Piece by Piece - Page 3

In the 1940s, as a girl from a "lower-middle class" family of six children in Chicago, Joan Smith began clipping images from Sears-Roebuck catalogs, and by the eighth grade was crafting her own clothing.

Schulze says that the "Chicago Art Institute was my education. And then Wabash Avenue is where all the art stores were. And of course, I didn't have any money. Maybe I could buy a pencil. But I would go into the art stores and smell the turpentine, the smell, the art materials."

"I would run away from home, get the 'L' [rail transit], go downtown at [age] 5, because my brother taught me how to sneak onto the elevated. And then I'd walk to the Art Institute, and I'd wait until there was a family. Then I'd sort of become part of the family, and I would get into the Art Institute."

Along with fine arts, though, necessity played into the future artist's development. It was the tail end of the Depression, she says, "So everything was saved. Nothing was thrown away. So we had a bag called the 'rag bag.' Clothes that were no longer usable would go in the rag bag, and they would be used to patch and save other things."

In high school, she says, teachers told her not to take classes in home economics, because she was destined for the university.

"I said, 'No, I have to take the course, because I have to know how to really make clothes.' So the school bent, and that was the best thing that ever happened to me as far as setting me on my path, because it gave me skills."

Schulze's skills, Corsini says, set her apart from many fiber artists. "Her background comes from a tradition of sewing and crafting," Corsini says, adding, "Her work is not shoddy. And a lot of the contemporary fiber that you're seeing now, in my opinion, is kind of messy."

At the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Schulze says, a teacher asked, 'Why aren't you an art major?' "I said, 'Because I can't afford it. I know people who are in the art program, and they all have money.'"

Aiming for a career, Schulze says, she trained to be a schoolteacher, a profession she followed in Sacramento and Texas. In 1959 she married Jim Schulze. He was an engineer serving with the Air Force. Between 1962 and 1969 they had four children.

"Dallas was more about making babies," Schulze says. "We lived in an apartment complex, and we didn't have any money for art on the walls." So Schulze created wall pieces through découpage, pasting magazine images on wood." She adds: "They were quite, quite wonderful actually, when I think about it."

Joan and Jim had fallen in love with California and both loved modern design. So when Jim quit the service, moving to an Eichler in the Bay Area, where Jim found work with Lockheed, seemed natural.

First they rented an Eichler, and then in 1967 met Joe Eichler, chose a model that would soon be built, handed Joe a check for $1,000, and made the Parmer Place tract of Sunnyvale their new home. They got to move in early. "The street wasn't finished yet," she says.

Her husband and Joe got along well, she says. "I love seeing that they bonded because Eichler was supposedly a very difficult man. He never was to us."

"We had some of the most interesting artistic neighbors you can believe," Schulze says, "and that's what sent me on my path of being an artist. One of the neighbors gave me a way to be serious about making art."