The mystique and romance of San Francisco draws so many people.

And the culture. I knew there were lots of art things happening. I heard a radio ad for the Academy of Art, so I went there. I started with a lot of illustration classes because I was thinking of developing a commercial art career. But once I got there, I segued into the fine art side. I got into the art school thing; met a great group of people, hung out in the studios all night painting. Took a performance art class.  So that was my formative art experience.

I did narrative/figurative painting which was on the ascendance at that time. Susan Rothenberg for example was breaking the dominance of abstraction with her horse outlines. My subjects were scenes from my own life in large scale oils. I also did printmaking; etching and mezzotints.

 

Did you go directly to grad school after that?

No, I took a break. I worked at various jobs (laughs). But I actually started my library career at the Academy of Art, as a work-study student. I had a great librarian that I worked with. He imparted the philosophy of libraries to me--the importance of the access to information and the educational value. That turned out to be a great gig for me.

 

What art libraries have you worked at besides the Academy of Art?

I worked at SFMOMA. Now I work at City College of San Francisco.

 

The library is one of the great democratic institutions, also maybe in decline like so many liberal programs. And the influence of computers and the internet has really changed the library systems.

Libraries embraced the digital world early on. But I’m glad I’ve had the experience of the manual systems as well as online as it is now. That’s why I have these checkout cards and the catalog cards to make art on, because they’re not used anymore. There is a lot of interesting historical information on each card about the book and of course it really was a different way to engage in searching for information. There was more of a body/mind connection. The tactile way you used to flip through the card catalog, running across an author or title that looked interesting. Maybe the card was typed on an old typewriter and the paper was worn so you could tell it was a really old book.

 

But it was difficult to search intuitively in the early computer databases. People had to learn to browse a different way. Now everyone is used to doing searches online.

 

I don’t know too much about databases, but I’ve read that there are people who are designing new computer searches that are more 3 dimensional; more spatial? Maybe they are moving to a new type of intuitive process?

It’s interesting, and always changing.

 

Well, we skipped a little bit ahead but let’s go back and wrap up your education.

I had a little gap there where I worked full time at the art libraries. Later, I went back to grad school at the San Francisco Art Institute. I had been working on my own for several years, and I had gotten to a plateau. I wanted to know more about the larger art world, to understand what people were doing, maybe take my work to a new level. I wanted to be able to understand Artforum! (laughs) I wanted a deeper background.

 

What teachers influenced you at the Art Institute?
Pegan Brooke was the chair of the graduate department and was very encouraging and a mentor. Richard Berger. A huge influence was a book arts class I took with Charles Hobson. I think it was one of the early book arts classes there, around 1990. That opened a whole world to me.

 

You were able to connect your love of books to the Book Arts which was an emerging discipline in the art world at the time.

We toured Arion Press and Crown Point Press. From Hobson I learned more about making art that matched the concept with the format.

 

Did you then move away from the large paintings and get more into printmaking and Book Arts?

Grad school was very challenging. Many teachers took their vocabulary from the Abstract Expressionists and it wasn’t what I was interested in.  I’ve always done some printmaking, I like working in series, the book can be a way to show a bigger idea. I started to move into more conceptual work. I started using the New York Times newspaper as a source which I continued with for a long time.

 

You did a piece where you drew on the NYT every day for a year. Tell me about that piece.

I did that after grad school. It came out of an idea about reading the newspaper every day and eating breakfast. It’s kind of a calming habit. And yet we’re reading these stories that are about large and sometimes horrific world events. How do we consume the media along with food at the same time? I did a drawing every day on the front page—this was when it was still black and white—and often I would draw my breakfast, or a still life of things that were really close to me like my desk; intimate scenes that were right before my eyes. I wanted to combine the two worlds—my daily life and the larger world of current events. It’s funny because I stopped reading the newspaper because I was drawing on it. (laughs)

 

(Laughs) What a relief!

It was! It was really calming. I showed the whole piece at the San Jose Museum in 1998. A year’s worth of New York Times front pages; it was presented in a grid, in a series of rooms. It was really fun to see how people interacted with it. They would go around and find their birthday, or find significant dates to look up. It was a huge piece, but also very quiet.

 

Did you ever deviate from your concept? Did you ever find yourself responding to what was written on any given day?

I tried not to make any conscious associations. The piece was more about my daily activities, small moments. I almost didn’t look at the words. I just had the paper with me and every day I would take an hour or so to do a drawing.

 

Your pieces were becoming more conceptual and you developed these ideas with the found printed material?

I did some pieces that I put in the bottom of the newspaper racks when they used to have a space to slip in an advertising card. I just slipped in my painting. I also did other pieces where I placed my art in surprising places. You know those postcard racks that started to appear in cafes? I would pick up a bunch of those. I would spray paint with stencils over the front of the card and on the back I would put quotations about propaganda and media that I collected from my reading. Then I put them back on the racks.

 

So people expected to pull out a postcard about say, vodka, instead they would find…your message! You have a lot of subject matter playing together, journalism, books, reading, propaganda, consumerism, the line between what is and isn’t art…

I like to blur the lines. And not confine my practice only to the studio or gallery. I want my ideas to be about everday life and to interact with the viewer in everday life.

 

One of my recent pieces was the Coffee Diaries which was another year-long, daily activity experiment. I also made an artist’s book that encapsulates the larger project.

 

I was thinking again about daily activities around consumption and I decided to collect my to-go coffee cups every day. On each cup I would write what I was doing that day, where I bought the coffee. A lot of the things I wrote would be like, I was going to get decaf but instead I got full strength and now I’m too wired (laughs). Just funky little details, a little bit boring even.

 

I presented the piece—a year’s worth of cups and jotted thoughts—on shallow shelves and they took up a large wall in the gallery. People could read them, follow a sequence of days, pick them up if they wanted. Hopefully, they might notice the ecological theme there about the wastefulness of paper cups.

 

As I transcribed the writing from the cups to do the little book I realized that as I got the coffee in the same cafes at the same time of morning, there was a small community of people that I interacted with. These were everyone from people on the bus going over to the City who would stop in the same coffee shop to the workers at the coffee shop. When the counter crew changed, I noticed and noted that.

 

What are you working on lately? What will you show at Mercury 20 in May?

I’m focusing on reconstructed books. At first I was afraid to cut up books because I didn’t think it was right. But at work we withdraw books from the collection and then hold book sales. So, I’m lugging these huge boxes of books to the sales, setting them up for sale at 25 cents a piece, and then boxing up and hauling the unsold books back. I realized that maybe it is OK to cut these books up and make some art from them. (laughs) 

 

(Laughs) Their final resting place.

I respond to the titles and the look of the old covers and I reassemble them. I think about word associations. I’ve been thinking about cyclical history lately.  I’ll see an old title and I think it’s the same now. Even though the book is 40 years old: same story.

 

I’m working on a new idea for this show. I’m making a big accordion book out of book covers, to try to make a narrative from the titles and ideas that the covers suggest. I’m inventing a new language for myself. 

 

You’ll be showing with a sculptor, Laura van Duren. I think your work will really talk to each other.

There’s a shared sensibility and a relationship with our interests in the figure. It will be interesting to juxtapose her large ceramic figures with the small portraits I’ve drawn of people reading on the discarded checkout cards.  And we share a questioning of media, advertising.

 

I also did a series of people eating and drinking that I drew with coffee. Some of those are going to be in a show at Root Division in SF called Taste.

 

 

You are showing all over, Mary! Let’s do a list…

Taste Root Division, 3175 17th Street, San Francisco April 9-26

The Art of the Book Donna Seager Gallery, 851 Fourth Street, San Rafael. April 22- May 21.

Gathering Oakland Museum at City Center, 500 12th St. Oakland. through June 13.

 

And more of your work can be seen at: www.maryvmarsh.smugmug.com.

Thanks so much for talking to me, Mary.