0.7 William camfield, b. 1934  (Page 2/4)

St. thomas expands

Dominique and I knew we needed help after that spring where we picked up the program. And so we began to search for new people. The fall of that year, ’64 I think, we announced a job opening or two, and that led to the hiring—in terms of art history—of Mino Badner and then Walter Widrig and Philip Oliver Smith. So we ended up with four art historians there in a year or two. [That] led to the hiring of Geoff Winningham in photography and James Blue in filmmaking, and there were others involved, too. James [was]a superb filmmaker and teacher. And Geoff Winningham of course is still here, and has really been sort of a pioneer for opening art photography in this city. So St. Thomas became really the lively center, particularly in the exhibition program and in art history. We didn’t have that much going on in terms of studio art, excepting of course, Winningham and Blue, who were major contributors to the city then; their legacy is still there.

[St. Thomas] was a really lively place in terms of the growing program in art history and particularly film and photography, but visiting artists, thanks to the de Menils, were coming in from time to time. Marcel Duchamp,

To foster knowledge of the arts and love for the arts, and for people to want to live with the arts, a print club was [established as] a way for people who didn’t know much about the arts or who were timid and didn’t want to (or couldn’t) invest a lot of money to actually own something. Once or twice a year my wife Ginny, who was director of the print club there for a while, would go to New York or Paris. I was going back and forth for a while to do research in Paris and [we would]come back with these wonderful prints—major 20th-century and 19th-century figures. Then there would be a big sale of these and everybody came out. It was a big social event, and people could acquire a Rouen print or a Picasso etching, or what—you name it—a contemporary piece by some European or whoever. It started a number of people on collecting, and in addition to the print club, where you could buy something for ten dollars to a thousand dollars, they had a club—a collectors’ club—for people with deeper pockets that met at their houses. They would actually bring on consignment major paintings and sculptures, and people would sort of choose this painting or that sculpture and they would live with it for a couple of months and then rotate it around, and if somebody fell in love with something they had a chance to buy it.