<Begin Segment 19>

TI: Okay, so Joe, we're now into the third hour. And where we are right now is we're in Lincoln, Nebraska, you're starting graduate school there, and you mentioned you also just got a job in the art department.

JI: Yeah. A friend of mine -- well, I used to hang out at the Wesley Foundation, which is where Bob Drew was. And mostly because I had friends there, and they had had a bedroom for two people, students, to stay there. And when one, who became a very good friend of mine, Ken Stevens, was drafted and left school, I was asked to, to go to live there. I was invited, I should say, and, which was great for me. So I did that, and there was a guy named Bob Hanson, who was an art student, who used to come to the Wesley Foundation frequently, and he and I became friends. And he said, said they need someone to work at the art museum, and if I wanted to, I should go over and ask, so I did. And they gave me a job, coolie work, building crates and so forth. But from building crates I got, I guess I did it well enough to, to help design shows, which I did, helped design exhibits that were planned there. And Nebraska was, I guess, the first school to offer a degree in, in studio arts in the country, followed by Yale and eventually Iowa, which had a graduate school. But ours was strictly undergraduate. But it also had a museum, and put on a big show called the May, May Show. And it was big enough so that it attracted the attention of New York press, and so we had New York people coming out to look at the exhibition. These were things that... but the director, Dwight Kirsch would go annually to New York to pick out, and he would go to several galleries and gather work and had this big show. Well, since I wrote, they had me do the labels, and this meant doing a lot of research. So whatever training I had in the arts was essentially that way, through the, through doing the research and doing the writing and seeing the work. So we, that's what, what I did, and then eventually the librarian, who was married to a chemist, your field, and he went to work for Phillips Petroleum in Oklahoma. So, so she left, and they gave me her job, which was a little step up. And so I became our librarian, and since I'd been doing all the research in the library anyway, that was handy for me. And then eventually, he made me a curator, so I did more work in the museum and did more exhibition design. Well, as a matter of fact, I did almost all the exhibition design, figure out how things should go, and how they would fit together and so forth.

TI: Was all this happening while you were a graduate student?

JI: Yeah, graduate student. And gradually, I quit going to classes in English, 'cause I had, my interests had shifted so much. And I still thought, well, when I get at finishing this before my six year limit is through. [Laughs] But I never did, 'cause I got involved in this so much. Well, and then other things happened, but we can get to that later.

TI: So you're, so it sounds like you, so because of this initial job in the art museum, essentially that was a huge shift for you. You went from literature to art, and now you're a curator at the... and what was the name of the museum?

JI: It's now called the Sheldon Art Museum at the University of Nebraska, but that was a new building that we were in, in an old building, just part of what had been a classroom building, they built two galleries on it. And we filled the two galleries with, and the hallway with exhibitions. The Sheldon is, was built as a museum, and it was, the seeds for that were started by Dwight Kirsch, but then when they wanted to split the department from the museum, he tried to fight that and essentially lost. And at that time, he was asked to be the director at the Des Moines Art Center, which was a two-year-old institution, and had lost two directors very quickly. And so they asked Dwight to go there. And about that time, let's see... I had, because I wasn't working summers, one summer I went to New York to work with what they call a College Summer Service group.

TI: Okay, let's, so what, so what year is this? The summer of...

JI: '44.

TI: So the war is still going on, 1944, summer.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.