In 1973, just four years into Theresa Pollak’s retirement, the founder and former head of VCUarts wrote, “When I was a child growing up in Richmond there was no art gallery or museum, no art in the colleges and no art school—except the Richmond Art Club, founded by Adèle Clark and her friend Nora Houston.”
These two artists, Pollak said, were the most inspiring figures in her life. They were the reason she became a professional artist. But Clark and Houston weren’t just teachers—they were ardent suffragettes who believed that art was a linchpin of social progress.
At the turn of the century, when Pollak was growing up, Richmond was the most densely populated city in the South. Its sophisticated streetcar system, the first in the nation, spurred rapid urban growth. Freed slaves and their children had transformed Jackson Ward into a thriving community of African-American business owners. It was a far cry from the ruination of the Civil War.
And yet, social ills cut deep into the lives of many people. Women could not vote, and Plessy v. Ferguson had given racial segregation legal precedent, creating a deeply divided city. Still, the increasing hurdles of social advancement inspired some to resist the status quo—including Maggie Walker, who become the first woman to charter a bank in the United States.
This was the Richmond that Nora Houston returned to in 1909. At age 26, Houston had spent her formative years studying in New York with William Merritt Chase at the institute that would later become Parsons School of Design.
Nora Houston in 1917.
Coming home to teach at the Richmond Art Club reunited Houston with her childhood friend Adèle Clark, who she had met 16 years ago during her earliest art lessons. Clark was an ambitious young woman with an acerbic wit—a self-described “renegade”—and her devotion to the club was rooted in a desire to affect social change as an artist.
“I’ve always tried to combine my interest in art with my interest in government,” Clark said. “I think we ought to have more of the creative and imaginative in politics.”
As soon as Houston began teaching alongside Clark, they joined 17 other women in founding the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. They gathered at the home of Anne Clay Crenshaw, who lived on West Franklin St, to elect a president and plan out their strategy to educate the public on why women deserved the right to vote.
Over the next decade, they worked tirelessly to protest, campaign and recruit the people of Richmond to their movement. The Clark and Houston painted in public, handing out suffragist leaflets to anyone who would approach them. Clark wrote in to Richmond newspapers and showed suffrage films at the state fair. Houston once delivered a speech in Monroe Park as hecklers pelted her with rocks. She ended up saving one for the rest of her life, a badge of courage from her struggle for equal rights.
It was during this period that Pollak met Clark and Houston, when she attended the Richmond Art Club as a teenager from 1912 to 1917. By the 1920s, she was studying in New York with the era’s leading modernists. And in 1928, she was invited by Dr. Henry Horace Hibbs to create what is today known as VCU School of the Arts.
But according to Pollak, she was able to muster the confidence and self-assuredness to succeed as an educator because of their leadership. “This is where I had my first beginnings as an artist,” she said, “my first stimulation and encouragement. The service rendered by Miss Adèle in this capacity was inestimable and I feel that it is to her pioneering enterprise that I owe much of my whole career.”
2018 marks 90 years of creative daring at VCUarts. To mark this occasion, VCUarts is spending this school year reflecting on our shared history and envisioning how we can continue to pave the way for creative practice in the 21st century and beyond. Visit the VCUarts 90th Anniversary website to learn more about the many stories that have shaped our school, and to share memories of your own.
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