0.18 Karl kilian, b. 1943  (Page 2/4)

A time to learn

One of the nicest things about that period was not that it was slowed down, but that it just hadn’t gotten that fast yet. You had opportunities to talk to people which we would probably never have now. For example, Fred Hughes, who had become a friend in sixth grade at St. Anne’s School, was always interested in art, and his grandmother would give him for Christmas lessons at the Museum School which was then in the basement of Cullinan Hall. And I would go with Fred. The assignment was to go upstairs at the Museum and look at the exhibition that was there and write something about it and draw something. [The exhibit] was Totems Not Taboo, and obviously that was extraordinary—really extraordinary. Fred and I remembered that. We walked around together, you know, sort of looking at architecture and so on.

And St. Thomas was a place that was interesting to us because it was modern. It was sort of my first experience with the meaning of “aesthetic.” And because my sister was there, we went upstairs to the art department. Part of this was trying to see what Jerry MacAgy was doing, because we had heard she was at St. Thomas. So we went in and sat down, and Louise Ferrari was there and we began having a conversation with her. Later in the afternoon Louise went to the back and called Jerry and said, “If you’re not too busy, there are a couple of guys who seem pretty interested in what’s going on and I want you to come out and visit.” Jerry sat there for easily an hour—maybe more—and I think that was one of those transforming moments to Fred. He probably would have gone to St. Thomas anyway, but it was something that might not have been able to happen even ten years later when five phones were ringing and all of that.

I remember the New Arts Gallery as it was called; Kathryn [Swenson] was great. She talked for information and she talked in a very sweet and engaging way…but not with that very, very intellectually based playfulness that Jerry [MacAgy]had. We went to New Arts because I loved the building that Bailey Swenson did. I could never quite figure out what was the house and what was the gallery. Sometimes Kathryn would take us around and show us. She was very generous about that, but everybody was so, to my mind, grown up then, you know. Everyone wore a jacket and a shirt and tie, and you dressed up for art the way you dressed up for church or anything else.

Macagy’s alchemy

Jerry was an oversized individual. There’s no other way of saying it than that. It’s astounding to think that she was 50 when she died. So I guess she must have been 46 or 47 when I met her at first. She was welcoming. She taught wonderfully. She really did everything there at St. Thomas that now whole art departments would do and she built a book library and a slide library. There was an exhibitions program. She did talks. Her talks—I guess they began with Giotto and sort of moved forward. She delivered these from legal pads which I saw after she died. Really, I think maybe the first serious art history classes taught by a PhD—which MacAgy was one of the first women in America to get—were in Jones Hall at the University of St. Thomas. But those—the city turned out because it was sort of the only game in town really, in some ways, as were her openings. I mean, Cullinan Hall was there, but I really couldn’t speak for what the Museum itself was like. I mean, I know more about it after Sweeney