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From the Tuesday, August 7, 1990 edition of The Christian Science
Monitor.
Interview
Creating Artwork to Sit Upon
Marianne Straub has devoted much of her career to quietly designing
fabric for public places.
By Christipher Andreae
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
Cambridge, England
[A picture of Marianne Straub is in the center of the page. She
stands outside her home in Cambridge, England, holding a piece of
the fabric she designed which is used to cover the seats in the
London Underground. She is wearing a striped cotton shift, with the
sleeves folded up to the elbows, exposing arms that are finely
wrinkled and tanned. Her fingers are slightly mishapen by
arthritis. She appears to be in mid-sentence -- her eyes are
narrowed to slits and her mouth curves slightly upwards into her
cheeks. Her hair is thin and light brown, parted on the side and
combed back; perhaps it is in a bun at her neck. A sidebar contains
pictures of some of her fabrics.]
"It may be safe to say," wrote Mary Schoeser, in her book about
textile designer Marianne Straub, "that most people have sat or
looked at a Marianne Straub fabric (or copy), yet few. . . .could
name the designer."
Many people, indeed, have sat and still sit on Straub-designed
fabrics in London Underground trains, on Trident aircraft, in public
buildings, or in ordinary British homes where the owner has an eye
for fine-quality woven material.
The largest part of Ms. Straub's career has been devoted to
textile designs that have quietly made themselves apparent in public
awareness without ever shouting "Marianne Straub!"
Yet Linda Parry, curator for modern textiles at the Victoria and
Albert Museum, rates her as "extremely important in the history of
modern textiles in British textiles." Straub is one of two or three
British artists who have used their "great ability" in textile
design to serve industry, she says.
The great thing about her work, say observers, is that it has
extraordinary balance between, for example, color and texture,
durability and appearance.
"Surrey," one of her more famous designs, is currently featured
in a travelling exhibit with the Muse� des Arts D�coratifs de
Montreal. Based on the crystalline structure of the mineral
afwillite, the design was used at the Festival of Britain in 1951.
"It's made a terrific name for itself. . . .selected as an
example of that period," says the 80-year-old Straub, who has
produced innovative, abstract textile designs in industry for over
40 years, but is now retired.
She willingly spoke about her career, and voiced her thoughts,
during an interview in her garden at her home in Cambridge -- though
we had to break off briefly to be introduced to the local robin.
All strangers have to be inspected.
Straub feels strongly -- she feels and speaks strongly about
most things -- that, like architecture, textile design is "a matter
of collaboration." For her, "it is neither here nor there" whether
the word "art" has a capital or a small "a." But actually she
prefers it small. "I put it on a 'design' level, you know," she
says.
"Her total modesty -- in being quite happy just to be part of a
design team. . . .I mean, it bowls you over," says Ms. Parry.
No cult of the individual for Straub. She has believed
throughout her long career, working for several manufacturers in
Britain, in "loyalty to the firm. I enjoyed that very much. . . .
I've never worked freelance."
None of this is due to shyness or false modesty. Michael Chase,
a longtime London Gallery director, says "There's nothing indefinite
about Marianne Straub."
Working in industry, though first trained as a handweaver, was
deliberate -- an early decision, stuck to for a lifetime, "to design
things which people could afford. . . .To remain a handweaver did
not seem satisfactory in this age of mass production," she says.
Born in Switzerland, Straub still owns a dual passport. But her
career developed in Britain at a time when, in 1932, she attended
Bradford Technical College (in the center of the Yorkshire wool
industry) to extend her experience of powerloom weaving. Her mother
had vetoed Germany as a place for further training because Straub
was "very outspoken," and she didn't want to have to rescue her from
prison.
Being a woman, she was a rare commodity in a technical college
set up to train [sic] people for industry. After the initial
surprise response, Straub believes she got "preferential treatment."
But as a workaholic, she is more likely to have earned simple
respect.
Her fascination with sheep and their wool -- which she has long
since collected samples of -- was prompted by one of the teachers.
But above all, her determination to understand the machinery of
the industry must have recommended her to the teachers. This was
also to stand her in good stead later when weavers on the shop floor
were unwilling to try new designs.
"I know the machines," says Straub, "and can talk to the
technicians." She almost always designed on the handloom,
developing her ideas as she worked. As a handweaver in the
industry, it gave her special clout.
"Then I could present the manufacturer with the finished
article," she explains, and he could never say "I can't do that."
Even if he did, she would stand at the big loom and demonstrate how
he could. "The work people respected you -- it made an enormous
difference."
Straub says that if more designers tried out the things they
were designing, fewer bad designs would result. It's often apparent
when a man designs an object a woman uses every day, she points out.
But the main reason she preferred to work with a company, rather
than to sell her designs as a freelancer, was to be in control.
"If you sell your designs, and the manufacturer hasn't got the
right yarn or the right color. . . .then in the end you see
something that isn't at all what you meant it to be," Straub says.
Employed by a Lancashire company called Helios (a subsidiary of
Barlow and Jones), and then by Warner and Sons, she most frequently
designed domestic fabrics -- upholstery, curtains, bedspreads. But
she was never much interested in designing material for fashion.
"I'm much more interested in architecture than ladies' fashion,"
she says with a chuckle. "If you work in fashion you've got to be
absolutely sold onto the whole thing."
Clearly, Straub is not. Fabric design is like architecture in
being structural and "also built out of units. You've got to know
your raw materials," she says.
Though never against using synthetic fibers when necessary (when
cost dictated, for example), Straub says "the most durable fabric is
still wool or worsted (closely woven wool yarn). And wool takes the
colors very clearly. It also has the great advantage over man-made
fibers in that it doesn't look dirty so quickly. All man-made
fibers, you see, are very strong."
If synthetic fibers get rubbed, they don't wear away like wool
-- revealing a cleaner layer underneath, she explains.
Her London Underground upholstry fabric is a case in point. It
is moquette -- a fabric with a thick, soft, napped surface similar
to velvet. If you look at the surface, it's part cut (or tufted)
and part uncut. The tufting makes it wear better.
"The chap at London Transport told me that it is by far the best
they've had for wear -- it lasts about 8 years," she says.
How does she protect against vandalism? "Nothing you can do,
unless you weave it of sheet metal."
Straub, who has taught at most of the major art colleges in
London, speaks strongly against the tendency today for designers "to
borrow too much.
"I've never used ethnic designs because I would feel dishonest.
That is not our [European] handwriting. We must keep our own
culture going with our own designs.
"But I am very interested in techniques. I will always look at
what is done anywhere -- how it is done. Or at old fabrics -- how
I can learn from them. But then I develop my own ideas."
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Reprinted without permission from the Friday, August 24, 1990
edition of the Christian Science Monitor.
Urban Principal Holds the Line
Edith Smith prods students, teachers, and parents to excel at
Washington elementary school.
By Clara Germani, Staff Writer of The Christian Science Monitor
The article is accompanied by a photo of Edith Smith, sitting on a
desk. "Edith Smith: During the past 13 years, she has promoted high
educational standards at the Shepherd Park Elementary School in
northern Washington, D.C. Under Mrs. Smith's leadership, test
scores have improved, teachers have been nationally recognized, and
strong parental support has been fostered."
At a time when urban schools have the reputation of war zones,
Shepherd Park Elementary School is an educational demilitarized
zone. Much of the credit for that goes to principal Edith Smith,
who has the no-nonsense air of a woman who wouldn't stand for it any
other way.
In the northernmost corner of the District of Columbia, where
urban blight begins to give way to the clipped lawns of the black
middle class, Mrs. Smith is known for prodding and inspiring the
best from students as well as from teachers and parents.
The school's distinctions under her guidance, say school-system
officials and parents, include: Improving test scores where
district-wide scores are dropping; faculty nationally recognized for
their innovative teaching, including one of the first winners of the
United States Department of Education's prestigious Christa
McAuliffe fellowships; unusually strong parent support; and no known
incidents of drug abuse among students whose school is close to the
Georgia Avenue strip where drug pushers have begun to pioneer a
middle-class market.
"This is one of the few schools here that do not adhere to the
stereotype of the inner-city school," says Priscilla Gay, who was
Shepherd's Parent Teacher Association president for the past two
years and has had children in D.C. schools for 11 years. "That can
only come from leadership like Smith's."
Smith's role at Shepherd began with a three-month appointment as
substitute principal, but grew to a 13-year assignment.
Mrs. Gay attributes much of the school's success to Smith's
persistence in trying to involve the community and points out that
the principal was a key player in getting the city to build a new
branch library in the spot where a Burger King was planned.
As able to respond with hugs to the tug of a tiny hand on her
billowy skirt as she is to react sharply to what needs correcting in
the classroom or the community, Smith is like a "grandmother to the
kids and a coach to the teachers," observes Marion Thomas, president
of a Washington-based engineering company and the father of a former
Shepherd student.
Impressed with Smith's efforts at creating educational activity
beyond the basics, Mr. Thomas says he decided to award annual
college scholarship funds to graduating sixth graders who excel in
math and science. And this year, he rewarded Smith's efforts with
free round-trip air fare to any place she chooses.
Preparing to leave Shepherd's hallways of musty Crayola smell
and thunderous little feet for retirement this month, Smith
distilled some of her perspectives from 24 years on the educational
front lines.
Much of the diverse curricula -- from Arabic language classes to
Socratic seminars -- that Smith has promoted at Shepherd seems to
stem from her own cultured and dignified manner.
A Washington native who revered teachers, skated to the library
for all the books she could carry home, started early with her
25-cent piano lessons, and attended every musical event she could,
Smith's expectations come from an older, richer school of
educational thought.
At times wheeling her desk chair forward to get that riveting
nose-to-nose stare schoolteachers perfect, Smith drove home the
lessons she's learned:
o Don't flunk students
o Test for success, not failure.
o Make sure students know how to use what they learn
o Beware of television.
o Parents should be aware that they are models -- good or bad --
for their children.
Grading should only be a measure of a child's learning, not a
scarlet letter, Smith says.
"Once you tell a child he has failed and you take an action
based on that, the child believes he's a failure...not just on tests
but in grade [levels]," she says, noting that she prefers non-graded
groupings for young children until they develop age-appropriate
skills.
"Failure makes you feel badly about yourself, it makes you
doubt, and it influences the way you feel about school. Anything
that makes a child turn off to school is a losing situation," she
says, asking why students would opt to go to school if they didn't
feel comfortable there. "I don't see children dropping out who are
happy in school."
If a child isn't doing well on tests, it may be more a function of
the teacher's style or a child's style of learning, Smith says.
"What interests the child? What turns him on? If tests gave
that kind of gauge, if they measured how it is that learning would
most likely occur in a child, you'd be measuring for success and not
for failure."
Smith doesn't look to test scores or to adherence to teaching
theory as a gauge of a teacher's success.
"I value knowledge and comprehension, but analysis and synthesis
and evaluation are the higher-level thinking skills...I want to know
what the students can do as a result of what they have been taught."
That means students present projects to show what they can do as a
result of the teacher's work.
Smith says that her own professional successes have been rooted
in the fact that she was an "activist parent" before she started
working in the D.C. school system in 1966.
She knows firsthand the difficulties today's working and
single-parent families experience in trying to keep a hand in their
children's education.
Because black women were not admitted to universities in
Maryland, where she lived with her physician husband and young
daughters in 1949, Smith had to leave them for a year in order to
get her teaching degree at Columbia University Teacher's College in
New York City. During her 21-year marriage to a Baltimore doctor,
she was the first black woman in that city to become a stockbroker's
representative, selling mutual funds to the black community. After
her divorce, she returned to Washington and faced the problems of
single-parent families. She sent all her daughters to college. One
was the first black woman to earn a PhD in science at the University
of North Carolina.
She places the burden of a child's success squarely on the
parent's shoulders.
"You don't have to have a formal education to recognize what
children need, or to subsidize it," she asserts. Though her own
parents were not educated beyond the sixth grade, they squeezed a
decent lifestyle from their lunch-counter business, and she says,
"I cannot say I was a poor child either in money or in quality of
lifestyle because of where my parent's values were.
"Modeling is important. And I don't mean SAYING what is
important, but the MODELING of what is important," she says.
"Children are being held to task for a set of priorities based on
what they see [their parents do]...and that's the bottom line as to
why there is a diminishing of the quality of education in America."
Smith targets television as one of the prime problems in
parents' relationships with their children, although she
acknowledges her own weakness for the game show "Jeopardy."
"You would be surprised at the many little ones who come in who
are just not ready to function as a learner. The reason a five year
old is not ready for school is television...It dumbs down a person,
it stupefies. We are getting a television child rather than a child
who has been involved in outdoor playing and socializing.
"Many children we're getting are different and to the degree
that television is more and more the babysitter, the child is
different when he comes to school.
"The pre-television child came to school with more knowledge of
self. He was tuned into himself more than what was happening on
television...Discussions with his parents made him aware of his
value."
She asks how often anyone sees a child playing on the street
anymore and follows with the assertion that if youngsters aren't
watching television they're more than likely with their parents,
shopping at a mall.
Among her suggestions for making children better students is for
parents to read to them -- or at least read near them as a model --
and go back to the pre-television family togetherness, where a
parent and child talk while they prepare the dinner "stringing the
beans, popping them, and throwing them in the pot."
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| From the New York Times, National Edition (without permission), 4/26/91
"2 Sides are Bypassed in Lesbian Case", by Nadine Brozan
After a five-year legal battle in Minn. between the parents of a
paralyzed, brain-damaged woman and her lesbian lover, a judge has chosen a 3rd
party to act as the disabled woman's guardian.
In his ruling in the case, Judge Robert Campbell of the St. Louis
County District Court in Duluth likened the paralyzed women, Sharon Kowalski,
now 34, to a child over whom divoring parents do battle.
"The two wings of ther family were unable to reach agreement on her
care and visitation, matters which will serve her best interests", he wrote in
an opinion issued Wednesday. "She must enhoy the love and comfort of both
wings of her family for her complete wellbeing and her longterm
rehabilitation." Those goals can be accomplished, he said, only through the
appointment of a "neutral third party."
Closeted before the accident, the couple became a cause celebre, the
subject of parades and vigils. They came to symbolize the struggle for equal
rights of homosexuals and disable people.
The woman's lover, Karen Thompson, 43, denounced the ruling, accusing
the judge of appointing a guardian who was just a "stand-in" for Ms.
Kowalski's parents.
And a leading spokesman for lesbian and gay groups called the ruling
"deeply offensive" and predicted it would "resonate throughout the law."
The case began in 1983 after Ms. Kowalski, a high school gym teacher,
was severly injured in a car collision with a drunken driver. Until then she
and Ms. Thompson, with whom she had exchanged wedding bands, lived in a house
they had bought.
Shortly after Mx. Thompson informed the parents about her relationship
with their daughter -- they have continued to deny that she is a lesbian --
they took steps to sever the connection.
Ms. Kowalski's father, Donald, a retired mining foreman, obtained sole
guardianship in July 1985. He moved his daughter to a nursing home in
Hibbing, a five-hour drive from Ms. Thompson's home, and had her barred from
visiting the younger woman.
Over the next 3 years, Ms. Thompson filed numerous appeals in local,
state, and Federal courts, trying to have the guardianship revoked and
contending that Ms. Kowalski was being denied access to therapy intended to
advance her physical and mental capacity.
Last summer Mr. Kowalski resigned his guardianship, citing two heart
attacks that he said had been provoked by the strain of repeated court
challenges.
And now Judge Campbell has appointed Karen Tomberlin, a teacher and
coach at Greenway High School in Coleraine, which is...near Nashwauk, where
the Kowalskis live.
In his court order Judge Campbell, who is on vacation and
unreachable..., described Ms. Tomberlin as "a close friend of Sharon and
Sharon's parents," who has known the patient since 1973.
...
Speaking from Atlanta, where she is attending a national lesbian
rights conference, Ms. Thompson, an associated professor of physical education
and sports science at ST. Cloud State University, said she would appeal.
"Karen Tomberlin is just a stand-in for the parents", Ms. Thompson
said. "She took up their cause when they became too tired and sickly."
Ms. Thompson said she had briefly told Ms. Kowalski about the latest
decision before leaving for Atlanta. "Sharon was clearly upset, moved and
concerned," she said.
Ms. Tomberlin could not be reached for comment yesterday.
In 1988 Judge Campbell ordered that a comprehensive evaluation be
conducted in Duluth, and she was moved there. He also ruled that Ms. Thompson
be permitted to visit. After Mr. Kowalski resigned his guardianship new
hearings on guardianship were held.
In his order, Judge Campbell wrote that Ms. Thompson "has demonstrated
commitment and devotion to the welfare of Sharon Kowalski." He also wrote,
"In the past two years, when asked where she would like to live, Sharon has
consistently said, "St. Cloud with Karen."
But in a section of his decision subtitled "outing", the judge said
Ms. Thompson had violated Ms. Kowalski's privacy by disclosing her sexual
orientation. He also cited as a consideration the fact that Ms Thompson now
has "other domestic partnerships".
Ms. Thompson does not deny that. "I said on the stand that two and a
half years after being away from Sharon, I decided to leave myself open to
other relationships. Sharon comes home with me all the time. She really
likes the person I am with, and has never asked."
"The system separated us, and we became strangers," Ms. Thompson
comtinued. "For Sharon i will always be what I was years ago. She can never
know me as I am today, but I will love her for the rest of my life."
Thomas B. Stoddard, exec. director of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, a
gay rights org, called Judge Campbell's decision "a deep offense not only to
all lesbians and nay men, but to all Americans who choose their partners and
households by their own terms and not the legal rules imposed by society."
He added: "The idea of neutrality does not apply in any other area of
family law. Sharon chose her family. But the judge doesn't agree, so he
imposed his own vision on her."
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