Cass Corridor Documentation Project
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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? COLBY INTERVIEW 2 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 COLBY INTERVIEW 3 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, COLBY INTERVIEW 4 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. COLBY INTERVIEW 5 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 COLBY INTERVIEW 6 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 COLBY INTERVIEW 7 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.