From the Vault — Ted Rust: A Life in Art

Editor's Note: Rust Hall at the Memphis College of Art has been in the news lately. When MCA announced it would close in 2020, the fate of the main building — designed by noted Memphis architect Roy Harrover — was uncertain. Next year, it will become the new home of the Metal Museum. It certainly carries an appropriate name for a national museum dedicated to metal fabrication, artwork, and jewelry (rusty or otherwise) but the building is actually a tribute to longtime MCA president Edwin C. ”Ted“ Rust. This article was the cover story of our December 2001 issue. Rust passed away in 2010 at the age of 99.

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A Quarter Center of Leadership

“TED RETIRED IN 1971, and the board passed a resolution naming the building after him, but then they foolishly, I guess, left it to him to memorialize their action,” says Jeff Nesin, president of Memphis College of Art since 1991. “And as modest as he is, and as focused as his design sense is, he would never trash up the front of this building with letters. So he made up a little bronze plaque that’s stuck in the corner behind the receptionist’s desk. But you can spend four years here and get a degree and certainly never know this is called Rust Hall.”

Sitting in his office in the college’s striking building in Overton Park, Nesin is talking about Edwin C. Rust — better known to his large circle of friends and colleagues as Ted — who served as director of the Memphis Academy of Arts, as the school was then known, for more than 26 years. By all accounts, it was Rust — oh, let’s just call him Ted, too — who led the school during its most formative stages, persuaded city government to build the new campus in Overton Park, and hired teachers that have had a lasting impact on art in Memphis to this day.

“He influenced the look of art here, by bringing in artists, by supporting them, and by giving them a place to work,” says Murray Riss, a professional photographer who taught at the college from 1969 to 1984. “The whole art scene in Memphis owes a great deal to Ted Rust.”

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The Move to Overton Park

“OH, I WAS LUCKY about finding some talented people,” says Ted, In his offhand way, sitting in the den of his East Memphis home, surrounded by paintings and sculptures created by friends and former students. “But they don’t ever mention the ones I fired, either!”

Rust, who turns 91 this month, is still very much a part of the art scene in Memphis. In November, he unveiled an 11-foot-tall bronze piece, Ikon, in front of the college to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Overton Park. And he’s presently at work on smaller pieces for his close friend Ellen Klyce, who has known Ted more than 40 years.

“Ted has a very strong sense of not wanting to intrude and not wanting to be in the limelight,” says Klyce, who served as the college’s development director in the 1980s (her mother, Polly Cooper, earlier worked there as the school’s public relations director). “But I just think our city is incredibly fortunate that he chose to come here.”

His path to Memphis was a circuitous one. Born in California in 1910, Ted attended Deep Springs College in Death Valley before moving to Cornell, then Yale, to study architecture. He took a sculpture class, and that changed the direction of his life, earning a bachelor of fine arts degree from Yale in 1936.      

 “Jobs were hard to come by,” Ted recalls, but he landed a teaching position at the College of William and Mary, where he later became head of the fine arts department. During World War II, he joined the American Red Cross as national director of the Arts and Skills Corps, teaching art to servicemen undergoing rehabilitation in veteran’s hospitals.

For a few years he worked as a sculptor in Brooklyn. There Memphis Academy of Arts board member I.L. “Ike” Myers found him and lured him to Memphis.

“Ike sent me a wire saying, ‘Have found lovely garden cottage, hope you will come,’” says Ted. “Well, that cottage was in his head, and I ended up staying at his apartment for a couple of weeks until I found another place,” says Ted. “I thought Memphis was just a jumping-off place, but there was something about it, even then, that I liked.”

The board hired Ted on August 29, 1949.

“And to the greater glory of the college, and this city, and this region, he never left,” says Nesin. “This really became his home, and in a very rich and complex way he became very active in the civic life of this city. He did his job, and I’m very grateful to him.”

At the age of 38, Ted inherited an institution that had gone through some rough times. Classes were crammed into the pair of decaying mansions on Adams, and one of his first goals was to find the growing school a new home.

“Just give us a building that doesn’t blow its fuses or drop plaster on our heads,” he told the boad of trustees, “and we’ll set the world afire.”    

 Some city officials thought the school should simply merge with either Memphis State College or Southwestern at Memphis, since neither had an art department at that time.

 “But that idea died on the vine pretty quickly,” recalls painter Burton Callicott, who joined the faculty in 1937 and remained there for 37 years. “So many people — board members and others — came to the defense of the school and prevented that from happening.”

Instead, Mayor Frank Tobey decided to construct a fine-arts center on a three-acre plot in Overton Park, and held a national competition to select a designer. The contract eventually went to the Memphis firm of William Mann and Roy Harrover, architects, and Leigh Williams, associate. Ground-breaking on the new building began on October 30, 1957, and the academy moved into its new home two years later.

This building belongs in the park,” read the jury recommendation. “It is precisely designed for the site which has been assigned to it. It is a unified design [and] and should be beautiful from any aspect as one approaches it, and will form a visual image of a pavilion which will be remembered.”

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From Academy to College

ATTENDANCE GREW STEADILY at the new Memphis Academy of Arts, and artists from all parts of the country joined the faculty — thanks in no small part to Ted Rust.

“He’s the reason I’m here,” says Riss, who was hired to develop the school’s photography department. “From him I learned that people who are in academia can come with a strong agenda of their own, or they can be a supportive administrator, who lets the good people they hire create their own programs, and that’s what he did. He allowed us to be the teachers that we wanted to be.

“Over the years, I would get offers to come and teach at other places,” he continues, “but I always compared it to Ted Rust and the art academy, and they never matched up.”

Some of the new faculty were former students, including painter Dolph Smith, who joined the faculty in 1965 and taught there for 30 years.

“Back then it was very small,” says Smith, now living in Ripley, Tennessee. “Ted was the director. Burton [Callicott] and painter Ted Faiers were my teachers, so I had the best of both worlds, being a student of those people and later on teaching with them.”

At least one instructor took a job at the academy without even visiting Memphis.

“Ted hired me sight unseen, which was nice,” says Memphis sculptor John McIntire. “Actually, I took the job before I even met him, all the way up in Ohio, because my mother said she had a vision that he was a wonderful person, and sometimes she’s psychic like that.”

His mother proved right. “Ted was an excellent boss,” says McIntire. “I couldn’t have found any better and couldn’t have worked for anybody else.”

For psychic reasons or not, other talented artists were drawn to Ted Rust and the little art academy in Overton Park, including calligrapher and designer Bill Womack, painter Veda Reed, fabric designer Henry Easterwood, ceramics artist Peter Sohngen, artist/designer Robert Riseling, and countless others.

“In my day, I think we had always had a faculty of creative teachers who were able to impart what they knew and inspire the students under them,” Ted says. “I think that the concern that the faculty and staff have for the students is unique.”

Then he adds, in his usual modest way, “At least in my experience, which is not vast.” In fact, he insists that his predecessor, Mildred Hudson, who served as director from 1943 to 1949, is responsible for much of the school’s success

“I get credit for a lot of things that Mildred started,” he insists. “She did not get her due.”

The fact remains, though, that during his 26-year tenure, the Memphis Academy of Arts doubled the size of its building, expanded its curriculum, and earned accreditation from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design as well as the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. What’s more, the he saw the school’s annual budget increase almost tenfold, from $65,000 to $600,000. 

One of Ted’s proudest accomplishments came in 1961, when the academy became the first integrated school in Memphis. Up until that time, Overton Park itself was segregated; African Americans could visit attractions there, including the zoo, only on certain days of the week.

“After I came we opened up our night school, and a woman named Melba Briscoe was our first black student,” says Rust. “That was important to me during my years there.”

But there was more to it than that.

“He personally drove her into the park in his car,” says Nesin. “That’s the kind of personal, physical bravery that in his matter-of-fact way seems as if he were just doing the sensible thing. But [because of the law] she had to be smuggled into the park.”

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Support During a Scandal

THERE WERE OTHER ADVANTAGES as well. The academy, like most art schools around the country, used nude models for its painting and drawing classes, and that didn’t sit too well with some Memphians.

“There was some crank upset about the nude models, and he kept trying to get the school to stop using them,” says Callicott. “Of course we didn’t, so he went into action.”

One morning early in 1969, after driving into the school parking lot, Callicott discovered an alarm clock attached to the rear bumper of his car, with wires leading to a pipe bomb that had been dropped into his gas tank. Ted summoned the police, who dismantled the contraption. “The police knew why it didn’t go off,” recalls Callicott, “but wouldn’t say, because they didn’t want anybody to know what they did wrong.”

A few days later, Dolph Smith’s son noticed something odd beneath the artist’s car parked in their driveway.

 “It was very crude,” Smith says. “A box under the gas tank containing bottles of lighter fluid with a cigarette lighter underneath. There was a string that trailed out of our yard and down the street. It was just amazing. The police came out and everything was okay.”

“This was in the 1960s,” says Ted. “Police were stationed at my house. My mother was living with me at the time, and she would get these calls while I was at school that I was going to be done in, but nothing came of it.”

 Crank calls and threatening letters came in for months. Then, in March 1971, Murray Riss decided to put together an invitational photography exhibition. Four of the pictures, taken by a photographer from Buffalo, New York, depicted nudes. The show opened first in Little Rock, “and the director wrote me saying it was the most uneventful, uninteresting show he had seen in a very long time,” says Riss.

Then those same photos went on display at the art academy.

“There was a guy running for the board of education who started complaining, and it became an issue,” says Riss. “And Mayor Loeb said these pictures had to come down. [Board member] Ben Goodman convinced the mayor it would be a breach of academic freedom. What would the rest of the world think of Memphis? So the mayor changed his mind.”

The pictures stayed up, and on the evening of March 25, 1971, an armed gunman burst into the home of Richard Batey, a professor at Southwestern, and kidnapped his 14-year-old son. The boy would be killed, the gunman threatened, unless the nude pictures came down.

“I remember that night well,” says Ted. “We had to go on television and say that we had taken the photos down.”

The boy was released unharmed less than three hours later. His kidnapper was never identified, though Ted and others believe that a man arrested years later for similar crimes in Salt Lake City was the perpetrator here.

“That whole thing was so crazy,” recalls Callicott. “The nudes couldn’t have been more innocuous. The boy was the son of a Southwestern teacher who was teaching an academic course [at the academy] but he had nothing to do with exhibitions, or nude classes, or anything else.”

Loeb, who had objected to the photos earlier, now saw them in a new light.

“The mayor was so furious that this crazy person was able to bring the show down when he couldn’t that he insisted we bring it to City Hall and hang it in his office,” says Riss. The academy staff convinced him it wouldn’t be a good idea.

 “During that whole incident, Ted was real supportive and wanted to be sure that all of us were okay,” says Riss. “He was always a champion of all the teachers, faculty, and staff.”

An Enduring Legacy

TED RUST RETIRED  from the art academy in 1975, when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 65. In honor of his achievements, he was named director emeritus for life. Guy Northrop, a columnist for The Commercial Appeal, saluted him as “a remarkable, gracious man … [who] towers so high in the art and cultural world of this community that there is really no one else around to compare with him. He is a superb director because he has a flair for getting cooperation from other people. And one big reason is that he does so much for those other people. From the day he arrived I cannot recall his having hesitated to respond to a request for his time, talent, and effort.”

An editorial in the Memphis Press-Scimitar proclaimed Ted “one of Memphis’ most valuable citizens” and observed, “The quality of this art school — one of the strongest, brightest threads in the cultural fabric of Memphis and the Mid-South — largely reflects the sculptor-turned-administrator who came here in 1949.”

Ted stayed in Memphis and turned his attention full-time to his art. In addition to private commissions, he produced sculptures for Baptist Memorial Hospital, Temple Israel, Idlewild Presbyterian Church, the University of Memphis, the University of Tennessee, and Rhodes College. His work has been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadephia Museum of Art, the Carnegie Institute, the Whitney Museum, the University of Florida, and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

“Oh, I have some talent for getting a likeness, and that’s what people want,” he says, “but the pieces I like to do best are the ones that I call architectural — that is, work for a specific site or a special place.”

The monumental bronze figure of Dr. Charles Diehl striding in front of Brister Library at Rhodes is one example, though he has reservations about it.

“The back of it is the only good part of it,” he claims. “Diehl had already passed away, so I had to work from photographs, and I found a picture of him out on the campus in a breeze, and his gown was blowing and I liked that. The design of the cape and the hood is nice.” In fact, he has a photograph of the piece in his home — taken from the back.

Not so nice is his marble sculpture that stands downtown in front of Cossitt Library. The work depicts a teacher reading to three students, but vandals have repeatedly knocked the heads off the figures. Ted has replaced them twice before.

 “Jeff Nesin took me down there and said he’d like to have them repaired and moved into a courtyard somewhere, but I’m not up to doing that,” he says. “There’s been so much damage it would be like starting from scratch again.”

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IN 1993, THE SCHOOL presented “Likenesses: 45 Years of Ted Rust’s Portrait Sculptures,” the artist’s first one-man show (“which he blithely called ‘Ted’s Heads,’” says Nesin). Three years later, he surprised Ted with an honorary doctor of fine arts degree.

“I did it as a surprise because he would never attend the graduation if he thought we were formally going to honor him,” Nesin says. “But it was a great joy to be able to do that. I cannot imagine any honorary degree — any honor whatsoever — coming from this place having any validity if he didn’t have one.”

As he presented the degree, Nesin described Ted as “this college’s most historically important leader” and said, “Without compromising the wonderful, essential work that goes on in this building every day, it is fair to say that none of it would go on today, that this building would likely not exist, without the vision and leadership of Ted Rust.”

“It’s almost like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life,” says Ellen Klyce. “To look back on all the people and all the artwork and all the events that would never have happened if he had not chosen to come here.”