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BN: So then what happens now after you, so you've graduated?

LH: So I graduated and I ended up in Aspen. I had such a serendipitous life. So what was I doing first? I was doing, working as a maid and a waitress and whatever because we were all hippies, basically. It was a hippie life. And we would have large gatherings in the mountains, I mean large, like a thousand, two thousand people wandering around the mountain somewhere. We went mountain climbing, of course, and we did all these different things, but we were hippies. So I ended up in Aspen which was actually, there were a lot of really groovy people there, right? Like the guy who started up Celestial Seasonings, Celestial teas, he started that in Aspen when I was there. And he was like the most spaced out guy you could possibly imagine, and he worked in the Mother's Natural Food Store.

So I was there and I was working for a friend who had a studio, where is that? Not in Aspen, but the other resort down the road. What's the name of it? But anyway, he actually bought property there, and of course, property at that time was like, it's pretty rugged cabins. And he was a potter and he had created this, sort of cell of pottery, well, stations where you could work pottery. So I was doing a little bit of work for him, but he had a big barn. And so I rented a studio for ten dollars a month from him. And I was working in the studio, because I really was into art by this time, like making art. And I was firing pots there and he was working on this model for Herbert Bayer, who was a very famous Bauhaus master who had a studio in Aspen. And he was associated with Aspen Institute, actually, designed the building and its environment. And Brad, I can't remember his last name, he was working on for him. But Herbert was, he was difficult to work with, he could be really prickly. So Brad threw down this clay for the clay model, like, "Here, you're going to be Herbert Bayer's assistant tomorrow." I went into Herbert Bayer's office, like, "Hi, Brad sent me in here to do this." So I was his assistant for a year, I didn't realize how, what a prestigious position that was, but it was. Herbert had a lot of, he knew everybody and he had a lot of power or whatever. Joelle, his wife, was also pretty prickly, but they were not easy to work with, but they were really interesting. So I ended up being his assistant, I would make his models and paint his paintings and do all that sort of stuff. And then, from there, I decided I would go to L.A. because you either had to go to L.A. or New York City if you were going to be an artist, you needed to be in that environment. So I decided to go to L.A., and I applied for a fellowship at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Little did I know how a recommendation from Herbert Bayer would land me that, but it did. So that's' where I went next, was L.A. And then I was really in the middle of the art world there for a couple of years.

BN: So and then from there, what happens after?

LH: So there, we're quite a ways from the family. So what happened is I... so my boyfriend was David Trowbridge, who actually was, also, a pretty famous modern artist. He eventually became a, that was his goal to be. Which is a really crazy thing to do. I mean, there are very few people that make it as artists. But I was in that milieu and we went to the Edward Ruscha show and then we went to all those shows and all of those things at that time. We went to museums constantly, that was our life, we're artists, basically. And then I broke up with David and I applied for the Tamarind curator position because they were moving, it was the end of their Ford Foundation grant and they were moving it to the University of Mexico. They ended up at the University of Mexico for some very good curator training at Tamarind. I wasn't allowed to be a printer, so I was in the curator training program. Because women weren't allowed to be printers.

BN: Even then.

LH: Yeah. There was so much prejudice against women, it's like, no wonder there was a feminist movement. That movement was like... because we needed it. I mean, we still do, but then it was, like, impossible. There were so many areas that you were blocked off. But anyway, somehow, at twenty or twenty-nine, something like that, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, I can't remember, I was the curator at Tamarind, which was actually a pretty big responsibility. But they were supposed to hire two other people, which they never did, and I ended up working, like, ninety hour, eighty hour weeks. And after a while, after about a year, I was, like, no way. And I'd been writing with my boyfriend, my first love, in Italy, and I was supposed to go back and marry him. So I was trying to figure this out, so I decided to go back to Italy. So that's why Italy is this very big piece. And we lived together for about three months and then broke up, and that was the end of that. But then here I was in Florence, completely broke. I had no support, so I had to figure out what to do. So I figured out a way to make it. I was a clerk in a store where they sell fine leather goods and things like that. And I went to the university because it only cost seventy-five dollars to enroll, and you just had to have nominal Italian, which I had, of course, by that time to enroll at the university. Then I enrolled at the University of Florence for a year. And the second year I realized that it was a time when the Communists take over the universities in Florence, and there's a lot of agitation, it was really difficult to get through exams and lectures and whatever. They were constantly being disrupted. And the university was changing because it had been this very elite, the most elite of a lot of the institutions in Europe up until this time, and they were having to change. They had, like, ten thousand students in the architecture department, they'd never had to any of this complete upheaval. So I realized it was going to be hard to graduate from the University of Florence even though I got close in terms of my exams. So I enrolled in the Middlebury School of Language program because I knew I could transfer my credits from there into an American university.

So I got an M.A. in Italian from Middlebury Language School, and their only requirement was that you take three courses at the university, which I was already doing. So I just had to go to their dinky little grammar class, and then that was all I needed to do. The courses at the university were intensive, so that was harder but I did really pretty well at my university there, and then I could transfer to the United States. Because by that time, they were making people do... before, you would be able to get, do a thesis and get done in, like, six months, but they were extending it to, like, two years. And I just didn't have the, I didn't have enough money, I just didn't have sources for supporting that for two years, so I went back to the United States. And by that time, I was pretty much heavily into my study of art history. I mean, I really knew the map of Florence, I knew a lot of art historians in Florence and was connected with some of the best scholars in that field in Florence, and access to the German Library and all kinds of things. So I had the libraries down, because I would travel from library to library in Florence to study. So then I went to UCSB and got my M.A. in Italian art history. So at this point, there's no, this is about the time I started the Japanese American Family Album Project after I graduated.

BN: What was your thesis on?

LH: It was on the... I can't remember exactly the title, but it was on the Pietro Strozzi tomb in Mantova. I was looking at the shift in Italian Classicism from the third century B.C., kind of stylistic interest to this more exotic interest in Caryatids and more exotic kinds of archaeological types, Egyptians, Etruscans and Caryatids and things like that.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.