<Begin Segment 36>

AI: So, at the end of the -- well, our, just before the break you were just on the point of arriving at Syracuse and you and Bea arrived there, and what did you find when you got there?

RS: Well, when I got there I remember I got there just a few days before we had to enroll and they informed me that I was going to receive a graduate assistantship. And that the assistantship was for two years, which, and it was a two-year program. And I asked them, I said, "What does this mean?" And says, "Well, what it means is that you won't have to pay tuition. And, plus, we're gonna pay you 'x' number of dollars a month." I can't remember what it was, then and so it was just godsend as far as I was concerned. And I remember that was notable, because when Bea and I sat down and figured out our finances, it would not be until I think the third year at Kansas that we made more money than those graduate years. So, so it was a wonderful deal. We were able to live in comfort.

But getting to Syracuse was another amazing experience because it made me realize just how culturally different the East Coast was than the West Coast. I really wasn't prepared for that in many ways. I mean, I knew there was a difference, but I thought the difference was in what you saw. And, and wasn't ready, I think, for the way that the people on the East Coast, as products of that eastern environment, would be so different. And to this day it's a difference that I still recognize and still enjoy and feel very close to. And it's one that I tell my students -- being halfway between the East and West Coast -- students are always asking where they should go to graduate school. And having had that experience of growing up here and spending time back there, it's easy for me to give them an informed opinion about some of the differences between the east and west. And those differences were all new to me when I first got to Syracuse. But the sort of fundamental differences, the kind of respect that art has on the East Coast, because they're still sort of steeped in a tradition of art that they've long since rejected on the left coast. People talked about art as something special, and artists as being special people. Whereas, in the west, especially in California, the idea that art was special was absolutely passe. That if one ate at McDonalds, one could claim that to be an act of art in some way, and that they're, all the lines had been blurred between what was art and what was life. But in the east they still believe that it's something special, something different. And when you went to parties, people went to parties on the East Coast with a purpose, and they went there to meet certain people, to interact with certain people, to do things for their career and all that. Whereas, one wouldn't think of doing that on the West Coast, that was just terrible to place art on any kind of pedestal. So, anyway, that was a real eye-opener for me.

And Syracuse turned out to be a really good place for me, and for many reasons. And one of them being that it seemed to be three hundred miles from everyplace. And it was three hundred miles to New York City; it was three hundred miles to Detroit, to Chicago, to Philadelphia, to D.C., to Montreal. And it seemed like every other week Bea and I were leaving Syracuse to go on some road trip to some city that we had never been to before and going to all the great museums. And then being up there right next to the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Rochester and -- no, not Rochester, in Utica, but being surrounded by all of these incredibly revered institutions was a real treat. And we had friends in New York City, so that became accessible to us and it was a very, very interesting two years. Not to mention what happened in my own studio.

<End Segment 36> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.