Interview with Jeff Morin

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview # MORIN, JEFF MORIN, JEFF (19-) At UW: Interviewed: 2018 Interviewer: Sarah Lang Index by: Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 2 hours, 51 minutes First Interview Session (July 6, 2018): Digital File 00:00:01 SL: Today is Friday, July 6, 2018. I'm Sarah Lang with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking with Jeff Morin, book artist, UW alum, and president of Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. We're talking at MIAD in Milwaukee. So Jeff, you grew up in Maine. Could you tell us a little bit about what that was like? JM: Part of me just wants to say surreal. But only after the fact. Growing up in northern Maine is a very specific thing. It's isolated. It's sparsely populated. It's primarily a French, Franco-American culture. Very tightknit communities. And at the point when I was growing up, probably about half of the graduating classes went off to college and half stayed more local. My family's been up in that area for an incredibly long time, as most of the families up there have been. And when I left the area, that's when I learned how probably exotic the childhood was. The type of food, and the fact that we were bilingual, and just some of the rituals, the seasonal and daily rituals, were quite a bit different than those that I discovered moving to Philadelphia. Because that's where I moved to from Madawaska. SL: Could you tell us a little bit about those, you know, the culture there in Maine? And can you explain a little bit about what you just said? 00:01:45 JM: Certainly. Madawaska is in the valley, in the Saint John Valley. If you flew over the town, you would think the town was twice the size because you'd see Edmundston, which is in New Brunswick. So it is literally on the border with the bridge. And growing up, it was a different time. So sometimes people stopped at the border, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they just waved and drove on through. And it's become a very different place now, post-9/11. 00:01:00 But at that point, it looked and felt on some levels like one community. The hospital was in Canada. So you know, a lot of people who were born in the community were actually born in Canada, although they were American citizens. So the relationship of the two communities was closer than probably the relationship of the two communities was closer than probably the relationship of Madawaska to the rest of the state of Maine, or to the US on some levels. Because a lot of people's families straddled the border. Growing up, our home was very close to the river, which was the natural border. And I remember there was an island in the middle of the river. And in the summertime on occasion we'd wade out to the island to camp. And it wasn't until after Google Earth that I discovered that we were actually crossing the border and we were in Canada at the time. Because to us, it was just an island not far offshore that you could wade out to. So that's how sort of soft that relationship was with Canada. For our television growing up, a portion of the TV channels we got were French language. I think we probably got more Canadian TV than American TV at certain points, pre-cable. So some of the childhood shows that I watched were not childhood shows that other people would have-you probably didn't grow up listening to [Bubbineau and Bubinette?] or The Friendly Giant, which are two childhood shows that 00:02:00 I remember watching. So moving off, moving out of that area, that's when I learned how kind of exotic it was. SL: And what was the artistic culture like there? Did you go to any museums, or what was that like? 00:04:22 JM: You've never been to Madawaska. SL: No. JM: So the only museum that was in the area that I remember was a really small, as in one or two-room log cabin style historic museum, which I went to a lot. But that had nothing to do with art, art making, artwork. It was all about the local culture. The first museum that I ever remember going to was when I was 18 and heading off to Rhode Island to a college visit with my high school art teacher, who drove me to Providence to visit an art school. And her family was originally from Boston, so we stopped in Boston for a couple of days and went to the Boston Museum. That was the first time I'd ever been in a museum, sort of had any frame of reference for what a museum was, or what it was like. And that gives you an idea of the dedication of the high school art teacher, Martha 00:03:00 Keezer who we got in a car and drove, I don't know, it would have been 10, 12 hours, at least, to do a college visit. SL: Okay. So your art teacher took you to visit college. JM: Yes. Yes. My family wasn't keen on me going to college, let alone going to an art school. So my brother and I were the first in our family to graduate from high school, because neither one of my parents did. And I was the first one to go off to college and graduate from college in my immediate family. So it was very much a different experience. I still remember when I got, I was very fortunate. I got a full four-year scholarship to Temple University, a full tuition ride to Temple University, to Tyler School of Art, which is part of Temple University. And my mom was convinced that it was a scam. That they were somehow going to get me to Philadelphia, and rob me or take my worldly possessions or whatever. I think she had a hard time believing that someone 00:04:00 would spend, would give someone else that amount of money to go to school. I mean, she couldn't, she couldn't see the profit in it. If they were giving me a complete free ride, you know, how was that happening? Why would they do that to someone from Madawaska, Maine? So that was an interesting time. Because it was clearly something for which they had no frame of reference. SL: Could you talk a little bit more about your parents and your family? What were they like and what did they do? 00:07:17 JM: So you had asked about art culture and sort of the art world up there. And there really isn't much of an art world up there, but there is a lot of craft. So it depends on how broad you cast the net for defining the arts. So my dad, for instance, tied fishing flies. Tied beautiful, I mean, they were absolutely beautiful. And I know that if you made them eight feet tall and put them in a gallery, people would ooh and ah and it would be a remarkable thing. But that was one of the things that he did. And other family members, they either quilted or they made furniture or they were carpenters. My parents owned a business. My dad was an auto body mechanic. So I started working when I was 11 or 12 pumping gas, and working in the auto body shop. And eventually that became a convenience store and I worked there until I was 16 and then went off and got another job outside the family business. So what they did was very sort of tied to process and craft. A lot of great cooks, because they were all farmers, you know, worked as lumberjacks or in the lumber yards. A lot of very, very physical manual labor. And a lot of things tied to nature. And a lot of things that had a craft component 00:05:00 to it. So there was plenty of that there. So I probably had a respect for or an interest in materials, material culture from very early on. My first memory of making art was in kindergarten. And I was doing a very large, ambitious drawing of a barn. And I remember one of the nuns coming over and correcting the roofline of the barn. And I was just so incensed that she would correct my perspective, because I was convinced, I have that memory as the first big drawing that I did. Because we were a paper mill town, everyone in town always had access to lots of paper. So my dad, we had a body shop, so Dad painted cars. So he would get end rolls, or damaged rolls of paper from the mill to tape off the car to do the painting, tape off the windows and stuff. That was the kind of work that I did in the body shop. But that also meant that we had rolls and rolls of paper to draw. And I had an older brother, three years older than me. And when you're very young, the skill gap is pretty pronounced. So there was always that sense of competition, because if I was six then he was nine and could clearly draw with more sort of 00:06:00 control. So I always noticed that. So from very early on, I was drawing. From very early on, I was working with paper. And one of the first jobs that I got outside of the family business was working for a publisher when I was 16. So I immediately went into printing and publishing and photography, I was doing the photography for the local newspaper, and doing all of the lab work for the local newspaper, at 16. So that put me in a print shop very early on. 00:10:57 SL: How did you get that job? JM: Well, everyone knows everyone in a town of 4500 or 5000, somewhere around there. And a classmate of mine, her father was the publisher for the newspaper. And I'm sure that Shelly knew that I did photography and had some skill as a photographer at that age. So she must have made a connection for me and her dad. They must have been looking for someone at some point. They paid, what did I get? Two dollars a picture every time a picture ran 00:07:00 in the newspaper. So you got really motivated to be out and about photographing things. Beyond doing the lab work for the newspaper, I got paid per picture that was published. SL: And how did you get into photography? JM: You know, it was just one of those things where we had, our high school had an interesting structure to it. It was a track system. So if you were in one of three tracks, it sort of defined your life, whether you were considered college-bound, or voc ed-bound, or not bound for college after graduation. I think it's a Catholic school model, even though it was a public school, it had a lot of Catholic school aspects to it, including having a lot of nuns and brothers as instructors. SL: That's interesting. JM: That was interesting, I think, until they got discouraged by the state from doing that. The convent ended up by closing and the brothers institute closed as well, probably by the time I was into high school. But a lot of my early teachers in elementary school and middle school were nuns. Because it's fairly mono culture at that point. All bilingual, all French, predominantly Catholic. So even though it was the local public school, I remember going to school and for the first half hour there was religious instruction. And I think we did things like confirmation training and that sort of stuff at school as well. A very strange model. But they could get away with it because of the times and the fact that it was a pretty closed community. 00:13:30 SL: Okay. And-yeah? JM: You 00:08:00 had asked how I got into photography. SL: Yes. JM: And I sort of drifted a little bit. So with this track system, you could only take courses in your track or higher, and I was in the college-bound track. So I was taking art classes, which were allowed. And they were creating all of these extra independent study sections for me, because we only had a couple of classes in art, and I'd exhausted those very early on. So I was looking around for other art-like things. And I wanted to take photography. But photography was taught in shop. And shop was not considered an appropriate sort of course array, depending on the track that you were in. So I had to petition or somehow have my art teacher say that no, photography is considered an art form as well, so it's appropriate for his course of study. So then I started taking photo courses at 00:09:00 school. And from there went on to build enough of a portfolio and enough work to start working as a photographer. SL: Okay. That's pretty ambitious for a young person. 00:14:46 JM: You know, it was a great school system. And maybe that encouraged people to be that way. But I've always been interested in making. So, so a lot of times people ask me what my favorite material is as an artist, and I don't care. I paint, I draw, I work in printmaking, I work as a book artist, you know, I taught graphic design for over 30 years, and worked as a designer. I don't care, so long as I'm making things. That's what makes me happy. SL: Okay. And you mentioned earlier that you were kind of competitive with your brother in terms of his drawing. Did he also pursue art? JM: He's a musician. So, and it's really interesting. After I went off to art school and started having my career, all of a sudden my dad decided to 00:10:00 take painting lessons from a local person that had a small studio. And my brother started painting. So I don't know if it's reverse competition or if one of them is doing it then the other one's going to be doing it. But they both, they both started painting, very different work. And I'd say that they were both primarily self-taught. But as far as a passion, I think my brother's definitely more interested in music. SL: Mm hmm. And you had mentioned quilt making and such. Did your mom do that? Or what kind of crafts was she interested in? 00:16:37 JM: My mom, my mom worked all the time because of the small business. My dad worked in the body shop, my mom did all the books. My mom ran the storefront. We lived in the same building. So we were always tethered to the business and they were both working fulltime. Even though, it was interesting. Poor planning in a way on their part. She never worked for a salary until very late in life, so she wasn't paying Social Security or any of that stuff. She was simply working for the business. So that's where most of her time went. As far as things that I remember her making, she made braided rugs. And braided rugs are really interesting, because they're all made with scrap cloth. And she did quilt, but not in the obsessive way that some people quilt, and quilt to very specific patterns. These were more crazy quilts than 00:11:00 anything else. But the braided rugs are really interesting. Because I could look at a rug and see my dad's work uniforms and a shirt. The rugs were almost like history, because you saw all the clothes that got recycled. And you could sort of pick them out for different time periods. So that's the thing that I remember her making more than anything else. And she knitted. She knitted a lot of Afghans and sweaters and that sort of stuff. SL: Okay. So I want to hear a little bit more about your trip with your art teacher to visit art school. Can you talk a little bit about that? 00:18:18 JM: Oh, sure. Marty was, she's very interesting. She was an outsider. Because everyone back home, they share a small number of surnames. There's a pretty heavy accent. And she came from Boston. Her last name was Keezer, which is not a French name. And she was very different from a lot of the other people around. So people knew she was an outsider. She came in almost right after graduating with an MFA from the Museum School in Boston. 00:12:00 Or Mass Art, she went to Mass Art. I remember meeting her, I was either in the seventh or the eighth grade. And I remember walking up, shaking her hand and saying, "You better be good at this, because I want to do this." I must have been some little child monster, just thinking back to some of the things that came out of my mouth. (SL laughs) But I remember distinctly that conversation with her. And she was really dedicated to what she did. Her whole life was teaching. She didn't have a family up there. That's really what she did. She was a printmaker. So I got some exposure to, some experience printmaking. And we probably worked on my portfolio to get into college for two years, my junior year and senior year. She would come in on the weekends. And there was probably a dozen, half dozen of us in any given year that she was working with and encouraging to go off. And really, you know, being a surrogate for a lot of different things, because a lot of our families didn't have that experience. So we were relying on her expertise. I ended up by going to Tyler School of Art because that's where she really wanted to go, and where she really wanted to send someone. So the list of schools that I looked at for undergraduate-Rhode Island School of Design, Philadelphia College of Art, which is now University 00:13:00 of the Arts, and Tyler. I applied to a couple of other Ivy League schools, which she really discouraged me from going to. (SL laughs) Because she, she was probably right that I would have felt like an outsider going to Bowdoin or going to Skidmore or a place like that. So in that respect, I think she was right. So when I got to my senior year and I was starting to submit portfolios, she, I don't know how we arrived at the fact that we were going to drive from Madawaska to Providence to look at RISDE. It was one of the schools that I was considering. And we just got in the car and drove. And because her parents lived outside of Boston, the whole trip probably took a week or so. SL: Oh, wow. 00:21:26 JM: We stayed at her parents' in Boston, in Natick. We went to Providence. Looked at the school. That was an interesting story in and of itself because RISDE forgot that they had scheduled a campus visit day on that day. So we actually got to campus and everything was locked. SL: Oh, no. JM: Yes. Yes. After having driven for hours and hours and hours and hours. SL: What happened? JM: So needless to say-well, what happened was that RISDE fell off my list of places that I wanted to go. You know, we looked in the locked rooms and stuff, because they felt badly about it. And it wasn't just us. There was a large group of people for campus preview day. That's one thing that I've learned in my job today, to make sure that it doesn't happen here. (SL laughs) But at that same time, we got to go, we went to several museums. We went to a beautiful little museum in Providence. And you know, it was definitely, it was definitely an adventure from my perspective. And her parents were great. They were very generous about letting me stay over. And I met her 00:14:00 extended family. She, I worked for her in the summertimes, trying to make money for college. Along with working my job, I did a lot of other odd jobs in the community to save up money. It was really interesting. By the time I graduated, I can't remember how many scholarships I had, but they were really goofy. I had a majorette's scholarship. SL: What's that? JM: Like a fifty-dollar scholarship-baton-twirling. Majorettes. 00:23:13 SL: Okay. Got it. JM: Because I had taken so many photographs of the local majorette pageants and stuff, that they had gotten together and given me like a fifty-dollar scholarship. SL: That's sweet. JM: I had the scholarship from the American Legion, which is what the guys applied for. And my dad was in the Legion, so I was eligible to apply for a scholarship, and I got that one. And then I got the American Legion Auxiliary scholarship, which is the women's organization. And it typically goes to women. But I'd covered so many of their events that that year they awarded-I don't think I applied for it. I think they just awarded it to me. So there were all of these weird little scholarships that came together primarily from just being in the community for two years, you know, going to every parade and picnic and social event. Covering it for the 00:15:00 newspaper. So yeah, I had my little majorette trophy and my little, the scholarship that went with it. It was great. But that was a nice thing about being plugged into the community. That's how I ended up by working for National Geographic as a photographer's assistant. Because the photographer that was doing the story on my hometown area was showing up at all the same events that I was showing up at for the newspaper. And we started talking. And he was saying that, "Oh, yeah, well I'll probably bring in a translator from DC so that I can interview some people." And my thinking was, they really won't talk to you. You'd be better off picking someone local. And he was having a really hard time crossing the border, the Canadian border, because they were constantly checking all of his photo equipment to make sure he wasn't smuggling stuff. And again, it's like, well, you really should hire somebody local. It will be a lot easier to get across the border. So that's one of the reasons why I ended up by working for them, was because they were doing a story on that area at 00:16:00 that time. And I definitely lobbied for the job. And it was worth it from his perspective. Because again, I would drive when we were going across the border. And I'd switch back and forth between French and English and just tell them we're going to Edmundston to have lunch or something. Then all of a sudden it was fine. SL: Okay. So can you talk a little bit more about your work then? I mean, was that primarily what you did for them, was work in your town? Or did you also, I thought you also went to DC. 00:25:58 JM: Well I worked on one article for them over a length of time. And even, there was a little bit of work that I did with them after I was in Philadelphia. They're housed out of DC. So that would be the reference to DC. It was all work on the story that they were running on my hometown area. SL: And can you explain a little bit more about what that was about? JM: Why they would be doing that? It's really covering that Franco-American culture. They were doing a story on both sides of the border, and really focusing on sort of how isolated and exotic, and a time stopped in time. Because there are a lot of aspects of it that are stopped in time. People would tell stories about, for instance, during World War Two when people went over to fight and were in France, and they were speaking French. 00:17:00 And the local French people would laugh sometimes because of some of the words that they used. Because they'd go, "I haven't heard that since my grandfather. Nobody calls it that anymore." So the language itself was kind of stopped in time. A lot of the food was probably very regional, and sort of very distinct for that area. So for a lot of different reasons, they were focusing on that area. That area had, they had officially seceded from the United States at one point. Nobody showed up, nobody cared. (SL laughs) But they still did that very early in the history of that part of the state, I believe it goes this way, that the US had a map showing that Canada owned that part of northern Maine. And Canada had a map that showed that the US owned that part of Maine. So nobody went there, because everyone thought it was the other's. So when they-it's called la grand derangement. When they took all of the French out of Nova Scotia and moved them to Louisiana, a handful of families went as far up the river as they could and settled northern Maine. So that's how the French got there. And it 00:18:00 was pretty isolated area, and it stayed isolated until early 1800s, I think. As not really identifying strongly with one or the other. It seems like a long time ago, but I think that really helped from some of the identity for the valley. Everyone calls it the valley. 00:28:39 SL: So what kind of food did you grow up eating? JM: So, one of the staples is something called ployes. And ployes are buckwheat pancakes. They're savory pancakes that one would eat instead of bread. And for some reason, it only works if you get the buckwheat from up there. If you get the buckwheat from the valley, they come out really sort of this chartreuse color and they're kind of stretchy. I've tried buying buckwheat elsewhere and a lot of times it's whole wheat buckwheat. And it just never, they come out brown, the color's wrong. And for some reason-and they're still milling the buckwheat up there. I have my mom send me a bag every once in a while when I have a craving for ploys. Ployes are like if you've had Ethiopian food, it's like the pancake that's under the platters when they serve Ethiopian food. Very, very similar. Not the same color, but very similar texture and taste. Another thing that we had probably, I don't know if we had it once a week or not, was 00:19:00 boudin, blood sausage. So I always equate that with Saturdays, for some reason. Certain foods you have on certain days. Boudin, to me, is always on Saturday with boiled potatoes. Dandelion greens, boiled dandelion greens. Boiled [frijee?], which is fiddleheads, fiddlehead ferns. Those are things that, I mean, those are seasonal foods. But I get an image of my grandmother walking down the side of the road with a big kitchen knife, cutting dandelions as she's walking, just pick a big pile of them. And then other things that are just, we had, most people are familiar with beignets, which are, for instance, from New Orleans, which are light, fluffy donuts. We have something called beignets which are actually dumplings cooked in syrup. But they're not dessert. You serve them with salty meats like ham. So it's served as part of the main course, even though it's very sweet. And then other things that other people 00:20:00 have grown up eating, like rabbit and things like that, things that one has hunted. Moose at one point, you know, some of the darker meats like moose or bear, things like that, every once in a great while. A lot of partridge. Again, from hunting or foraging. Yeah. Those type of foods. A lot of food that take a long time, a lot of prep to them. Something else called rollers, which is cinnamon rolls. You make it just like a yeast cinnamon roll, but you bake them in a molasses bath, so that the bottom half of them are coated in this really gooey-you have to like molasses if you grow up in northern Maine. And the other thing, and I've actually made this since I've moved here, is cochon which is, it's head cheese but it's not really like head cheese that you would think of, that's big chunks of gelatinous stuff. This is really, really smooth and creamy with almost the texture of peanut butter. But that's something that 00:21:00 you have all the time with ployes. If you're having it with dinner, you have ployes with cochon. If you're having it for dessert, you have ployes with molasses and butter. So those are all just staples. 00:32:31 SL: That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing that. JM: Well it's not the type of menu that most people grow up eating. But anyone back home, especially at that time, there's a salad that I just love. It's Simpson black seed salad. It's a really light green color. But it's always done with sour cream and salted green onions, spring onions. That's the typical summer salad. That's a taste of home like probably nothing else. SL: Very cool. So I'm curious, how was it for you when you went to Temple University, coming from a place as unique as your hometown was. What was it like for you to go to the city? JM: You know, everything was an adventure. But I remember it from the first day as just being, you know, weird on a lot of levels. (SL laughs) I remember getting to Philadelphia. I mean, a couple of things. My parents drove me to the airport, which was over an hour away. And I think it would have been the first time I would have flown commercially. I had flown with my dad because my dad had gotten his pilot license, little two and four-seaters. I'd flown with him before. But it was the first time on a commercial flight. I had a footlocker packed with everything that I owned. And I remember getting to Philadelphia and getting to the airport and getting a cab. Getting hopelessly lost, because the cab could not figure out where the school was, the cab driver. And then when we got to the school, he's driving over the lawn, he's doing, I mean, because by that I think we were both exhausted by the end of that, and just trying to get me to the dorm building. I remember moving in. And it was probably the only, my only day of doubt, real doubt. It was before my roommate had arrived. And I just remember sitting in bed at night going, what the hell am I doing? Because it was so different. The people on my floor, you know, the guys down the hall, I remember having a conversation with them early on. It's like, "Oh, yeah, my mom used to take me for life 00:22:00 drawing at the Met." Everyone was from Philly or from New York. These kids were going to the Met on the weekends and doing drawing at the Met. There were some experiences in class where faculty would make a reference to something like the Guggenheim and I had no idea what they were talking about, and it was clear that I had no idea. But I was there on a full scholarship. So for some people, that didn't quite make sense, either. Because it was an academic scholarship and I seemed to have such gaps in knowledge and experience. It evened out very quickly. But even where Tyler used to be located, they've since moved to the main campus at Temple University. But where they used to be located was on the north edge of North Philly. And parts of North Philly are rough. You know, primarily African American. And very, very urban feeling. And so for 00:23:00 this little scrawny white kid, I mean, everything was, I don't think I was ever afraid. And I remember hanging out in parks at midnight with a bunch of other kids my age but not my color, the only white person there, and not really thinking anything about it, but realizing, yeah, I guess they could have been gang members. I guess they could have been a lot of other things because of where we were and the time and everything. But just none of it just dawned on me. I don't remember ever having a negative experience. So it's, you know, God protects the feeble minded, I guess. Because I should have felt really out of my element. And there was something just really fun and adventuresome and everything else about it. I don't know that I could live that way today, to be that just, so unaware that everything was fun. I guess that's the best way to describe it. 00: 37:12 SL: And what kinds of classes were you taking? What was your art program like? JM: Well, Tyler School of Art's definitely a very rigorous art school. I did five to six courses every semester, which was pretty much an overload almost every single semester, because I had to get out in four years. I had-- SL: Did you have to get out because of your funding? JM: Yeah. Financially. And again, I didn't know it at the time, but it was perfect for who I am. You were allowed to have a major that they called interdepartmental. Which meant that you sort of can major in everything. And the reason why it was really important there, there were certain days of the week that the studios were only open to majors. So if you were a printmaking major, I don't know if it was the weekend or what, but on certain days, it was only open to printmaking majors, which meant most people knew what they were doing in the studio, and they weren't that crowded. As someone who was interdepartmental, I could go anywhere and work anywhere. So it was great. There were only two of us at that time. I think they were phasing it out and you had to apply for it by permission of the dean, and there was a process to go through it. So for me, it was perfect, because I could go 00:24:00 from photography to glassblowing to printmaking to painting and drawing to design, to all this stuff. The other thing that I took advantage of there, which really was life-changing, was they had a campus in Rome. So I did my junior year abroad. And spent the full year, which a lot of the students typically went for one semester. And I took the full year. So I developed deeper friendships with Italians. I learned the language. If you went for a semester, it was easy to get by without the language. For a year, you just ended up by picking up more of it. And that was just another one of those experiences, sort of like getting to Tyler. I remember I got to Rome very, very late. It was midnight or something. And it was before ATM cards and being able to just get currency whenever you wanted to. So I had no Italian currency. It was after midnight. I couldn't get anyone to get me a cab ride. I was staying with someone that I knew there. I 00:25:00 wasn't staying in campus housing. I ended up by walking. I'm sure one of the people that I got directions from was a prostitute. And the only reason she could help me out is because she spoke French. So we spoke in French and she gave me the directions that I needed to get me there. But after I learned about the city and learned about the part of the city that I was walking through, it's like oh, okay, I get it now. That's why she was standing outside after midnight along the street. And even that was, it was all, it always had like, almost like a circus-like feel to it, the layers of adventure and weirdness and characters. That always just seemed to be part of the story. 00:40:39 SL: And can you talk a little bit more about how you decided to go to Rome in the first place? JM: It was my opportunity to travel. I worked at the college. So I worked in the dean's office and I worked for admissions. So I heard a lot of the narrative of the school as I was giving tours of campus and what we talked about, the things that we touted for the school. So I'm sure early on it got put on my radar. The way that the school ran, because it was another campus, faculty from Tyler went to Rome. They'd go for like a three-year period. So they would go to teach for an extended period. So you were working with some of the same faculty. So it felt much more structured. The only difference was, you know, you're paying your travel to get there and then figuring out housing. Because it was the same tuition. So it was simple. And I worked in the summertime doing photography for a summer 00:26:00 camp and an ad agency in New York. So I lived in the Catskills in the summertime. They hired about a quarter of their counselors from Europe, because it was a way for Europeans to come to the States, to travel. I got to know an Italian. I ended up by living with her and her family when I was there. The company that I worked for ended up by giving me a plane ticket to get over. And the woman that I'd met while working at the camp, I mean, I was supposed to just stay there for a week while we looked for housing. But I ended up by staying there, period. So it was all of these dots that just connected really easy. I spent a month in England before going to Rome because of another friend that I met through the camps that was a doctor in England, so I was visiting with her. It was very confusing from the school's perspective, because I didn't really let them know that I was doing a lot of this stuff. So they thought I was going to be in campus-provided housing. And I had my friend, because she was a model at the school, so she knew the people at the school. I had her go to the school and explain the situation, but they didn't really believe her. So when I got there, I was the perfect 00:27:00 roommate. Because anytime there was a housing problem, they would move me into that room. I never visited any of the rooms that I paid for my first semester when I was there, because I was living somewhere else. And I was basically living for free. So. SL: How far away were you from campus? 00:43:32 JM: I was on the other side of the city. And Rome's a nice, big, sprawling city. But that was great. I mean, that's why I learned the language quicker. I wasn't hanging out with a lot of the students from school, because I was hanging out with the person that I knew and her family, and all of their extended friends. I was in a completely different neighborhood. So I think I learned the city better. I learned the language better. And I got a truer experience. It made me connect with some of the faculty more, because some of the faculty were Italian. So with a little more facility for the language, you connected with the faculty more 00:28:00 that were from the area. But again, more sort of adventure and circus because there were only two of us that were not living in campus housing when I was there. SL: Okay. And as far as classes go, were you still doing the interdisciplinary approach? JM: Mm hmm. SL: And so you were taking a little bit of everything? JM: Mm hmm. So I was doing poster design, printmaking, painting. And then other academics, like I had an archeology class and art history and language. SL: And what about while you were studying in Rome, did you go to museums? Can you talk about that? 00:44:58 JM: It was the most transformative moment on so many levels. I was a little frustrated at Tyler as a freshman and a sophomore because I was more impressed with my work than anyone else was. (SL laughs) And then when I studied in Rome, and just seeing the scale of things and the labor of things. You know, you walk into the Sistine Chapel and you're thinking of your little painting. And then you look up and you're looking at acres of painting. I mean, the whole idea of scale and ambition and work just really sunk in that year. The school was very smart. They closed on Saturdays and would not allow people in. Because it was a competitive school and people were all, a lot of workaholics, basically. And if they wouldn't have closed, people would have been in school all week. And their point was, why bother coming here if all 00:29:00 you're going to do is come to school? You've got to be out in the community. You've got to get lost. You can't wander down the street without having some amazing aesthetic moment, whether you're in a church or a chapel or a museum or just walking. So that was good. So yeah, I ended up by seeing a lot of the city. I've gone back quite a few times. Because I've gone back enough times, one of the last times when I was traveling with friends, we decided to organize the trip based on body parts that we wanted to find. So we were looking for Saint Sebastian's head, or so and so's femur, or so and so's collarbone, all the reliquaries. And that was really interesting. Because even though I'd been to Rome quite a few times, and had lived there for a year, I ended up by going to parts of the city that I'd never been to before, because we were looking for parts. SL: (laughs) That's an interesting way to plan a trip. When you were studying in Rome, did you have time 00:30:00 to go see other parts of Italy, or other parts of Europe? 00:47:08 JM: Mm hmm. One of the good things about being there for two semesters is there was usually a break and trip. So we went to Venice one semester and went to Florence the other semester. Because I was staying with friends who were Roman, they had a little roulotte, which is like a teeny, tiny Winnebago. And we went to Naples for three days at one point, and just sort of slept in the piazza. Parked the little camper someplace and just slept. And drove down the coast and up the, the Amalfi and the Amalfi Coast. I had enough friends that we could do day trips or take off to different places. For Christmas break, I went to Amsterdam. So I got out of the country. Because I was visiting other friends that I'd worked with through this place in New York. So I spent a few weeks in Amsterdam. And again, another city that I've gone back to again and again after that. Yeah, 00:31:00 so there was lots of time to see lots and lots of other places. And it was always really interesting. I remember being in Possagno, which is the birthplace of Canova, I think, and they have a museum dedicated to Canova, the sculptor. And they knew that it was a group of students, a group of art students. And I remember talking, I don't know if the guy was the janitor or what, but I remember talking to this person in Italian who worked there. I must have told him that I was studying poster design. So all of a sudden we're down in the basement of the museum and he's opening all these flat files and giving me copies of all these different posters that they had done over the years. SL: Oh, wow. 00:49:03 JM: And weird stuff like that happened all the time. So years later, I was in Florence, traveling alone and just sitting on the 00:32:00 steps outside the Duomo? I don't know if the Duomo has steps. But sitting on the steps someplace. And this guy comes by on a scooter and just looks at me and says, "You want to see the most amazing church you've ever seen?" Sure. Get on the scooter. We drive out into the country. And it truly was the most amazing church I've ever seen. It was this school of Giotto, I've taken friends to it since, the school of Giotto Gregorian church. And if you time it right, you'll tour the church at the same time as they're singing mass. So it just fills with this Gregorian music. But yeah. Stuff like that just happens a lot. SL: And I should have asked you earlier, but what year was this? JM: I was in Italy in '80-'81. I turned 21 there. So I started in '79, so my junior year would have been '80-'81. Eighty-one-'82, I take that back, '81-'82. So. SL: Okay. And then you came back and finished- JM: Came back. Finished my senior year in Philadelphia. And started looking at graduate schools. SL: Okay. And could you talk a little bit about that? What schools were you looking at, and how you came to Madison? 00:50:41 JM: I sort of, that whole thing sort of went around and around for a little bit. I was accepted to grad school at Tyler if I wanted to. I didn't even apply. But Romos [Theasolus?], who was a printmaking faculty there, said, 00:33:00 "You're accepted if you want to come to graduate school here." then he said, "Don't come here." And it's not because he didn't love the school. He truly did love the school. But his advice was, "Go someplace you've never been before." And I really remember that. So at that point I became much more focused, I could have gone to University of Pennsylvania, because a friend would have paid for that if I would have stayed in the area. But Romos' advice was go someplace you've never been. And I had never been west of Philadelphia in the United States. And that's pretty much on the coast. So I had never traveled inland at all. I had traveled in Canada, up and down the coast, in Europe. So the three places that I looked, that I narrowed it down to, were all in the Midwest. It was Madison, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Indiana at Bloomington. Bloomington and Madison had really big printmaking and other areas. The Art Institute was Chicago, so that was the draw there, and that fabulous collection there. I ended up by going to Madison. And that was a, the only bad advice that I got as an undergraduate was you don't need the GREs to get into grad school. Which is true. Madison, none of the places I applied to 00:34:00 required the GREs, GRE exams for grad school. But what I didn't realize is, if you don't take the GREs, you're not eligible for a fellowship. So I got to Madison, a little bit more about the trip here. But I got to Madison and just figuring out the finances was just killing me. The people that I worked for in New York fronted me a loan to pay for grad school for a year. And I paid that back to them with interest. But I basically had a year to figure something out. And at that point, I don't know if it's still true, but at that point, to be eligible for a fellowship, you either needed to have taken your GREs, or have had, it was a semester or a year's GPA in residence. So I had to wait until I had a GPA for Madison before I was eligible for any fellowships. And I 4.0ed my time at Madison, so that wasn't an issue. So I had enough money to go to school fulltime my first semester. I went to school part time my second semester and ran the frame shop for Mass Co. It was an art supply 00:35:00 store not far from the campus, but they had a frame shop in Monona. And I managed that frame shop, worked fulltime there and went to school part time for my second semester. And in that meantime, became eligible for a fellowship. So after that, I had two different fellowships for the other two years that I was there, and summer fellowships. So after that, I didn't have to work. SL: Did you have to pay out of state tuition for the first couple of semesters? 00:54:25 JM: Yeah. Yeah. SL: Yeah. It sounds like it worked out for you. (laughs) JM: It did work, it did work out. The first year was rough. And you know, Madison at that point, first of all, flying out. So I'm wrapping up my work with the summer camp and this ad agency in New York. And I get on the plane, I fly here. And I'm changing planes in Milwaukee. And it's just as 00:36:00 the plane's touching down that it's like holy crap, they only thing that I know about Milwaukee is Laverne & Shirley. And that was my only frame of reference. (SL laughs) So I change planes and fly into Madison. And it's late, it's dark, it's nine or ten o'clock at night. And the cab is taking me down State Street. And there's someone on a unicycle juggling fire. (SL laughs) It's like the day before registration. I didn't have time for, I never visited the campus. So I never visited any of the schools that I applied to grad school for. So the day before registration was my first day in Madison. I did temporary graduate housing for that first year because of being from a distance. And because it was State Street and registration week, it's just crowded with people. And there's bands playing, 00:37:00 and everyone's outside drinking. And there was literally a guy juggling fire on a unicycle. So that's my first picture driving into Madison that I remember. The other thing that was weird about going to school there is, at that point, at least, you had to talk faculty into being allowed to study with them. SL: Yes. JM: So I remember some faculty looking at my portfolio and saying no. I remember one faculty member, Ray Gloeckler who was a relief printmaker, looking at my slides and saying, "I don't know why you'd want to work with me." I mean, basically my first semester, I was just trying to find people that would let me into classes. And that's actually how I ended up in Walter Hamady's book arts class, was advice from Eleanor Moty, who was jewelry faculty member, art metals faculty member there, and had either taught at Tyler or had graduated from Tyler. So we had a connection somehow that way. And so Walter's class was one of the classes, I didn't go there for that class, but I ended up in that class the first semester because there were certain faculty that just said no, they wouldn't work with me. I've got a hard time to believe it's still like that? SL: I doubt it's still like that. (laughs) JM: Pardon? SL: I doubt it's still like that. 00:57:18 JM: But at that point, that was in '83, at that point, it was a very different type of place. And it was weird. It never dawned on me that I would have to sell myself after being 00:38:00 admitted. SL: Sure. JM: Because registration, advising was still face to face, no computers. People still lined up in the barn, in the dairy barn, to register. You'll hear stories about that from the old days. And it was basically going from table to table with your slides, trying to convince people to work with you. SL: And how did you decide to go to Madison in the first place over Bloomington and the Art Institute? JM: How did I? I never heard from the Art Institute. I mean, it's sort of like RISDE, you know, write them off. And I don't remember what the aid packages looked like from Bloomington and Madison. I know I went back and forth talking with teachers over and over again in Philadelphia about, you know, I've got these choices, which one would you pick, which one would you pick. And at some point I learned that, because I always wanted to teach, I learned that Madison had more people teaching art at the college level than any other university in the country. So I mean, that was my end route. So that came into my decision. I also thought that, I mean, from a distance, Madison looked like 00:39:00 more of a city. And even though I'm from a very, very small town, I got used to living in larger cities, and liking living in larger cities. So it was an appeal there. SL: Okay. And then can you tell us a little bit about the book arts class with Walter Hamady? 00:59:24 JM: Yeah. After a while, I think you've talked to a few students of Walter's, it's an interesting thing, because we all get together and talk about his every once in a while. After I graduated and when people looked at my work, they would say something like, "Oh, it's clear who you studied with." You know, "You're one of those Walter people." And I can remember a lot of axioms or truisms that I got out of his class. I don't know that I remember him teaching in the most traditional way that people teach. A lot of people are going to have the same story. He would come into class, he would sit down and read his mail. You will hear that from more than one person. And he did. He would start class. He would come into campus. 00:40:00 Because all of those folks were really not on campus beyond the days that they were teaching. They were out in their studios and working. And a lot of the faculty at that point didn't live in Madison. They had studios out in the country or out in other communities. And they would come in for that day. So he would come in. He would scoop up his mail, sit down at the table and read his mail and sort of talk to folks. But I also know that I learned a very, very exact way of crafting a book and setting type and printing that I must have gotten from him. With other faculty members, I remember demos, I remember lectures, I remember a lot of different-but not with Walter. So it's kind of interesting. I still see him every once in a while. And I remember going out to see him with Caren Heft. And he had some type locked up in his press, and he was editioning. And I said, "Hmm, I'm surprised that you put your coin keys, the lockups for the press, here and here. Because I remember you saying that you should never put them on that side because you might drop something on the way to tightening up the type." And he looks at me, and very good natured, but he has a way of seeming offended. "You people keep making up this bullshit about stuff that I've taught in class! I never told you that!" And he just goes on this theatrical rant about clearly I'm making it up and he 00:41:00 never got that from me. But I learned it. And I only studied letterpress with him. He's an interesting faculty member. Beautiful craftsman and designer, and well-lauded for all of his accomplishments in that respect. But he's irascible at times. And I think he has a history with some folks at times. But he's, you know, I've never experienced that directly. And he's only been generous with me. So the frustrating thing about having studied with Walter is that I was at Madison for three years. And between sabbaticals and grants, he was gone for a year and a half of that time. So he was on sabbatical my second year, and probably the second semester of my first year there. The person that they brought in to replace him, Joe Wilfer, wouldn't work with me. 1:03:12 SL: Oh, why was that? It was one of those, you present the slides and they say yea or nay? JM: And there are lots of stories about who Joe liked to work 00:42:00 with and who he didn't like to work with. And I think I fell into that latter half. So for a year and a half, I went off and did other stuff. SL: What did you do? JM: I worked in painting, I worked in printmaking. You know, I did a fair amount of art history stuff. I studied philosophy, other things. I worked a lot with Richard Long, who's probably the person that on a day to day basis I had the deepest connection with who was on the faculty. Richard was a painter. It was an interesting time. It was an amazingly political minefield in that department. Certain faculty didn't talk to certain faculty. And certain faculty didn't like the students of other faculty. And the students were very aware of this. So it was interesting to navigate that and still get what one wanted from the program. But I just did other stuff for a while. And then when Walter came back, I worked a fair amount with Walter after that for the last year. But there was a gap in there. SL: That must have been difficult to have to navigate all of that. I mean, what 00:43:00 was that like for you? JM: It would have been difficult if I would have been monofocused. But the grad program at Madison was perfect for me in the same way that Tyler was. In that once you got accepted into the program, you could really move in any direction that you wanted to move in, so long as you took X amount of credits. It didn't have to be just in book arts. It didn't have to be just in printmaking or painting or whatever. They really didn't have a delineated separate design program at that point. So the design was really in printmaking. So I was working in that department area. And if I couldn't be doing typography, I'd be doing something else while I was waiting for him to come back. 1:05:29 SL: Sure. And what was it about making books that you really enjoyed? JM: I like process. It's why I got into photography. Even as a painter, I paint like someone who likes process. I paint traditionally in some respects. That's why I like printmaking, because there's so much ritual and process to it. You know, the book arts started, I mean, I had made one book as an undergrad. So it wasn't a great passion at that point. I love books. I love paper. But it wasn't, as a discipline, it wasn't on my radar at all. So it wasn't until I got to graduate school that it was even on my radar. And after that first class, which I loved, it still wasn't necessarily oh, that's my life's work. I really, I was around a lot of other book people. I was seeing a lot of the work that they were doing and the successes that they were getting. But it was no 00:44:00 more or less important than making in any other way. Which is ironic, because I remember one month in my first teaching job where I actually got more money from my book arts gallery than I did from my teaching job. That didn't happen very often, and it doesn't happen now as much. But I remember at that point starting out that as far as getting attention and success, that's the area that it was coming in, more than in any other studio area that I was in. SL: Okay. Interesting. Can you tell us the story behind sailorBOYpress? I know everybody was encouraged to come up with a press name. Can you talk about that? 1:07:29 JM: Yeah, and we all should have probably, it should have been explained to us that some of that will follow us for the rest of our lives. And being a smartass one semester may not be a good thing. It's based on my name, my last name, which is Morin, or Marin, depending on-in my family, it's spelled two different ways. So my dad's siblings, half of them are Morins, and half of them are Marins, with an "a." And before that, it actually goes back to Morin. But Marin translates as sailor. Marine or sailor or whatever. So I just came up with a campy name based on my surname, based on my last name. You know, it was part of my identity, that kid that grew up in sort of the French area, or Franco-American. And it was a name that a lot of people didn't know. So it was a camp version of that. And under that press name, in graduate school, I made three or four books. But they were actually books that were selling by the time I got out of graduate school. So I didn't want to start a different press name. And people seemed to be okay with the press name. So I mean, it started as one of those larks because in grad school, everyone who worked in the letterpress area had a press name. I don't know that I honestly agonized that much about it. I was being a smartass and I wanted something campy, so that's 00:45:00 where I ended up. And I liked it typographically to have the boy in, everything lower case but the BOY in all caps. So typographically, I could do things with it and shape it and stuff. So I liked that from a designer's perspective, from a typographer's perspective. So in that respect, it worked. But it also doesn't work, because you know, the collections out there have it arranged in three or four different ways. They have it as, in the search engines and stuff, three separate words. They put "sailor" and "boy" together, but they separate out "press." So I created this nightmare to search later on. And sort of a dubious name to begin with. But. SL: So the way you have it, you designed it, was all one word. And it was all lowercase except for BOY is uppercase. 1:10:03 JM: Mm hmm. And there was a clothing line, Boy of London at that point. There was sort of, I think "boy" was just in the culture, too, in the early to mid '80s. That's where it came from. SL: Okay. And 00:46:00 can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the other students in the book arts that you interacted with while you were there? JM: You know it was, if you talk to folks in the book arts community and start rattling off the names of people that I was in school with, almost everyone in my class went on to have a career that is recognizable. People know the names. They know the press names. Kathy Kuehn, Penny McElroy, Ruth Lingen, Caren Heft, Walter Tisdale. I mean, that was just a handful of the people that were in that group. They all went on to do very well. And to this day, just a couple of weeks ago, I was making paper with Caren Heft. And Lisa Beth Robinson, who studied with Penny McElroy, so now it's generational, you know, it's like the next generation. And we're all still working together. We've done this for years now. We get together for one week in the summertime and we make paper. And we'll make two, three, four thousand sheets of paper in that amount of time. When I was up at Stevens Point teaching the UW system and Caren Heft was up there at that same point, too, that started it. 00:47:00 Because Caren had the paper mill. Then Walter gave me a paper beater. Then we had a couple of paper beaters. So that connection has been, thinking back to school days, stronger and deeper than anything else, either in undergraduate or graduate school, was that book arts community and the way that people were really good about curating one another into shows. Caren was the best person in that respect. We only had one class together, and she was actually studying at UWM, and drove to Madison to take that one class with Walter. SL: Oh, she did. Okay. 1:12:28 JM: Mm hmm. Yeah. She didn't graduate from Madison. And she's had a great career in the book arts world. But even only working together in that one class, she kept in contact and she was really good about pulling me into shows, and pulling me back into that community over the years. As other people were. It caused a connection with Woodland Pattern here in Milwaukee. I've shown there over the years. I've run into other people from my class, like Kathy Kuehn there. And when I moved to town to take the presidency here at MIAD, Anne Kingsbury from Woodland 00:48:00 Pattern reached out and said, "Do you want a show?" So the first solo show that I've had in Milwaukee was there. And that all traces back to that class in 1983. It's amazing how successful that group was. Because there was probably eight or ten of us in a class at that point. You know, I was in class with Tracey Honn. She was in graduate school a couple of years later, but we overlapped. So when Walter came back in '85-'86, Tracy and I had a class together. And people that were in that group. But I really knew the group from when I first got there. But like Ruth is out in New York, a very good career immediately after graduate school. Penny McElroy went off to Bethany College. And I replaced her at Bethany College when she took the job at Redlands. She's been at Redlands ever since. Tisdale's in Maine. He's been working ever since. Kathy Kuehn's had a successful career. There were a couple of other names in there that I'm blanking on, too. They were all papermakers. Beth Grabowski, who's on the east coast. Yeah. Lots of people. SL: Well I know we're getting 00:49:00 close to time, so I think maybe we should stop here. JM: Mm hmm. 1:14:43 [End Track 1. End Session 1.] Second Interview Session (July 27, 2018): Digital File 00:00:00 SL: Today is Friday, July 27, 2018. I'm Sarah Lang with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking with Jeff Morin, book artist, UW alum, and president of the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. We're talking at MIAD in Milwaukee today. So Jeff, last time we were talking a little bit about the Woodland Pattern Book Center, and kind of the connection that some of the students at UW Madison had with Woodland Pattern. Would you mind talking a little bit about that? JM: I'd be happy to. And I'll put it in a little bit of a context. For those of us in graduate school who came from outside the area, our first resource for books, the nature of books, book arts, would have been the Kohler and would have been the rare books collection connected with the Union Library. So that would have been our starting point. And then, once you get a little bit more of an understanding of that world and you start reaching out beyond the immediate confines, one of the first places that we discovered is Woodland Pattern. And Woodland Pattern's a very interesting bookshop, gallery, fine press, curiosity shop, in Milwaukee. Very long history, very long tradition in the community, both in the Milwaukee community and in the book arts community. And very supportive. They have, I believe, I believe they have the largest collection of Native American authors. So that's one of their focus points. But they 00:50:00 also over the years have produced and commissioned broadsides from many notable people, including Walter Hamady. And they've always had a good for sale collection of small press work, some of which is very low-end, Xeroxed, photocopy, offset work, and some very high-end letterpress work. So it was a good way of familiarizing myself with what was going on out there. It was the type of place, and this happened to me with Kathy Kuehn. It was the type of place that you could show up unannounced and someone like Kathy would be sitting in the corner reading a book. And this is maybe 20 years after I left school. And there she is. So it always felt to me like a convergence point where if people were coming through the Midwest, you'd cross paths there. And there are other places, there are other book arts centers around the country and in the Midwest. They feel very different from Woodland Pattern. Because Woodland Pattern isn't trying to be a studio, a workshop. They do have gallery space. But it's not their driving mission. So it feels different from a lot of book arts centers in that respect as well. SL: And after you had graduated, I know you did do an exhibition there and talked as well. 00:03:27 JM: Mm hmm. SL: Would you like to talk a little bit about that? JM: I've had a couple of exhibitions at Woodland Pattern over the years. One of them was at the same time, I think it was, I always thought that it was the inaugural speaker, but I think I was actually the second speaker in the Ettinger series at UW Milwaukee. And it's a series focused on book arts, named after and supported by Susie Ettinger, who's very much a cultural figure in the Milwaukee 00:51:00 community. And at the same time as giving my Ettinger talk, I had an exhibition at Woodland Pattern and was also doing workshops through the Golda Meir Library with Max Yela. So it was one of these things where we could connect up three different experiences for me in the community, and all happened at roughly the same time. So I could take some time away from my job. I was either a faculty member or a dean up at UW Stevens Point at that moment in my career. And that was the first time I had a solo exhibition at Woodland. And they were also very gracious when I moved to Milwaukee to start my position here at MIAD as president to give me an exhibition as a way of introducing myself to the community. Anne Kingsbury, one of the founders and driving forces behind Woodland, was very, she sort of smiled at me when she told me about the show and said, "I really want to send the message that administrators can make things, can continue their careers." So she was sending a double statement about you can be a practicing artist 00:52:00 and have another career. So I appreciated the way that she came at the exhibition. And it was a way for me to do all new work. It was all work that had been done in about my first 18 months here in Milwaukee. So that was, it felt like a nice personal tour de force as well. SL: Would you like to start by talking a little bit about the worked that were in there? Or would you like to kind of go backwards in time and start with your first artist book? 00:06:02 JM: I think probably start with the first books done at Madison. Because my work has evolved quite a bit since that time period. But there were, well, there were several important milestones for me while I was at Madison making books. The only book I had made prior to going to Madison was in a photo class at Tyler School of Art. And I did, I did a book of self-portraits using a pinhole camera and making 00:53:00 my own photo paper with a photo emulsion made from scratch. The book's horrible on some level. I mean, I'm still interested in the pinhole camera images. But I had never had any instruction on how to bind a book. And of course I wanted it to be a leather-bound, case bound book. I still have it. I'm sure the thread that I used, I opened up my sewing box that I had for fixing clothes, and picked whatever heavy-gage thread I could find there. I mean, so on so many levels it was so naive. But it showed that I had an interest in books before I went off to graduate school and decided oh, I'm going to start making books. There was always that in the back of my head about being really interested in the nature of books. So when I got to Madison, one of the first courses I took in grad school was with Walter Hamady. It was his 00:54:00 introduction to letterpress and papermaking. So we were doing papermaking at the same time. There were several luminaries that were in the studio at that time. Kathy Kuehn was there, Walter Tisdale was there, Ruth Lingen was there. And a host of other people. They were a year ahead of me, so they weren't in that class, but they were always in the studio. And Ruth was, I think, the studio technician. So she was really helpful. SL: And Jeff, can you remind us what year this is about? 00:08:15 JM: I started in 1983. So I went from1983 to 1986, and I did an MA and an MFA. So in that first class, it was interesting because there was some very sophisticated work being done by people around me. It was my starting point. And Walter had a system. He had us do a letterhead system, then we did a broadside, then we did an editioned book. And the broadside was pretty tight that I did. There was a lot of origami, a lot of folding involved. And it was partially litho and partially letterpress. And then I did the book, which was a pop-up book. It was one of kind of sort of poetry, because I'm not really a writer of poetry. But I was young and that seemed like the thing to do. So it was based on my walk to school and the blinking, you know, sort of hazard lights from construction and stuff. And it was collaged and it had pop-ups, and it had a lot of little things that you found by peeling up the pages. And I got to the final critique and Walter picked it up. He practically held his nose as he picked it up. Because I had done a lot of collage in the book. And then I had run the pages through the press. So the printing of the type was really uneven. Because some parts of the book were really thick 00:55:00 from the collage. Some were really thin. And I know he didn't do it, but my memory of it is practically holding it up with two fingers at a distance. And he was kind of brutal in the critique. And justifiably so. But even in that critique, I got a chance to with him and with others in the class dissect what I did, why it was problematic, and then how to do it correctly. And then so for the next books, I was incorporating all of this stuff that I got from that first critique and that first session. So that first book was called "For the Moment." It's a tiny little book. The next book that I worked on, "Dear Mr. Clifford," was really embedding all of that information that I learned about printing and pop-ups and alternative materials. And for me it's a leap because of the quality, the printing quality. It was also one that I could get a chance to be pretty thoughtful about very simple things. It's glued in paper dots and triangles and copper wire. But I was really thinking about the 00:56:00 pacing of a book. One of the things that, when I teach book design and when I talk about it with my students, and it's a holdover from my thinking at that time, the difference between a book and anything else is the element of time. So if you think about a drawing or a painting or a poster, there's no real element of time involved in experiencing the work, because you're not turning pages. So the turning of the pages brings in the element of time and allows one to build in surprise and progression and metamorphosis and all that. So from the first book to the second book was a leap for me. There's a little bit of a time difference in there, because that first book was done in '83, and the second book was done in '85. And the reason for that time gap was that Walter had strung together a sabbatical and grants. And all of a sudden he was gone for a year and a half. So I started making books in my first semester at Madison. And then the person that I decided I was going to work with was off in Hawaii and other places working on his own work. So at that point, I started to do more in printmaking and design and painting. And when he came back, I had a chance to come back into the letterpress studio and get back into my work. It was a completely different group of students at that point. 00:57:00 It was a younger group. It was more of a group that was starting out. People like Tracey Honn were in that second group. One of the things that I do remember that was really sweet, a woman who didn't go on to be a book artist, [Deborah Ordelon?], did some very interesting work. But really, she was working in healthcare. She was working, I think in a mental health facility. And I don't know how she ended up in the class. But she's one of the few that didn't end up by going on and having a career in book arts. But the fire alarm went off in the building late one night. And she was in the letterpress studio. And she scooped up all of my books and my work and I don't know, maybe a couple of other people. I mean, she was going to rescue this stuff. You know, that was the, to me that shows the type of kind of family or community or tightness of the group that she heard the fire alarms go off and her thinking was to look around for work to save. I think that that's a charming way to talk about the sense of community that was there at that time. All of the early work is different from my later work in a couple of different ways. "Dear Mr. Clifford" was based on a letter, a photocopy of a letter that I was given as an undergraduate in a painting class. So it wasn't original content, or unpublished content. The next book I did after that, "The Priest and the Acolyte," was an excerpt from an Oscar Wilde story. And I only did a small section of the story because if I remember right, the story doesn't end well. And I only picked out what was sort of maybe a happier part of the story to focus on. The book after that, "Words to My Brother Theo," was based on letters that Van Goh wrote to his brother, Theo. So all of that was stuff that was content that was out there, that people had been mulling over discussing, debating. It wasn't until I left grad school and was working in Kansas, where I replaced Penny McElroy and other book artists from that same era who had left Bethany College and gone on to Redland to teach. It wasn't until I was there that I started looking around for poets, 00:58:00 for authors, for, or to develop another type of content that was more original. At first, for me, it was more about being the designer and solving the structure of the book, and thinking about the elements in the book. And the text was important to me, but it was also important to a lot of other people, and a lot of other people knew the content. So in Kansas, I started looking around for other authors. "Two Tribes" is like that. It's two authors, Steve Ferlauto and Grant McGuire. Grant was a poet and had been published to some degree. Steve Ferlauto was a designer and really hadn't been published for his writings, wasn't known for his writings at all. And I just kind of mashed them together in a book. And that was one of the first times that I dealt with content that was written by someone alive, someone that I had to negotiate with even about maybe the design components or other things. And Steve Ferlauto and I 00:59:00 have worked together on other projects later on, much more ambitious book projects. But that was our first collaboration. And for me, that was one of the first collaborations with contemporary, people who were my contemporaries. SL: How did you decide to pair the two authors together for that work? 00:16:41 JM: They were friends, people that I knew. And people that I had worked with at two very different times with quite a few years apart. Steve I knew from undergraduate school in Philadelphia. And we had remained in contact. He's one of the only people I was still in contact with from my undergraduate days. And Grant was someone that I had met in Madison. And the connector for Grant and I was Bill Bunce, who was at the art library, at the Kohler. So it was a connection of friends. Steve and Grant never met one another, don't know one another. But I had connectors that kind of closed the loop on those two. And I thought that their writing paired well together. It wasn't, I wasn't interested in doing a call out, like I'm looking for writers to work with. It was two people that I knew on different levels, and also knew that they wrote, and thought that there was a way of putting that content together. And they were both willing to be hands off enough about the book design that it worked in that respect, too. SL: Can you talk a little bit more about how this was for you working with living artists? Living writers? Versus working with text that had already been published before. Like what were 01:00:00 the challenges? 00:18:26 JM: There were a couple of challenges. I don't know how much I thought about it or processed it at the time. One, as the press was starting to get notice or attention, I was selling a fair amount of work at that point. I really started thinking, you know, I'm just sort of taking these pieces of writing that I don't have permission for. I mean, I've been given them, but I wasn't given the original. You know, so it was problematic. And as a student, which those first few books were done as a student, you know, I thought that's fair game as a student. You're exploring and discovering, and it's not the most important piece in a way. So I just wasn't worried about it. I wasn't being thoughtful about it. As I started to think more about it, as the work started to go into more collections, not that I ever had a problem or was ever called on it as far as the content, it just didn't seem that I was being mature about what I was doing. So that was one of the 01:01:00 reasons why I wanted to make that change. And working with people that I knew, I felt comfortable working with them. It wasn't like I received an unsolicited manuscript and I had to build some sort of working relationship. The working relationship was pretty easy with both writers, because I knew them both fairly well. And the book becomes like a Venn diagram. It's overlapping circles. And the book becomes the center of that Venn diagram where three people overlap. I didn't feel the need to go back and forth with them and negotiate on design. They gave me work that was laid out the way that they wanted it. So the word pattern on the page, that was their work. I was not going to tinker with that. So I put down that word pattern. But they were also-and they both liked my work, they both knew my work. So it wasn't like they were signing on to something and yet they didn't agree with it aesthetically. So aesthetically we 01:02:00 were in a similar enough space. And my attitude, which is probably really arrogant, was that I really didn't interrupt your, I didn't correct your writing and I didn't insert myself in that part of your creative work. So I'm looking to work with people that don't want to insert themselves too much in my part of the creative process. And I think that it's really easy, and I've had other instances over the years where working with a collaborator there have been, you know, misunderstandings, disagreements, surprises, because both people were trying to control the other person's work a little bit. And those things 01:03:00 hadn't been negotiated in advance. There was one project that I worked on later on with Caren Heft. Martyr, Mercury, and Rooster. It's actually a book, a trilogy of books, that did very well for us, got a lot of attention. Some for good reasons, some for not good reasons. But the way that we did the project, I did one book based on how death impacts a culture. Caren did one book based on how death impacts a culture. And then we jointly did the third book. And it just never dawned on me that she would plaster her press name on like the title page of the book and stuff and not even mention me. And in her mind, she's working on the book, that's her book as part of the trilogy. But because of the order, her book sits on the top in the case. Because she did Martyr. I did Rooster, which is the last book. And we did Mercury together. So I looked at it and I thought, what are you doing? We open this box and your name's plastered all, they've got to dig pretty deep before they realize that I participated in the project, too. That was one of those instances that I learned from that, you know, some things have to be negotiated at the beginning. We're great friends. It didn't damage any of that. There's no Walter-like story about conflict there. But I did call her on it, because I was surprised by it. So with things like the Two Tribes book with Steve and Grant, there was none of that, because they had done their part and I had done my part. 00:23:48 And then I started working on a model that has become more of a reoccurring model. And the book that was pivotal for that is Saint Sebastian. It's a fairly light book. Handmade paper. One or two pop-ups in it. 01:04:00 What I did is again I went back to an established piece of writing, historic sermon on Saint Sebastian. But I purposefully, it was a game. How few words could I change in the text to make it something absolutely different in meaning and a bit scandalous? So take something that's a sermon that's intended for one function. Change a few words and it becomes an inappropriate romance. And that started to become really intriguing to me as I've worked on books as I go along where the importance of social justice really starts to increase as I get closer to today in my work. And the concept of creating a fable or a narrative that is a little bit timeless or feels fable-like, from found text or found source. News articles, that sort of stuff, where I feel like I'm inserting myself enough to be able to claim it as my intellectual property. But it's anchored in something else that's happening. Does that make sense? 00:25:37 SL: Yeah. Could you talk a little bit more about the social justice aspect of it? JM: Sure. SL: Did you want to talk about that later? JM: No, I'm happy to talk about it now, because it weaves through a lot of the titles. More of the more recent titles that I've done. The most recent book that I did is called A Murder of Crows. Or The Defense of Marriage and Other Things. 01:05:00 They usually have these convoluted Victorian titles. An easy one that I can talk about, and then the long one that stretches out. So in that book, it is about a murder or a group of crows. They're all nesting in a chestnut tree. And there's a car accident at the base of the tree. And they feed on carrion. So they feed on the person that dies in the accident. And as they're feeding on the person, they're slowly adopting the person's value system. And the person was a Christian, had a Bible opened on the seat. The Bible got splattered with blood, so they eat the Bible, too. So not only do they internalize the values of the person, but it's based in Old Testament. It's based in the book of Leviticus. So they start to realize that there is such a thing as marriage, that only certain crows are allowed to be married. And they go through this whole thing as they see themselves as human but they're not. And it's a little bit nonsensical on some levels, and it's really vicious on other levels. And a couple of the crows become real zealots, and really, really preach for Old Testament punishment of the other crows. And the crows slowly just start to fly away. And at one point, there are only three crows left, the most zealous and two males crows that are a couple, 01:06:00 that no one realized were a couple before they knew what couples were. And that couple flies off and, I think it's a beech tree. They settle in a beech tree and look down and they're looking down at a chuppah and two men getting married. And there's this dove in the center of all the crows. And it's all based on, I mean, it's connections to Noah and all these other things. And even some of it's just a really bad pun. And I don't know if people realize that in my work. Like they start in a chestnut tree. That old chestnut. That old argument. The phrase "that old chestnut" means oh, that old, tired argument again, about who's allowed to get married and who's not allowed. So that's what I mean by social justice and talking about the nature of fable or folktale or fairy tale. It's 01:07:00 something that fits into that fairy tale model. It deals with something that is contemporary. And I try to do it in a bit of a discerning way to have that discussion or that debate with someone, with the person reading the book that I'll never see. So you know, that's the most recent book. The book that I'm working on now, and you had mentioned at another point about talking about the nature of pop-up and stuff. And that was in my early books. It sort of fell away after a while. And the book that I'm working on now is going to go back to that pop-up model. And it's, you know, it has that same, the working title is The Flying Men of Syria. And it's a, it seems like an exotic, interesting title. Is it pilots? Is it adventurers? What it ends up by being is the men that are thrown off of the highest point in the city to kill them because they've been discovered as being gay. So it's an odd, there is, there is Koranic reference to that, to doing that, throwing the person from the highest point. But it requires some sort of gymnastics to makes that allowable. Some sort of theological gymnastics to make that work. I don't know what the correct terms would be for that. So the book is, I made the paper over the summer. It's blue with cloudlike paper pulp in it. And it's supposed to be about that day that is beautifully, beautifully blue with a line of white clouds. 01:08:00 And the clouds sort of look like Arabic. So the person that's being thrown from the roof is envisioning that the cloud will tell their story. So that's, it's an explanation at this point, but it's what I'm working on next. But again, it has, it's looking at a place, it's drawing attention to an injustice. The book before The Murder of Crows was called The White Maiden Male. And that was based on the life of Rudolf Brazda, who was, the way that I found out about Brazda was I was in the doctor's office reading an old copy of Time magazine as I'm waiting for my appointment. And they had run his obituary when he passed away. And the reason why they would have run his obituary is that he was the last known survivor of a Nazi concentration camp to have worn the pink triangle. Which is designation he was in the 01:09:00 concentration camp because he was gay. And he managed to survive. He survived Buchenwald, I believe. And what I did was I researched and found a German folk tale about, called The White Maiden. And it's about this wine that if you drink this wine, your thirst will never be satisfied. There will never be enough. There will always be that sense of want. And I had also researched the word "maiden." And I believe originally the term "maiden" is gender-neutral. Although we only think of maidens as being women now. So what I did is I mashed up his experiences in Buchenwald, based on his writings, and some interviews that I could find on YouTube, and that folk tale. So it's like someone who's dealing with trauma and fantasy is the only way, they sort of fantasize their way through the trauma. And I've used that device a few times in the work that I do where, I did one book on Joan of Arc, The Twelve Articles, which takes Joan of Arc's trial, and a contemporary person who's suffering from ARC. And we don't use the term ARC anymore, but it's AIDS-related complex. And in 01:10:00 the early days of the AIDS crisis, people had ARC before they died. So whatever the illnesses were, were all ARC. So I did the double entendre on the sound of the two words. And in order for this fictitious person to just deal with the immensity of having that condition, he made himself go through Joan of Arc's trial in his head. So she was tied to a log at one point so that she couldn't escape, so he tied himself to something. So it was just this way of him dealing with the immensity of that. And that's become my vehicle for creating the narrative for my works. So I'm much more reliant now on my own writing, rather than either partnering with poets. And I think that that was a little bit of an influence of what a lot of other people were doing coming out of the Madison program. That's not where my primary interest is. But that seemed to be what a lot of people were doing. Walter's work is like that, other people's work is like that. But that just never quite resonated with me. I'm more interested in storytelling, which poetry is different from storytelling in my head. Whether that's right or wrong or I'm a philistine or whatever, that's what's in my head. So I've looked around to figure out a way that I can write and still deal with social justice issues that are here today, whether it's the nature of war, or environmental poisoning. The trilogy that I was talking about earlier that I did with Caren Heft, Martyr, Mercury, Rooster, my piece of that is about a home remedy for HIV in Africa. And it is to have 01:11:00 sex with a virgin will somehow purify the man. Well, you can't trust that people are a virgin. So you have to look for younger and younger people. So it ends up by being a child rape practice. And in that case, it was a story that I got out of the news. And it was a very, very young child. And an older friend of the family. And I just started thinking about that child. And how did she talk to herself, you know, that internal voice, how did she talk to herself to get her through this thing that was happening that was probably, that would have been completely foreign to her. I mean, the entire act would have been, I don't know what's happening, I don't know what's going on. So she slipped into a fairy tale of sorts to get her from point A to point B, and to survive. So those, that's the type of content that the work tends 01:12:00 to be more about now. People who are being violated by the bigger culture. You know, a lot of it's either in the AIDS community or the LGBT community. But some of it's also been related to war, environmental poisoning, that sort of stuff, too. There are a few communities that I go back to more naturally. But not exclusively. 00:37:43 SL: Could you tell me a little bit about if you've done any, because you're talking about looking at, I guess, fantasy as a coping mechanism, for lack of a better way of explaining it. Have you done some research, or read up about any of this? JM: I'm probably being completely irresponsible, because I haven't, I haven't done, I haven't treated it clinically. SL: Sure. JM: There are other times when, there are other books where research has been more important to the authenticity of the object. There was a book that I did called The Sacred Abecedarian. And it's about, and it was a book that I did with Steve Ferlauto, the author from one of the previous books. And it is about a system that he developed for the geometry of the development of the Roman alphabet. And it is extremely geometry and math-dependent. And there's no way to fake what that is. So I did some work, but I really relied heavily on his research. So it was very much a research-driven piece. The other work that I'm doing has been more about 01:13:00 wondering about the individual. How does the individual, the duality of narrative, the story we talk about in our head versus the story that comes out of our mouths. A good example of that is this book called My Darling, My Reason. It started as, and God bless eBay sometimes. It started out as, I bought a stack of letters that a sailor wrote home to his wife during World War Two. The sailor thing connects up to my press name, so it's always hanging out there. I have a strong interest in World War Two as a period of time. And if you read the letters one way, they're perfectly innocent and everything's okay between the two of them. And if you put a little subtext in there or, you know, I'm writing this, but I'm thinking that, then it becomes something completely different. And he makes, in his letters home to his wife, he makes some very, very veiled references about another soldier. And that soldier's like, 01:14:00 "You remember so and so." And it really makes it seem like the guy's gay. But it's just a couple of very careful words written, knowing that letters were being censored at that time. And some of the letters that I have are actually the censored letters. They're all original things. So is it code to his wife? And was there any sort of relationship with this other person? So it's fictitious on my part, but it's not a big leap. And imagining how the girl Sibongile in that Rooster book gets through it is pure speculation on my part. But it's a way that I could see someone coping. There was a, now I'm going to blank on the name of it, was it A Beautiful Life? There was a concentration camp movie done quite a few years ago. 00:41:40 SL: Life is Beautiful. JM: Say it again? SL: Life is Beautiful. JM: Life is Beautiful. And about the relationship between the father and the child. And how the child almost thinks that he's at summer camp in some weird way. And the father's doing everything, and roping in other people, and doing everything to keep that narrative going. That's really similar to how I'm thinking about a lot of the narratives in my work. You know, either the person is doing that to themselves, or someone else is helping with that around them. And I go to things like folk tales or nursery rhymes or that sort of stuff because we all have that sort of in us. It's part of what's helped us form the narrative and make sense of the world. So it seems really plausible. I want to produce something that's plausible. It doesn't make any sense at all that crows are debating marriage. But if you believe in this one thing-that they can internalize values-and given the way that we obsess about food, and if I have this, if it's organic, this happens to me. If it has a micronutrient, this happens to me. I mean, we're so obsessed about how food can alter us, it's not that big a leap. It's sort of rambling, but that's, I mean, that's how I approach the content of my work. SL: Mm 01:15:00 hmm. I appreciate your talking about that. I was going to ask you about the fables and fairy tales, so I'm glad you brought that back. Is there anything else about, you talked a little bit about the pop-up elements. Can you elaborate you a little bit more about maybe what drew you to including those in your books in the first place? 00:43:36 JM: You know, part of it was, I've got a couple of things that drive me. So working with Walter was really good in that respect. Because he would say things that would seem so simple, but were so profound at the same point. And one of them, for instance, was, "Well you don't have to use the same kind of paper throughout your book." And coming from a publishing background before that, and having worked as a designer, and going on to work as a designer later on, you specify one paper. You might print color on it, you might fold it, you might perforate it, but it's basically the same between the covers. The covers might be different. You have cover stock. But really, 01:16:00 that's as exotic as it would get. And Walter comes along and it's like, the pages don't have to be the same size, they don't have to be the same color, they don't have to be the same material. And it really started me thinking about the nature of book and the nature of tactile, and what was it in a book that I couldn't do in a drawing or a print or a painting. Well, I work very flat. I'm not a, I'm not a thick collage artist. I'm not a sculptural painter. So I'm always working with implied three-dimension. But in a book, I could work three dimensionally. And it's something that in my head, a print could never do. So it allowed me to say okay, I'm doing something different now. And I'm always, 01:17:00 it's what keeps me working. You know, someone, you might look at a half dozen monoprints that I've done and think, oh, yeah, they're all in a world similarly. And in my head it's like, you know, I purposely tried to do that kind of mark on that one. Or I know that I can do this well, so I didn't allow myself to do that in the next print. It's what keeps me making things. To constantly throw something into the mix that I've never done before, that I've never tried before. It was also in the nature of the paper that, for instance, with really good handmade paper, you can water tear it. You just take a wet brush and run the brush down the page and you can pull it apart. And it gives you something that's as soft as a deckle. Well if you can do a straight line and cut a paper that way, then you can do a curved line and cut a hole or a window. So in that Van Gogh book there are some paper cutouts, 01:18:00 some windows cut out that are nice and fuzzy and clearly not done with scissors. Well that's because they're all done with clear water and a brush and a template that I traced so they were all the same. But then I'm so stingy that it's okay, what can I do with the leftover pieces of paper? Well, some of those could be clouds or pop-up or-some of the decisions that I made were for really practical reasons. My first book that I made, For the Moment, the little pop-up, I had to figure out, because I had no money at that point and no support from the school at that point, how could I get an entire book out of one sheet of paper? So that was my first design problem to solve. Okay, so it's going to be this big. And then friends like Ruth and Kathy and others gave me their scrap, their cutoffs from their paper for their books. Well there are all these narrow little cutoffs and stuff. What can you do with that? You can do pop-ups with that. You know, so they became the pop-ups in the book. So it's a way of designing or problem solving that we all do. It's like, I've got these limitations. How do I turn that into something? So that's where a lot of it came from, the fact that I had very little resources. I had generous people giving me scraps that I could use. But they were not scraps that would allow me to produce an entire book. I mean, sometimes the pages in my book will change color and paper partway through a page because I'm gluing two sheets of paper together, and it's a way of using the trimmings from something else. And the way that I like to design is that okay, I've made one decision. Now I have to base something else on, you know, based on that decision, here's what I do next. Based on that, here's what I do 01:19:00 next. So for me, the book evolves from making the first decision, and then every other decision based on that. So everything that I do is based on the previous act in a book. I don't sit down and do a [macket?] of the whole thing. I honestly can't say on day one what the book's going to look like. And I know that there are some book artists that do that, and some designers that do that. They've got a really, really tight [maquet?] for the whole thing. Not the way that I work. The trouble with that is if I leave a book alone for too long-and it's happened before-I forget where I was. I've tried to keep notes, and it's not really a good vehicle for me. So then I have to study it for a while and figure out what the next decision is, because I can't remember where I was going. Okay, well, take this road, see where it gets you. You thought you were going here, but now you're going to end up here. And 01:20:00 that's sort of the evolutionary process, and that's where the pop-ups came from. And there were also a couple of people who'd graduated a few years before, and Walter had a collection of, he always kept two books. One for himself, and one for the sort of teaching collection at school. And there were a couple of people that were just, they were doing either pop-ups or interactive pages that you could go in and work with. And I was really intrigued by that. It was something I hadn't seen before, so I was intrigued and wanted to try it. SL: Mm hmm. Thank you. You mentioned earlier when you were talking about Joan of Arc, AIDS. And you were in school in the '80s. Can you talk a little bit about what that was like when- 00:50:24 JM: Oh, it's horribly grim. It's, you know, in hindsight it's like I'm really glad I'm alive. I'm really lucky I'm alive. Because I was in Philadelphia and New York from '79 to '83. And I remember the gallows humor jokes as people started dying that were kind of in my social circle. Not people that I knew directly. But when the musician Klaus Nomi died, or when the articles started coming out that said, "There's this thing, there's this condition, but these people have had twenty thousand sexual contacts in the bathhouses and stuff." It's like well, I've never been to a bathhouse so 01:21:00 I'm fine, I'm okay. I haven't had that many contacts yet, you know, at 18 or 19. But it was, and I worked as a photographer. I was always interested in fashion. So a lot of my friends or sort of clubbing friends were in that industry. Models, designers. And it was during the big sort of like British invasion. So like way over, everything was way over the top. And I was in the middle of that, happy to be in the middle of that. So that was my first contact with it. And then I came to the Midwest. So I left New York in '83. And people were starting to become militant and galvanized. And for me, that was on the periphery. When I came to Madison, I remember the first time I met someone that was HIV was during that time in Madison. And it just really struck me, oh, well I know what that is. And I sort of know where it is. But I've 01:22:00 never known who. So that was already in my head when I was in grad school. I think the Matisse book has a donation thing in the colophon. That would have been part of my MA exhibition. So I was already thinking about, figuring out how to get money to groups. The point, and it hit me in my life in other places not directly connected to my work, more in my social circle, as a thing that was nonexistent when I went to Kansas because it was a little town in the middle of nowhere and there was no gay community, there was no out community. When I went to Chattanooga, all of a sudden it was virulent everywhere. I knew so many people that were sick. In the last year that I was in Chattanooga, before I came to teach at Stevens Point, I had two funerals in one week. And I can think back to a group of, a big group of social friends. We had our section of the bar when we'd go out on the weekends and stuff. It was always our big group of a dozen, dozen and a half people. I think there are two of us that are alive now. And by the time I left Chattanooga, a lot of those people had already died. Where it affected me in my book work, I used to have a lot of what are called standing orders. So standing orders are an arrangement that you make with either a public collection or an individual collector where they get a discount because they agree to purchase everything as you're making it. And maybe it's a 30 percent discount 01:23:00 or something. And so from a collector's point of view, they get a great deal. They already like your work and they've already signed up for it. I used to have a fair amount of standing orders. Every one of my private standing orders is dead. Every one of the individual people that used to collect my work is no longer here. I still have a handful of them for public institutions. But every one of the individual ones is somebody who died of AIDS. And maybe they were collecting some of my work for the gay content of the work. Maybe they were collecting my work because some of it was AIDS-related and starting to really deal with that. But if you think about that as a practicing artist and, you know, I imagine it happened to a hell of a lot of people. And it's a stupid thing to focus on. But it affected people's livelihoods in a weird way, you know what I mean? It's a dumb thing to focus on, but if you're a 01:24:00 manufacturer of widgets and then all of a sudden you realize that everyone that used to buy your widgets is dead, that's a weird moment, the day that the last widget buyer dies is a really, it's a moment that you just have to stop and take a breath. And these were all, these were all total strangers. People that I'd never met. You know, I knew what was happening in my social circle, and we were dealing with it. But you know, these were complete strangers that I had a strong connection with. We would write. I would send them work. But it was never anyone that I even interacted with socially. So for me, it affected, at first it was kind of a joke. The gallows humor in New York. It was, until the panic set in, it was really just handled the way that, well, I can envision a lot of people drunk at a bar, handling this and making jokes about it. It was sort of like that. And then it just got deeply infused into the entire world. And a 01:25:00 lot of friends that I have over the years will think back to that time. And it's actors, it's dancers, it's musicians, there's this whole, it's like you wrote a lot of names on the board and then take an eraser and you just run it across the board and it catches that many names. And it's like, they're gone. It affected me personally and I'm sure it affected me psychologically. Even though we live in a different world today, it's still something that I address in my work every once in a while. Oh, for one thing, I don't think, I don't think younger people in my world take it seriously anymore, because it is possible to not die. I don't think they realize how profoundly it affected people. And I think that, to get, and then I'll tell a joke or something so that it's not so heavy. But my own personal definition of art is that as individuals we are having a dialog with history. So I'm talking to all of the people that made art before me. And I'm talking to people 01:26:00 that are going to make art after me. So a lot of my work deals with historic themes like crucifixion, Pieta, all these big religious themes that have happened through the years, that artists have dealt with for five, six hundred years. So I ask a question, how do I bring something new or contemporary or relevant to the conversation about whatever that is. I think there's going to be a whole body of work related to that time period from about 198-wgatever to today. And we're going to be interested in that narrative, in that dialog. So I think that it's important to produce work so that there's evidence, so that there's a piece of the conversation. It's evidence, it's a piece of the conversation. I mean, we're sitting in my office right now. And when I look around, the one monoprint on the wall to the left is about the Pulse shooting, the Pulse nightclub shooting, where it's someone taking cover, seeking shelter, hiding from one of those big mass shootings. And the mono print 01:27:00 all the way on the right, the T-shirt says, "I matter." And it's my way of trying to figure out how to respond to the Black Lives Matter phenomenon. I'm not black, so I can't claim authenticity. You know, in a way, you know, and I don't want to try to. So I've started thinking about the individual and the worth of the individual. And the fact that someone wears or has to wear a T-shirt that says "I matter." So all of my work, or a lot of my work, has some sort of anchor to something happening culturally. And the longest running thread is the rise of AIDS in our communities. Bigger answer, probably heavier answer, than you were seeking. 1:00:53 SL: No. I thank you very much for your contemplation and appreciate your thoughts on that. Is there anything that you would like to add about that, or about your books? JM: The one thing, two anecdotal things. Caren Heft and I have spoken on panels together several times. And we were at Carleton College one time, because they have my work, they have Caren's work, they have my husband Brian's work. So we were all on a panel talking 01:28:00 about the nature of books and how we make them. And we started talking about our three-person collaboration called Crossing the Tigris, which is about stories that were a blip in the media that are gruesome, but that are just an anecdotal blip. You know, they're a headline for a day and then everyone forgets them. But they're profoundly horrifying. So we're talking about that book project and the other book projects that we have. And at one point, I felt compelled to say, "But we're actually all happy people." Because everything was so grim, and just like the worst of. So I felt compelled to say that. And everyone, a little nervous laughter and that was good. Another point, when Caren and I were talking about our work at University of Georgia's international program in Cortona, Italy. We had been invited out there to talk about our work. And we're talking about our work and I look up and 01:29:00 there's this one woman in the audience. She's just crying. She's just like crying. And it's, you know, that's not what we want from our work, but that's what we all want from our work. The narrative was resonating with the person and clearly there was a connection. And maybe that happens to this person a lot. But it was clear that the work was making them think and having an impact. I always connect that back to one of my, the person I model most of my teaching on comes from my undergraduate days, Roger Anliker, he's since passed. But I remember, he's the one that gave me the Matisse letter. And I remember going to a show of his work in Philadelphia. And it's very intellectual work, some abstract, some representational. But I'm watching a woman look at one of his paintings, and she's 01:30:00 just, tears are just coming down her cheeks as she's looking at that painting. It was a fairly abstract painting, but she was so moved by the beauty of it that she was in tears. At a very young age for me as an artist, I'm looking at that going you know, that's got to be the moment that any of us want, where someone comes up to our work, whether it's in a library or it's on a wall in a gallery, and they connect to such a degree that you know, they express emotion that they would normally hide. It's a thing that has stuck with me for so long. And every once in a while, I'll get a letter out of the blue from someone or an email. You know, "I saw your work in the collection at Wellesley, or at Madison or wherever, and it really spoke to me, and let me tell you why." And you know, it's absolutely out of the blue. And that's just about the coolest thing, to know that somebody actually took 01:31:00 the book out, saw it, held it, interacted with it, and it resonated enough to them that they wanted to reach out and say thank you or something. Or just dropping you a letter, note. And it's great when that happens, because it's always unexpected. That's one of the things I like about the fact that the books are out there. That I've been fortunate enough to make them and that they've found homes. The best part of that is when someone out of the blue says something. SL: Mm hmm. Thank you. So you mentioned a little bit about your career when we were talking about your books, how you were in New York. That's when you were in advertising, right? And you were a photographer out there? JM: Mm hmm. 1:06:05 SL: And then you also started teaching. Can you talk a little bit about, I guess, how your career path, how you got to where you ended up? JM: How I got there was a lot of luck. And just misguided confidence. (SL laughs) But specifically, so I grew up and my parents owned a small business. It was a body shop and a gas station and a used car lot and a little convenience store, all in the same building. And we lived in that building. So as kids, we worked, I started working at 12, pumping 01:32:00 gas. When I turned 16 and could legally work, not in a family business, legally work somewhere else, I got a job at a pharmacy. And that's the only, I only stayed there two months. That's the only job I've ever had that wasn't art-related, in my life. The minute I started working at that job, an opening came up at the local newspaper in our hometown. It was a weekly newspaper. It was the biggest weekly newspaper in Maine because it served the, it was the only server of a particular area of the state of Maine. And I ended up by being, I did all or almost all of their darkroom work processing everyone's film and printing it. And I was also a photographer and I got paid two dollars a photograph. So every photograph that got printed, I got paid. So I was really motivated to get out there and take pictures. I did well enough in school that if something came up where they needed someone to go take pictures, I could leave school. So even at 16, if there was an event or an accident or something, I could leave school 01:33:00 and go do that. Weird, weird town. How people get away with stuff like that, I don't know, but it just, it just happened. I got, very early on, I got to do things like I got to get a security clearance when I was maybe 17. Because Roslyn Carter, as the first lady, was coming to Maine. And I was going to be part of the press group following her around. I'm 17 years old, you know, with my camera. And I always looked younger than I actually was. So it looked like this 12 year-old following her around with a camera. But I had to go through all the steps that any legitimate reporter would go through. And so my newspaper figured that all out for me. And not long after that, National Geographic was doing a story on northern Maine, the French part of northern Maine and the French part of New Brunswick. And they had already written the piece. The way they work, they'd already written the piece and then they sent the photographer up there, who stayed for months, living up there to get the images to support the story. And that's the way that they worked on the structure for their story. And the photographer for National Geographic was always showing up at the same events that I was covering for the 01:34:00 newspaper. So we started talking to one, clearly he was an outsider. He was from Boston. Had a name that no one else would have in the area. And he started complaining about the fact that he had a hard time getting across the Canadian border, which was in my hometown. So if you flew over my hometown, Madawaska would be on one side of the river, Madawaska, Maine. And Edmundston, New Brunswick would be on the other side of the river. And the river wasn't very wide. Every time he crossed the border, they'd make him show his papers for his cameras, his proof of ownership. They gave him a hard time. And he said, "And I need a translator," because he didn't speak French. And he was telling me about, he was going to hire this translator from Washington, DC to come out and do this. And I just shook my head and I said, "They won't talk to you. You have to speak the local dialect." I was really angling for the 01:35:00 job, basically. And he ended up by hiring me. So I went seamlessly from working with the newspaper to also working with National Geographic before I even got to college. And so I did the translating with him and for him, was his photo assistant, worked on that article even while I went off to college, because it's a pretty big project to do those types of articles. And having that as a credential opened incredible doors for me. As my freshman year was wrapping up at Tyler, I realized I needed a job for the summer. Saw a notice for a photographer for a summer camp in the Catskills. Called them up, asked them what they needed, and they said, "Well, you need to send your portfolio." And it's like, "Oh, I don't have one of those. I'll make it and I'll send you tomorrow." (SL laughs) The dumbest stuff 01:36:00 that would come out of my mouth. But because I worked for a newspaper, it was, you know, what do you need? Twenty images? Well, I can do that in a day. So I shot an entire portfolio in a day. Processed it, printed it in the darkrooms at school. Put it in an envelope. Shipped it off to the people that were hiring. And it ended up by being, the people who owned the summer camp owned the advertising agency. And the agency had the camp as the client. And I don't know how much other work they did. So I ended up by getting the job, probably because I could turn around the work that fast. So it made sense to them. Stupid. I followed a squirrel around and took pictures of a squirrel, all sorts of stuff like that. Dumb, dumb stuff. I ended up by working for them for four years. So I would work for them in summertime when the camp was up and running. Go out, 01:37:00 shoot thousands of images and process them on-site. And did all sorts of other stuff. Wacky stuff. They would photograph the location from a helicopter to do all these great shots. So I'd be in a harness. They'd take the doors off the helicopter. I'd hang out, I'd have my feet on the running boards of the helicopter and literally hang out, sort of with- SL: Wow. (laughs) 1:13:01 JM: And it was so expensive to do that I would go up with like a half a dozen cameras loaded with film. Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, throw one over my shoulder. But at 20, who wouldn't want an experience like that? They paid horribly. But it gave me enough money. And because the camp hired like a quarter of its staff from Europe as counselors every year, it gave me all these connections in Europe. And when the owners of the 01:38:00 camp and the ad agency learned that I was going to do my junior year abroad, they got me a plane ticket for free bundled with the charter that brought these people back and forth. And I ended up by living with the family of a woman from Rome that I met, because she was teaching ceramics. Everything always, like one thing just, it's the dumbest sequence of events. Like one piece always fell off, the next, the next. When I was applying to graduate school, because Tyler never pushed taking your GREs for graduate school, I never took my GREs. So I got into Madison no problem. And then I got the letter that said, but because you haven't taken your GREs, you're not eligible for any financial support. So I got that like maybe in the summertime, like right when I'm ready to come out here to grad school. So I'm scrambling, trying to 01:39:00 find another school, doing all this other stuff. And the [Lorens?], Harold and Bea [Loren?], the people that owned the agency and the camp said, "We'll loan you the money." So they loaned me the money for my first year of graduate school. With interest. Ten percent interest. But at least I had the money to come here. So I had enough money to go fulltime my first semester. And then I got a fulltime job working for a frame shop. Managing a frame shop. My second semester, all I needed was a GPA instead of my GRE exam results. So I 4.0ed grad school. So I had my year of GPA. And all of a sudden that made me eligible for all of these fellowships, and I got a free ride for the rest of it, which was wonderful. But you know, every piece always 01:40:00 is connected. You know, I don't take any of it for granted. So that's the professional thread woven through. At sixteen, I had to work fulltime, we were really poor. I had to work fulltime, or work as much as I could, which is why I worked at the newspaper and stuff. Because if it came to buying clothes or anything else, or whatever. My parents charged me rent when I was sixteen. SL: Oh, they did. 1:16:08 JM: So I mean, I think it was 20 bucks a week or something. But it was in the '70s. So I had to figure out ways to-so that started the whole thing off. I think it was all perfect. It sounds horribly, I could make it sound like walking barefoot to school and everything uphill. (SL laughs) But it was really all perfect, because every piece-had I not had to pay rent, had I not worked for the newspaper, I wouldn't have worked for National Geographic, which opened up tons of doors for me. It wouldn't have given me some of the money to do my undergraduate, which led me to the ad agency, which led me to my time in Italy. I mean, it all just strings together perfectly. SL: Well what about your career as an arts educator? You were at Bethany College and then the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Then you were at Stevens Point for quite a while, and now you're here in MIAD. Can you talk a little bit about-I know you mentioned in the past when we were talking about how important education was to you and like how you looked at different teachers and how they approached teaching. How did all of that influence you? JM: There are two things I've always known. And I probably told this story the last time we spoke about, you know, I knew in kindergarten that I wanted to be a teacher and an artist. So I've known since that moment what I wanted to do with my life. So 01:41:00 you know, art school made infinite sense to me. As an undergraduate, I was also trying to get my teacher certification. And it was a choice between studying in Rome for a year or doing my teacher practicum. So I didn't complete my teacher certification. And I also didn't complete it because I didn't want to teach high school. I didn't want to teach elementary school. Whenever I would go back home for vacations, I would substitute teach in the local school system. So I substitute taught I think every single grade for a week or a day or whatever, you know. First grade all the way through high school. I knew I didn't want to do that. So when I went to Madison, I knew I needed an MFA if I wanted to teach, get a legitimate job teaching at the university level. I knew, I used to work in the offices as an undergraduate, 01:42:00 so I had a good idea of who was making a good living, who wasn't. Part time folks were not getting paid anything. It was not the way. So I knew I needed the MFA. So that's in part what really drove me to go onto grad school, because I knew I wanted to teach. In the third year of graduate school, as everyone is starting to line up interviews and stuff, there were two of us that, I must have had twelve, thirteen interviews for teaching positions. And they just never panned out. But there were only a handful of us that were really interviewing at the College Art Association and those types of things pretty hot and heavy. I was offered a, like a one-year job and a couple of really short-term gigs. And I wanted something much more stable and predictable than that. And the job at Bethany came up. It came up very late. And I think that that was a really hard sell. I was the third person in five years in that position. So a little town in the middle of nowhere. Great students, great school, good facilities, middle of nowhere. So I mean, 01:43:00 maybe if you were married and you had a family and you wanted to settle down someplace, it was a good gig. But if you were just starting out, I was 25 when I started teaching, you know, I needed more. I knew it was not the place for me long term. I ended up at Chattanooga. Again, it was the type of thing where because I was teaching in design there were a lot of design jobs. Not a lot of people willing to take design teaching jobs because they could make so much more money. Especially in the '80s, salaries were ridiculous in the design field. So it was a teachers' market. I was going to decide from a bunch of different offers, basically, which is what I did. And I ended up at Chattanooga. I was there for seven years. Helped build the 01:44:00 program there. I was really proud of the work that I did there. Knew it was time. And just the dumb happenstance, I was at CAA again, College Art Association, interviewing faculty for a painting position at Madison, at Chattanooga. The person sitting next to me at the table next to me was trying to interview people, but there was no one showing up. He ended up by being the department chair for Stevens Point, and they were looking for a graphic designer. And I was making jokes with them, "What the hell are you looking for, a byzantine iconist?" You know, I was trying to think of the most obscure thing. He leans over and he says, "Worse. We're looking for a graphic designer." And it's like, "Oh, I do that. Where 01:45:00 are you?" "Wisconsin." "Oh, I did my grad work." You know, so, "Why don't we take a walk?" That ended up by being my interview. Even though I hadn't applied for the job, I wasn't interviewing for the job. Yeah, I had to fill in all the paperwork afterwards, but that was pretty much it. They offered me the job. I turned it down. I thought, oh, dumb mistake, turning it down. (SL laughs) They call back later, about three weeks later. "What do you really want?" And it wasn't financial. I wasn't mad at Chattanooga, so I didn't want to leave so late in the year that they couldn't find a replacement. So I said, "Leave the job open for a year and hire me as a consultant. And I'll rewrite your curriculum. And I'll be able to house shop while I'm up there 01:46:00 doing the curriculum work." And I'd come up a half dozen times or whatever. And he didn't miss a beat. He said, "Fine. We'll do that." And they hired a one-year replacement. I think it was Amy Wenzel, who's also a Madison MFA, is still in Madison. So she came up for the year, did that. I think it was Amy. Anyway. And that gave me more time to part cleanly with Chattanooga. So I went up to Stevens Point. Grew the program there quite a bit. The person who hired me retired. Within four or five years, I put my name in the hat for consideration for department chair. Became department chair for a while. The dean retired. I put my name in the hat for that, became dean. They had political upheaval. I became the interim 01:47:00 provost for a year, then went back to being dean. Was starting to see a lot of toxicity in the UW system, and a lot of really, really, it was really getting uncomfortable to work in the system. I remember coming into work one day and my assistant, who had been there, I think, for 42 years, I come in the office and she's crying at her desk. Convinced that she has to retire early because she's going to lose a particular benefit. Because they were talking about taking away benefits. And I swear it's the same day my IT specialist, whose office was right next door to me, was crying at her desk. Convinced that she's going to have to leave, something about retirement. I mean, it was that type of environment that's horrible to work in that sort of environment where the people are really being driven to that level. I felt the same way 01:48:00 at different times. After they retired, it was just getting more and more toxic. So Brian and I were looking for the next step. And the next step was either going to be as a provost or as a president, but the end result was going to be a presidency. The provost would have been a stepping stone to a presidency, which happens for a lot of people. And that's how I ended up here. In the roughly the week that I got shortlisted for the presidency here, I was shortlisted for another presidency and a provost position, all in roughly the same week. One search firm was handling two of those, so they actually knew, the same person was handling two searches. So at that point it was like, this is it, something's going to happen. So two different art schools and one big state school. 1:25:52 SL: So how have you liked being at MIAD? JM: I love 01:49:00 being here. We've been able to do some really good work. I love to work, so there's got to be work. And I feel like there is work to do. So it's rewarding for me. This fall we will most likely welcome the biggest incoming class in the school's history. And we are thinking that the overall population of the school will be the biggest in the school's history as well. And from two years ago to this fall, two years ago, retention of freshmen to sophomores was about 69 and a half percent. Right now, it looks like it's going to be over 83 percent. SL: Oh, that's great. JM: That's a humongous jump. So I feel really good about that work. I didn't do any of that. But I could be the catalyst for other people to do all of that work. I mean, that's all that the president is in an institution. It's the catalyst for someone else's work. I mean, we all take credit for it. But that's not true at all, 01:50:00 because there's no way I could do all of that work. The retention work, the admissions work, the curriculum work. So it's just the person that can make it easier for someone else to do their work. And you know, going into my fourth year, I feel like we're still just starting. So that's a good feeling in a job, too, where you still feel like you're not looking at your watch and stuff. SL: So how do you find time to work on your own projects and do this job, which I imagine takes up a lot of energy, and you're putting in a lot of hours, I imagine. 1:28:03 JM: It's a balancing act, and you have to let go of some things, knowing that 01:51:00 you'll be able to grab hold of them again later on. So I haven't taught since I got here. And my whole identity is in part as a teacher. So it drives me crazy that the students don't know me in that way. I had a show at a small gallery here in town this summer. And some students showed up to the show. And they were like, "I didn't realize you made work." They didn't tell me that; they told the person that owns the gallery. "I didn't realize that he made work." So I don't like that disconnection, but I've had to give up that piece to be able to do the administrative piece and find some time 01:52:00 to be in the studio. This week is a perfect example, you know. I'm in from 8 to 4, 4:30, here for the job. I would go home, have dinner. And every other night I drove back in to work at the printmaking studio till ten. Because the building closes at ten. So I'd be home for an hour to have dinner, and turn right back around. The only, the reason why it was every other night was because we had a dinner or a reception to go to on those other nights. And that can, I can easily be at events five nights a week. And saying no to a few things. And it's the nature of the job. I'm expected to do that work. I take my vacations in the building. I literally take a vacation day so that I can go up to the printmaking studio to pull a mono print. When I was working on a commission for the Bucks Arena, I mean, I took almost half of my vacation time for the year to get enough time to paint in the studio for that project. So you know, evenings and weekends were not enough. I'm fortunate, I've got a good vacation package. SL: Uh huh. Can you talk about that project? 1:30:18 JM: Yeah. It's an interesting project. They did a call out for, there's a company that puts art collections into sporting venues. The same company did, worked on the Green Bay Packers project a couple of years ago. So when Bucks Arena came around, they were hiring to build an art collection for the arena and to be in parts of the arena. I think it's cool, it puts artwork in there. So they did a big call out to area artists. I submitted work. And I submitted a proposal for what I wanted to do. Some of the athletes in their athletic gear in unexpected parts of the city, in neighborhoods, just unexpectedly standing there with, much like that painting on the wall where someone's 01:53:00 standing there with an environment. So doing that with the athletes, and taking them out of context but making it very Milwaukee. They rejected that. And they said, "Would you consider doing a portrait of Herb Cole?" Because Herb Kohl is instrumental to the Bucks, to the Bucks staying here and to the Bucks surviving here. So that's what I worked on was a portrait of Herb Cole with a background of, a wallpaper background of the older retro logo of the deer sitting on a basketball. So that's what I spent my time working on. It was not what I thought I was going to work on. But it's what they needed. And it's going to be unveiled in a couple of weeks. SL: Cool. Did you meet with Herb Kohl, then? 1:32:03 JM: I 01:54:00 didn't get a chance to. I've seen him before. They wanted me to work from photo references. And very youthful photo references. SL: I kind of wondered about that, too, actually. (laughs) JM: I would have picked, I would have picked several other sources. And you know, they wanted one particular idea. And I suggested a different idea. And then when I ended up by doing was both paintings simultaneously, thinking well, maybe they'll buy both. What they ended up by doing was acquiring the idea that I wanted to do, not the one that they wanted. SL: Okay. Oh, that's really cool. That's very nice. JM: So. SL: I love it. JM: So it's definitely, It's Herbert in a different time period, for one thing. I wanted a picture of 01:55:00 him much closer to today. And what they wanted was a painting of him in black and white against a colored background. So that was that variation. SL: Oh, yeah. Okay. JM: So there was that juxtaposition of black and white, almost photographic black and white, and then rich color around it. SL: Uh huh. Yeah. JM: So I worked them up side by side. And it was going to be what it was going to be. 1:33:42 SL: Uh huh. Well I'm looking forward to seeing it at the- JM: And again, one of these weird serendipities that projects just come around. I still enter competitive shows. I still get rejected from plenty of shows. I don't have to do any of that stuff. But I can't help myself from making stuff. SL: Well, I know we're just about at time. Is there anything else that you want to say in terms of the UW or even just where you are now? JM: 01:56:00 Being at Madison at that point was a really good choice for me. What I liked about the grad program was that they were not, they were not fastidious about which courses one had to take. So for someone like me who's an omnivore, I mean, I will create in anything, that openness was really a good match. And some of the folks that I worked with, I have a lot of respect for. And I think of them until today. Walter Hamady, Richard Long, Ray Gloeckler. Those are people that I worked with that I think about their work, I think about them as people. They're three very, very different people, but I'm glad that I had the opportunity to work with them. SL: Well, thanks so much, Jeff. I really appreciate this. JM: Thank you. 74:43 End of Second Interview