article, which I thought I had right here.
Colby: I’m drawing a blank.
Dye: That’s not a problem. I told you, it’s not a test.
Colby: It’ll come to me in the middle of the night.
Dye: Of course it will. Do you remember the Forsythe Saga show?
Colby: Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh, now I know. That was that old wreck of a building. And it was the police storage for some sort of grandstands or something for parades, they put it in the Forsythe
Building. But it kind of went to wreck and ruin. But I can’t remember who was in there off-hand.
Dye: I have stories about it. We’re just trying to get your take, what you remember of things. I came across mention of a show called “Art Presentation” in Mary Dennison’s home in 1974.
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Colby: I didn’t see that show.
Dye: You didn’t?
Colby: I don’t think I did. I remember Mary Dennison was very active in that. I think that—
Well, better not say that (laughs).
Dye: Well, it wouldn’t have to go on the record, but there’s not much point in saying it if you don’t want it to go on the record.
Colby: No, I don’t (laughs).
Dye: I also came across reference to the “Detroit Artists’ Invitational” at Detroit Bank and Trust, also in ’74.
Colby: Oh, yes. Yes. That was a show like a breath of fresh air. It was really kind of wonderful.
It was downtown, in one of those flossy buildings, you know, business center. And this art, you
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know, came in and it was so fresh and nice to see this downtown. It was interesting the way the
Cass Corridor work adapted to different spaces.
You know, I think it was sad when the old Willis Gallery closed. That was a wonderful space. I walked through it with Philip Guston one day, when he was in town for a one-man show. And he said, “I like this space. I would like to exhibit here.” And he said, “It’s just great.” And I asked,
“What do you like about it?” And he said “I don’t know, the space is good, and the feeling is good.” He said, “There’s something about it.” Well, I thought it was rather sad when the Willis
Gallery moved to the Fisher Building, which was just not the right place for it. And the work looked kind of past tense then, and it wasn’t, I don’t know, it just didn’t look right there. And other galleries, you know the Gertrude Kasle Gallery was very successful there, and then her space was taken over by Feigenson-Rosenstein Gallery [in 1976], and Charles McGee moved his gallery there for a while.
Dye: Yes, was there much African American art being encouraged at that time? Or going on at that time?
Colby: Yes. That was another explosion of interest. And the leader of that movement, of course, was Charles McGee. He was just an amazing man, you know, he’s been through so many—he’s explored so many kinds of material, and he’s been successful in every one of them. And this was the beginning of the success of Black art in Detroit. It had been around for a while, but nobody
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paid too much attention to it (laughs). And all of a sudden, this movement, it started in, I think the exact date when it started, for me at any rate, was in 1969 at the Detroit Artists’ Market. They had a show, “Seven Black Artists,” and Charles McGee put that together, too. Then Charles moved the gallery out to his studio on 6 Mile Road. In the front room they had a Saturday class for children, and the artists taught it, and they were very much involved with that. So all of this
Black energy was going on while the Cass Corridor group was flourishing.
And Detroit was quite a place at that time. You know women had been greatly ignored, and
Wayne State was turning out wonderful women like Ellen Phelan and Nancy Mitchnick and
Nancy Pletos. And I called Bob Wilbert and asked him about the women that they were teaching, and I said, “I thought there was a women’s movement, can you give some names of some people?” I said I’d forgotten them all, outside of the three that I’ve mentioned and he said, “No, I can’t remember that. I think you’re making it up.” But it was true. Wayne was the source of that energy, which later was taken over by CCS. You know, that happened back and forth and back and forth. But it was really an amazing, wonderful era.
I think that several of the Cass Corridor artists were deeply troubled. And that meant that they weren’t continuing to make the kind of work that they had made in the beginning. But a group of them went to New York. And they came back to Detroit, New York was not quite the kind of—
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Dye: It didn’t work for them?
Colby: It didn’t work for them. And of course I had children in the art program at Wayne State.
My oldest daughter Sarah was a painter, and my youngest [Lisa] is a craftsperson, a jewelry designer. She’s wonderful, she lives by that. Not very affluently, but she lives by it. And I could never write anything about them. This was my community and not theirs. And they felt a little stung, if you will. So when they finished Wayne State they left Detroit. And I think my husband never quite forgave me for that. Because they wanted to make their own names and their own way. And Sarah, my oldest, did very well, she was teaching at Parsons for a while and she was on the faculty of the Maryland Institute where she got her masters’. And then the girls were, my oldest and my middle daughter, Katy, they were great friends of Tim Gunn. Do you know the notorious, famous Tim Gunn?
Dye: I can’t place the name.
Colby: He’s on that fashion program on TV, and he’s very much the in-guy. He was the chair of fashion at Parsons. Well, that’s neither here nor there. And Lisa studied with Phillip Fike at
Wayne State, and then went on to— I’ve forgotten the name of it.
Dye: So when were your daughters in school at Wayne?
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Colby: Oh, gosh, you know, I can’t give you a date. I think they were there during the seventies or eighties. Yeah.
Dye: You mentioned most of the galleries that I had found in my reading, but you didn’t mention the Alternative Space Detroit. Are you familiar with that one? And I don’t have an address here.
If not, that’s fine.
Colby: It’ll come to me in the middle of the night.
Dye: Of course, of course.
Colby: At least I got the Forsythe Building.
Dye: You did.
Colby: When did that gallery operate?
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Dye: I didn’t include that information in my questions. I’ll try to get back to you on that. Just so you know.
Colby: Okay.
Dye: And a couple of the other shows that I found mention of. One was at Somerset Mall [now
Somerset Collection], called “Cass Corridor Artists”?
Colby: Oh, yes. Yes, that was interesting. It was kinda forgettable. There was something about the atmosphere that wasn’t, you know. I always had the feeling about Somerset that the people who came there lived to shop. I think that was fine to get the art out and make people aware of it, if they really looked at it. I don’t know that they did.
Dye: I suppose some did.
Colby: Yeah.
Dye: And the last show I have information about is “Forsythe Detroit.” That was in ’76.
Apparently that was a reprise of the artists in the “Forsythe Saga.” You don’t remember that?
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Colby: Well, I remember that they gave shows at the Forsythe Building. I don’t remember that one.
Dye: I came across mention of one specific show in ’76, with that name, but that’s fine.
Colby: I seem to remember that there were several shows at the Forsythe Building with one or more artists featured, Cass Corridor people. Because I remember going over there, and I had lined up some people to interview. And one of them was Gordon Newton. So I talked to everybody else that I wanted, and somebody said to me, “Gordon won’t talk to you.” And I said,
“Well, I had an appointment with him, I thought.” So we finally came face-to-face, and he sank to the floor and crawled away on his hands and knees. And I was just amazed (laughs). They said, “See? He won’t talk to you” (laughs).
Dye: Was that his style?
Colby: Yeah. He didn’t want to talk. Gordon, you know I really never talked to him. But I think he was, and probably still is, an amazing artist. I mean, he had all sorts of ideas. Some of them never gelled, but you know, I would see his work here and there, Susanne Hilberry, I don’t know whether she still carries Gordon Newton in her gallery, but I think she probably does. And she
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always had interesting things by him, drawings. Some of them are not quite finished, but they were interesting.
Dye: Did the DIA work with the local artists during this period?
Colby: Well, Sam Wagstaff was a great. He favored the Cass Corridor. He inspired them, really.
You know, I loved Sam. He was just a great guy. He was funny, funny, funny, funny. He had this attitude. He was the first curator, for example, to include a motorcycle in a local show at the
Detroit Institute of Arts, which was wonderful. I mean, there’s a whole group of motorcycle people out there now, that was way before its time. And the Guggenheim, was it the
Guggenheim? Yes. the Guggenheim, many years later, had a motorcycle show. Which went out to Las Vegas, I think. But Sam was always—he didn’t have a time, he was every time. And he collected photographs, and sold them for a couple million dollars to the Getty. And then, before he died, he was collecting 19th century silver, which makes me kinda cringe. I mean, we couldn’t understand exactly why Sam was collecting that, but he was very interested in that. But he was just unexpected. He only, he only was a few years at the DIA, and it was a terrible loss. His great love, of course, was Robert Mapplethorpe. And he went to New York to be with him. I think. I mean, that was part of the reason. I’ll never forget, I had my eldest daughter, we were in the
Willis one day, Sarah was with me, and Sam was there with Robert Mapplethorpe, and that was before Mapplethorpe was widely known. But he was dressed in black leather from head to toe.
He was quite a fascinating sight. I thought Sarah’s eyes were going to bug right out of her head.
But there was always something going on with Sam. And we needed him in Detroit.
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Dye: And he wasn’t here long.
Colby: He wasn’t here long, no. That’s very much too bad.
Dye: I’ve got a note about John Hallmark Neff becoming curator of modern art. Did the relationship to local artists change at that point?
Colby: Well, John was a funny bird. He was kinda stiff and remote, and he was more the art scholar. I don’t know. I don’t think he had much of an impact here.
Dye: Not locally?
Colby: Not locally, no.
Dye: I know the Detroit Artists’ Market had been around for quite a while. Did it change in this period, or did it remain what it had been, pretty much?
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Colby: Well. The Artists’ Market, when I first started at the News, it kind of grew out of everything in Detroit. Every art thing grew out of the arts and crafts movement. That includes
CCS, which was the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, and, of course, Cranbrook, because
George Booth, the founder of Cranbrook, was president of the Detroit arts and crafts movement for a while. He carried that out to Cranbrook. And then, of course, Wayne State, there were other influences. So everything was really started here by the arts and crafts movement.
Dye: And that takes me back to something I wanted to ask about. How did you get involved with writing Art and a City?
Colby: How did I get involved with writing?
Dye: In writing this particular book, the history of the arts and crafts society.
Colby: Oh, Lawrence Fleischmann, who was president of the Arts Commission at the time, asked me to write the book. And so I went over, and I found their records. It was an awful mess, in one of the rooms at the old arts and crafts society on, oh gosh, what was the name of that street? I know that like my own street and I can’t remember that.
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Dye: I should know that, too.
Colby: Is that building still up? Well, it was an amazing, wonderful building. Anyway, all their records were in a big mess on the floor. So I got into that and, of course I was working at the time and I was newly married, and I really had more on my plate than any human being ought to have. That’s how that came about. I got very interested, of course, in the arts and crafts, and somebody told me they were going to have a seminar, and they told me that book was the first one written about the arts and crafts movement in a city, other than in Europe.
Dye: Or about the movement in general.
Colby: Yeah, yeah. That book of course was specifically about Detroit.
Dye: Yes, it was very specific, and I enjoyed it.
Colby: Thank you! Every time I look at it, I think “Oh, God. If I could write this over” (laughs).
Dye: Any writing, the author feels like that, I think.
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Colby: Yes.
Dye: I came across reference to the Detroit Artists’ Monthly. Are you familiar with that? And of course I don’t have much information about it. It was a publication.
Colby: Yes, really, it’s a name to me.
Dye: All right. I know that the Detroit art scene was different than New York’s, but can you compare them a little bit?
Colby: There’s too much difference to compare them, really. That’s an interesting question, but I just can’t tackle that.
Dye: I understand it’s a big question, and I didn’t really have any directions I was intending to go with it. But perhaps we can go on to the “Kick Out the Jams” exhibit.
Colby: Yes.
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Dye: And I did read your review. Can you tell me something about what bothered you about that exhibit?
Colby: Did I say I was bothered in my review?
Dye: Well, it sounded like it.
Colby: Yeah. It just wasn’t very good. I don’t know. It didn’t live well in the museum, and I don’t know. I can’t really remember specifics. But it upset me at the time.
Dye: You called it a lazy show. You took exception with the representation. Brenda Goodman had twenty-one exhibition pieces, while William Antonow had three.
Colby: Oh, yeah.
Dye: You thought that the analogy was forced, tying it to [the song] “Kick Out the Jams.” If you don’t remember, that’s fine. That was something that Sandra asked me to ask about in particular.
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Colby: Well, it was a lazy show, now that I think of it. It was done by people who weren’t in at the beginning of this, and didn’t really understand or know exactly what this movement was all about. It was rough, it was rough around the edges. And that was what was so interesting about it. And they kind of filed the edges down, brought a lot of stuff in that just didn’t seem pertinent.
It didn’t go together. And it was kinda gimmicky, I thought. I don’t know. Like they were capitalizing on something that wasn’t— They were over-stating what was there, and not representing the right artists, I didn’t think. I mean, not fully.
Dye: What changed about the art scene after this period? The Cass Corridor and the Gallery
Seven?
Colby: The Cass Corridor. Well, the Black presence became more pronounced. And women became more pronounced (laughs). I was looking for names, there was a wonderful painter in
Canada, and I can’t remember her name. In Windsor. That’s something that we were always so fortunate in Detroit about living on that border and being able to experience the Canadian movement, both the artists and the history of Canadian art. But that’s not what you asked me
(laughs).
Dye: No, but that would be an interesting topic, too.
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Colby: (laughs) Yeah.
Dye: So the change in the population, or the character of the artists, or the color, gender of the artists. I’m not saying this well.
Colby: Well, you know, George N’Namdi—do you know him?
Dye: No.
Colby: I didn’t see his spectacular new gallery [G.R. N’Namdi Gallery], I left town before that.
But George was very prominent nationally, and in getting Black collectors to collect Black art.
And that’s the secret of this whole explosion, and the fact that George—he later had a gallery, has a gallery in Chicago that his son’s running— I assume that that’s still going. And then he had a little gallery space in New York for a while, in SoHo. But his presence was so significant in
Detroit. There are people who bad-mouth him, like everybody else, but that was important. And the fact that women, we had the Guerilla Girls in New York, and people were kind of upset about them, but they really made an impact on what was happening with women. So it was a mixture of things. I think CCS became more important. The emphasis kind of centered on them for a while. And then Wayne State was kind of— I can’t make that case too strongly, or prove it—
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because a lot of my memory is gone about exact dates and exact movements and exact shows. I did tell you that I threw my sixty years of art writing away, didn’t I (laughs)?
Dye: Yes, you did.
Colby: (laughs) You know, I was really glad I was gone. And I was a good example for my children, who save everything, they’re kind of pack-ratty. And when they could see me do that—
(laughs). But, anyway, it’s interesting. Bob Wilbert was telling me that Detroit is such a “fizzy” place—no, not Bob Wilbert, it was Michael Hodges on the Detroit News. Michael is a friend of mine, and he kind of took over the art beat, and he said that there’s a real “fizz” in Detroit now, that people are turning out for culture and young artists are moving to Detroit and living downtown. And that it’s. I left in 2008, and so I didn’t exactly see this happening before I left.
Dye: It was starting to happen.
Colby: Yeah, starting, but not full-bore.
Dye: Have you seen changes in local support for the arts? Over your career?
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Colby: Yes. You know, first we had Lydia Winston Malbin, who was Albert Kahn’s daughter, was the great collector when I was kind of, I was starting out when she was a great collector here. And then we’ve got someone now you may know, Gilbert Silverman, with his Fluxus
Collection, and that’s a very daring area to explore, and he’s been amazing and wonderful. Gil and his wife, and of course, I don’t know who’s supporting right now.
Dye: Well, you aren’t here right now. It’s understandable. You said in the Metro Times farewell article that you weren’t able to review exhibits, or get the space to cover art news in the Detroit
News the last few years you were there?
Colby: Yes.
Dye: It was getting harder?
Colby: It was getting harder because the paper was just going to pot. Across the country it was that way. And you know, I was so disappointed, the Post-Dispatch, the leading paper, or the only paper, daily paper in St. Louis, had a man writing, I’ve forgotten his name now. But he was good, my kids used to send me tear sheets of their activities. And he was good, he knew what he was talking about. He was a little snotty at times. But they fired him, or they let him go, and
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nobody has replaced him. And that’s three years without a voice for artists, and I think that is a shame. But the Post-Dispatch, like all daily newspapers, is struggling to stay alive.
And you know the Detroit News doesn’t have a Sunday edition any more. And of course that’s the edition that people read. And it’s very, very sad. I could just cry. I loved that business. I loved the business. I love the art. But unless things change drastically, we’re in for a really bad time. I think it’s necessary to have art writers on daily papers, to let people know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s going on in St. Louis. I mean, my kids tell me, and I go to shows, but I wouldn’t unless they were involved in it. That’s too bad.
Dye: I noticed that in the farewell party at the Scarab Club, you signed a beam.
Colby: Yes.
Dye: And can you tell me something about that tradition? Do you know how that started?
Colby: I’m not sure how that started, no.
Dye: But how did you feel when you were asked to sign it?
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Colby: I was thrilled to death (laughs). I really was very honored. That was wonderful. But, you know, I can’t stand heights. I really want to pass out. And they had this ladder, that was rickety, and it went back and forth, and I was climbing up, and I got near the top, and I thought, “I can’t do this. I just cannot do it.” I looked down and I thought I was going to be sick on somebody’s head. But finally I got up and did it. I looked at what I had written and it was terrible. I mean, it wasn’t even my writing, but just to get up there and down again. I was so glad to get down that, that kind of ruined the experience for me.
Dye: That’s too bad. But it was certainly nice that you were asked.
Colby: Oh, yes. Yes. Yes, especially, you know the Scarab Club was a man’s club for so long, and then finally they let women in to have studios and things. It’s a tradition. They had bad years, really bad years. In the galleries, the gallery shows were not good. But Treena [Flannery]
Ericson is really, she’s awfully good. Is she still there?
COLBY INTERVIEW 29
Dye: I am not sure. I didn’t gather much information about the Scarab Club. I did look into the tradition a little bit, because I was intrigued by that, by you being invited to sign a beam. I was also intrigued by the Jim Pallas hitchhiker image of you.1
Colby: Oh, yes.
Dye: And that sounds like an interesting project.
Colby: Yes, that was great fun. You know I sent it—I cheated a little bit—I sent it to Cincinnati with my daughter. Sarah and her husband Kim [Humphries] lived in Cincinnati at that time, they were working with organizations there, and Kim was with the Museum of Contemporary Art
[Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati]. I sent the hitchhiker with Sarah, and I told her to see that
Kim was cleared out of the way, and we would take that hitchhiker image and put it in his office, and just not say anything about it. So the staff was highly amused at that. And he went into his office, and I mean, what would you say to have your mother-in-law, a painting of your mother- in-law, sitting on your desk? It was funny. But then, of course, they brought it back.
1The Hitchhiker Project was artist Jim Pallas’s painted plywood silhouettes of artists and local celebrities, posed hitchhiking. Each participant agreed to write a message and postal address on the back of their silhouette, and then abandon it. The hope was that a stranger would find the silhouette and see to it that it reached its new destination. The Colby image was created in 1999.
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And it was terribly hard, I know Charles McGee had that problem, too, to put an image of yourself out on the street. So when I moved, I still—I don’t want Jim to know this—but, when I moved I still had that hitchhiker painting. Jim did a good job on that. And I didn’t know what to do with it, so the people across the road had children who were old teenagers, and I asked their mother if they would take that image and put it in the street, anywhere they wanted, just put it there. And, of course, she thought that was great fun and that they would love to do it. But that’s the last I saw of it. But we had great fun with that. I have a group of photographs, and they were with my husband. He was with the hitchhiker and I treasure those, particularly since he died a few years ago (sighs).
Dye: Yes, there was a picture of you with him and the [hitchhiker] on the Web site, that’s where
I came across the reference, the pictures of you and the story about it.
Colby: Yeah. (sighs)
Dye: Well, when and why did you leave the News?
Colby: Well, I’ll tell you. I was 80 years old. I had gone back on the staff more than 20 years before that. And things were getting so bad at the paper that I thought probably I would lose the job anyway. The whole thing was moving out from under me. So they offered a buyout. And I
COLBY INTERVIEW 31
took the buyout. That meant salary for the rest of the year, full salary. And that was their parting gift to us. So I thought that was a good thing to do, rather than retiring without any compensation.
Dye: So that was in 2006, was it?
Colby: 2006, yes, that’s right.
Dye: And did you move to St. Louis right away?
Colby: Well, I had to sell my house. And we had bought a condo here and it stood empty for three years. We couldn’t rent it because we expected to sell our house right away. But that house was one my husband had built, and he thought it was worth so much, and we couldn’t get that price for it. And he died and there I was alone in the woods on two acres of wooded land, with trees falling (laughs). It cost $3000 to get the leaves raked up. And I couldn’t afford to stay in that house, nor did I want to. But finally I found a family with three young children, the same number as ours, and they bought it. But I had to take half what the offer was in the first place.
And had my husband not died, he wouldn’t have permitted me to sell it for that low price. But it was the best thing to do financially and personally, because then I left.
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I had promised the Scarab Club that I would curate a show for them, so I did that and I stayed in a motel for a couple weeks. I left the car at the airport. I don’t drive freeways. And I flew in.
When I got to Saint Louis, the condo was all fitted up, it was all designed and all we had to do was hang the paintings. Everything was fine. So I love it here, I really do. I love the city. I’ve adopted it. It’s so wonderful to be with my family.
Dye: And how many of your daughters are there?
Colby: Two. And the third one, the middle one, is in New York, in Brooklyn. We see them once a year (laughs).
Dye: And do you have grandchildren?
Colby: I have two grandchildren, two girls.
Dye: I’d like to go back a little bit, because you mentioned you’d met your husband at Wayne.
And you also in the Metro Times article talked about art schools training a new generation of artists after World War II. So your husband was one of those artists?
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Colby: Yes, he was one of the generation. Well, he was at Wayne State before the war, and then he enlisted because he wanted to fly. He was also patriotic. And then he came back to finish his degree.
Dye: So he didn’t get the opportunity to go to school because of the GI Bill. He was just finishing the degree.
Colby: Yeah. Well, I think he had the GI Bill.
Dye: Yes, but he wasn’t going to college just because he had the GI Bill.
Colby: No. And the chair of the department was very fond of him. I think the chair of the department and his wife kind of “match-made” with my husband and me.
Dye: All right. I wasn’t able to listen to or to read the Smithsonian oral history interview, the one from 1977.
Colby: Oh, that’s a mess. I’m so mad about that.
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Dye: Well, I got in touch with them to ask if I could read a transcript or listen to it, and they never got back to me.
Colby: Well, they can’t let that out. I don’t want it, because they never finished that. They got through about three years of my career. They just left and never finished it. So, I said I don’t want that let out to anybody, they’ll think that I was writing art for three years or something, and that’s just ridiculous. You finish that, or you just don’t do anything with it. But there’s nothing there for you, nothing there for me, nothing.
Dye: I was just doing research, and I thought that would be something to consult. Is there anything else that you’d like to cover here, in this interview?
Colby: Well, I don’t think so.
Dye: I appreciate your time. Thank you very much.
Colby: Well, I think you’re very good, what you’re doing, and it’s been nice to talk to you.
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Dye: Good. Thank you. I will get back in touch with you. I will send you another copy of the release form.
Colby: Now, I wonder why I didn’t get that.