San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Educator’s art conveyed life’s urgency
“Julia had always used visual imagery to extend her verbal ways of thinking about issues that concerned her.”
Leonard Hunter, husband and fellow artist
As a professor at San Francisco State University, Julie Marshall taught her students to use art to work through personal issues, a process she employed during her own four-year struggle with a bone marrow disorder.
During long treatment sessions, she’d take the intravenous infusion in her left arm to leave her right arm free to draw interpretations of the IV drip bag that was her inescapable companion. Her goal was a triptych of paintings that reimagined the drip bag as personal totem. Each painting was offset by a mouse, a rabbit and a canary to symbolize her own vulnerability.
Marshall finished the first two and was at work on the third when she went into the hospital on Feb. 10. She died five days later at UCSF Parnassus from complications related to aplastic anemia, a disease in which bone marrow is unable to adequately produce blood cells. She was 74.
“Julia had always used visual imagery to extend her verbal ways of thinking about issues that concerned her, both involving the world at large and her own thoughts,” said her husband, Leonard Hunter, retired professor of art at S.F. State. “Once she got terminally ill, her emotions overwhelmed her logical mind, and the paintings represent her sense of urgency and what fate held for her.”
Marshall’s approach to art education is now spread far and wide, both through the art teachers and professors she trained in her 20 years at S.F. State and in the textbooks she wrote and co-wrote.
Her main courses at S.F. State were art for children, plus curriculum and instruction in art, both requisites for the K-12 single-subject teaching credential in California. Her classes were always full, usually with a waiting list.
“The thing that was so cool about it is that we were making art at the same time we were learning how to be teachers of art,” said Lisa Hochtritt, who studied under Marshall and went on to teach art at Half Moon Bay High School.
“Julia had a kiln, she had paints, she would bring in tons of art-making materials. And she didn’t just give us assignments. She’d do the work with us, too. She was curious about everybody and everything and made it so much fun,” Hochtritt said.
When Mozelle da Costa Pinto got her credential at S.F. State and was hired at Sequoia High School in Redwood City 26 years ago, she structured her introductory art class in the thematic style that Marshall trained her in. Current events, history, science and student curiosity all melded into the creative process. To guide her, da Costa Pinto keeps two of Marshall’s textbooks on the shelf in her classroom.
“I literally carry her with me every day and every time I think about lesson development,” da Costa Pinto said. “If the students are laughing or
finding joy in the creative process, that’s how I know that Julia is there.”
Julia Newell Marshall was born Dec. 9, 1947, in Red Wing, Minn., a small town south of Minneapolis. As a child, Marshall wrote and illustrated an accordion book called “Arbutus the Turtle,” and she was on her way.
“She never stopped. Almost daily she was making art or teaching art,” said her older sister, Caroline Marshall. “She had a little art school in the basement of our house where she taught neighborhood kids to make art.”
Marshall attended boarding school at the artsy Barlow School in Amenia, N.Y., and from there went to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she got her bachelor’s degree in studio art in 1969. Her master of fine arts in sculpture came from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her master’s project was a life-size Egyptian sarcophagus.
“She was quirky and had a
wonderful sense of whimsy,” her sister said.
This became evident in the summer of 1973, when Marshall persuaded her to tour Europe in a Volkswagen bus they bought at an Army base in Germany. The sisters started out in May and by the end of the summer had made it as far as Venice. Caroline had to get home to her job, so Julia drove her to the airport and then kept going. She drove that VW bus through Italy and Turkey and all the way to Kathmandu, meeting traveling companions at campsites along the way.
When she finally returned to the U.S., she moved to San Francisco to meet up with high school friends from Barlow. One of these, “Barlovians” as they called themselves, was Peter Sawyer. In 1977, they were married on the banks of the Brule River in Northern Wisconsin, where her family had a summer home. Marshall and Sawyer settled in a converted storefront in the Mission District. They got around by riding double on a motorcycle that was garaged in the living room.
Marshall found work through Leap Arts in Education, a nonprofit that dispatches art teachers to schools hit by budget cuts. This compelled her to go back for her doctorate in art education at the University of San Francisco.
“She really began to believe that art teachers were going about it the wrong way,” said her sister, also an art educator. “They were teaching students how to hold a brush. Julia thought the ideas you were trying to express were what art was all about.”
Marshall was hired as a lecturer at S.F. State in 1988. The next year she and Sawyer were divorced. Marshall and then-faculty colleague Leonard Hunter began a long dialogue on the changing world of art education. That conversation lasted through Marshall’s promotion to assistant professor, in 1998, through her wedding to Hunter at San Francisco City Hall, on May 3, 2006, and was still going.
“The day before she died, we were still talking about things in art education,” Hunter said.
They settled in a house in Merced Heights, a 10-minute walk to campus. If Marshall was not in her home studio, she was in her campus studio, next to her classroom.
“Julia was always available and never said ‘no,’ ” said Hochtritt, who was so inspired by Marshall’s process that she ended up earning her doctorate and is now a professor of art education at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. “Everybody in art education has a ‘Julia’ story about how she affected their life in some way.”
In 2014, Marshall retired as a full professor and moved into the Faculty Early Retirement Program, which allowed her to teach part time for four more years, before finishing in 2018.
Marshall liked to say “teaching is my art form,” but so was painting and sculpture in wood and bronze. Her work was exhibited at community centers and galleries, and a few years ago she began work on a career survey that she hoped to stage at the University of San Francisco, where she got her doctorate.
That survey, 20 of her works including the final triptych, will be displayed in the Student Art Gallery within the Cesar Chavez Student Center at S.F. State. It opens June 4.
Survivors include her husband, Leonard Hunter of San Francisco; son Doug Berlin of Herndon, Va.; sisters Caroline Marshall of Washington, D.C., and Morley Knoll of Portland, Ore.; and brother Paul Marshall of Wayzata, Minn.