Speaker: Amy Torbert
Assistant Curator of American Art
Saint Louis Art Museum

Hello, I’m Amy Torbert, assistant curator of American art and cocurator of Art Along the Rivers.

In 1960 the artist Houston Chandler gave a lecture at the Saint Louis Art Museum about sculpting animals. He recommended visiting the St. Louis Zoo to get to know them up close. He wasn’t interested, however, in exactly replicating them but rather used abstraction to find “the simplicity that brings out the most powerful line of expression.”

Chandler conveyed such lessons to his students at the People’s Art Center, where he taught for many years. The center was created by a group of Black and white St. Louis philanthropists who solicited support from their communities and the Federal Art Project. In establishing the city’s first interracial art center, they envisioned that it would “bring together people of all racial origins, religious faiths, economic levels, and ages for creative self-expression through a common interest in arts and crafts.”

For more than 20 years, the center offered free art classes for children and adults as well as exhibitions of student, local, and national artists. It taught painting and drawing, as well as metalwork, pottery, dress designing, weaving, woodwork, art appreciation, and more. At its peak in 1952, the center served 1,385 children and 700 adults. Local artists and Saint Louis Art Museum staff members taught at the center, including Oscar Thalinger, the Museum’s registrar.

The People’s Art Center deserves to be better known today for the success it achieved in placing art into the lives of everyday St. Louisans. For example, Manuel Hughes, whose large painting is also in this gallery, walked into the People’s Art Center on his own at age 7 or 8 and told them that he wanted to take an art class. His years of study at the center laid the foundation for his career as a professional artist, which continues today.