ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG ORAL HISTORY PROJECT The Reminiscences of Susan Davidson Columbia Center for Oral History Research Columbia University 2015 PREFACE The following oral history is the result of recorded interviews with Susan Davidson conducted by Sara Sinclair on March 3, 2015, March 31, 2015, and May 5, 2015. These interviews are part of the Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project. The reader is asked to bear in mind that s/he is reading a transcript of the spoken word, rather than written prose. Transcription: Audio Transcription Center Session #1 Interviewee: Susan Davidson Location: New York, New York Interviewer: Sara Sinclair Date: March 3, 2015 Q: Today is March 3, 2015. This is Sara Sinclair with Susan Davidson at the [Robert] Rauschenberg Foundation at 381 Lafayette [Street] in New York. So, to begin today I want to start with you and it can just be as simple as where and when you were born and a little bit about your early life. Davidson: I was born in Houston, Texas, on May 16, 1958, and grew up there. I had an early exposure to art through my mother, who went to work for John de Menil as his private assistant in 1968. Prior to that she had had all kinds of other funny jobs, such as working in television and things like that, so moving into the “arts” seemed rather natural, though at the time I don’t think my mother really understood what she was getting into. I know that John de Menil very much wanted somebody who was French-speaking and my mother, being Scottish, didn’t necessarily speak French, but she soon learned. Through that professional relationship, I was introduced to the de Menils. At that time I would have been about ten or eleven years of age and occasionally, as mothers encounter family situations, they have to bring their children to work, and that’s how I first met the de Menils and started being around fine art, really as a young person. That became very informative for me; in many ways it’s led me to where I am today. Davidson – 1 – 2 Q: What did you mean when you said your mom didn’t know what she was getting into? Davidson: At that time the de Menils were very active in the city of Houston and it being the sixties, there were a lot of political tensions. It was a time of activism and the de Menils were really very much at the forefront of that. I think that she didn’t—I don’t think anybody really was aware of the depth and the long arm of what they were doing and how that would really affect history, at least within the city of Houston. John de Menil ended up dying of cancer in 1973 and my mother then transitioned into working with Mrs. [Dominique] de Menil and that became a long-lasting relationship until Mrs. de Menil’s death in 1997. Q: What was Houston like at the time? Davidson: Well, it was quite different than it is today. It was a lot more provincial; still, obviously, it was an oil and gas town. Today, however, I think it’s a lot more diversified. I think that was why the de Menils were trying to turn things on the edge in a way. When I went off to high school, at Lamar High School in Houston, which was at the other end of River Oaks Boulevard, it was literally down the street from where the de Menils lived. As an after-school project, I used to go and work in what was called the “collection room,” which in fact was the garage that had been turned into offices. In that area, the print curator and the Davidson – 1 – 3 collections curator worked, and maybe a collections assistant. I had the physical job of taking the collection, which at that time was probably about ten thousand objects, and making index cards for each object, typing up the data about the work and then dry-mounting small images onto the cards. It was their first cataloguing system. I did this all through high school. So, while I never studied art history in high school because in those days they didn’t have that in public schools, and certainly not in Houston, I had this very direct access to the art and to learning about cataloguing and curatorial kinds of endeavors without really realizing it. Q: Do you remember, was there any work in particular that you encountered in high school that had an impact on you, that you really liked? Davidson: Yes, well, I was convinced I was going to study African art. That was really what I leaned toward. I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to the twentieth-century material. I learned about it and I recognized all the names and I could identify different artists and such, but for some reason I seemed to be much more engaged with objects. When I went off to college I thought that’s what I would do, study African art. Actually I should have studied architecture. That was really my first love. That was also something my father very much was keen that I do. I don’t know why. He always has bought property throughout his life and my parents had built an apartment complex during their marriage. So, I don’t know, maybe he saw it as a way to continue the family interest. But when I got to college I took a couple of architecture courses and—I couldn’t draw and I couldn’t really do the math so I just kind of moved away from it. Davidson – 1 – 4 Q: Okay. Did the building, the Menil [Collection, Houston] space, have an impact on you in particular? Davidson: That was so much later. This was in the seventies. I graduated from high school in 1976 and went off to college that fall. Q: So, were there particular spaces in Houston that were—? Davidson: No, not that I recall. It was just at the beginning of an oil boom there and Philip [C.] Johnson was building a lot of skyscrapers although of course he’d had a long history with the de Menils, having built their house in 1949 and then again with the Rothko Chapel [Houston, 1971], which opened probably in 1970 or ’71. When I was in college I used to come home for Christmas and I would either guard at the Rothko Chapel, which was incredibly boring because it was generally wintertime and there would be nobody in there so you would just read and then tend to fall asleep because it was very dark; or I sometimes had summer jobs at the Rice [University] Museum [known as the “Barn”] as a guard or front desk person. Q: I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit about your impressions of the artists that you met earlier in your life, so in high school when you first started working at the Menil. Growing up in Houston, which, as you said, at the time was largely an oil town, if you had impressions that the artists represented a different kind of community or—? Davidson – 1 – 5 Davidson: No, I just wasn’t that aware at the time. I was in high school and while I think a lot of that was going around, and perhaps my mother and stepfather were involved in that, it’s just not something I really paid any attention to. I was with my friends doing what kids do and this was just an afternoon job. I didn’t realize how it was going to significantly change my life. I’m sure I met people, but I just don’t have any memories of that. Q: Okay. So, at what point did you decide that art history was going to be your course of study? Davidson: Well, I think because I’d had this very direct and early exposure through high school to really high-quality art—not just sort of going to museums, it was a very direct experience—I was inclined toward it—that I thought I needed to walk away from it. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to try architecture. It was also one of the reasons why I wanted to go to a small town and go skiing because that was my great love at the time. So, I spent two years in northern Utah, where they only had one art history professor and I think I was maybe one of three students. So, there wasn’t a lot of real involvement with art at that time. I was still interested in tribal materials so I decided that I would transfer from Utah back east and applied to schools, NYU [New York University] and other places, and I decided to go to George Washington University [GWU, Washington, D.C.]. I transferred there in 1978 and studied art history; they had a very strong art history program. Of course, being in Washington, there were all the museums and the Library of Congress so that was a very enriching time for me and it was during that time, finishing my undergraduate degree, that I moved away from tribal art into more Davidson – 1 – 6 twentieth century, although the work that I was doing, even in graduate school, was still a kind of marriage of the two. Q: Okay. Can you talk a little bit about that moving away, about how that— Davidson: What I realized with the tribal material was that I didn’t really want to be a proponent of that professionally.