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Museum's innovative leader quits By BILL VARBLE The Schneider Museum of Art was tucked away at the edge of Southern Oregon State College's campus when Greer Markle signed on to run it. As Markle steps down this month, an expanded Schneider is poised to become the centerpiece of something called the Southern Oregon Center for the Visual Arts. The Oregon Legislature has approved an ambitious $11.4 million plan, most of the money has been raised, and construction could start as soon as this summer. The story of how the art gallery got from there to here spans Markle's watch. "Greer was not one of the wheeler-dealers who started it," longtime board member Gary Heiter of Medford says. "He was the one who kept it going." When the Schneider opened in September of 1986, Markle was hired to run it and to teach in the college's Art Department. He remembers arriving from the Sun Valley (Idaho) Center for the Arts and Humanities, where he'd been the director. "There was no budget and no staff," he says. "It seemed like they forgot to do something." The museum's art collection stemmed from the 1970s, when an art dealer named Sylvan Simone moved to Ashland from Los Angeles and became friendly with members of SOSC's art faculty. "How come you don't have a museum?" he asked Lyle Matoush, a longtime art professor and print maker at SOSC who is now retired. Simone gave the college a number of paintings before he died. A group of art enthusiasts centered around Bill and Florence Schneider of Ashland began raising money for a gallery in the 1980s. "We kept having little fund-raisers," Matoush says. "We'd raised maybe 10 or 20 thousand. One day Bill (Schneider) says, `This is never going to happen having these little ice cream socials. Here's something from an anonymous donor.' "It was six figures," Matoush says. "He didn't want to be known (as the donor). He tried to hide it." Once the roof was on and the windows in and a director hired, the gallery needed to display art that would draw people in. "We struggled the first couple years, but we finally got a lot of support from the community," Markle says. "We got a good board. We got some grants ... It took five or six years." Matoush says much of the credit goes to Markle. "A director makes or breaks a museum," he says. "Greer brought in some really wonderful shows. I have to hand it to him. When it started, I thought, well, they'll bring in their friends they knew. But he didn't really need that." "He did more than the board could expect," Heiter says. A landmark exhibit was "The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger," a 1990 exhibit featuring contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol. "We sort of came of age," Markle says. The show had a ripple effect on campus and in the community, with impromptu hunger events springing up around it. A 1996-'97 expansion that added both gallery and office space allowed the gallery to put on not only more shows, but longer ones. It also permitted additional showings of art from the museum's own growing art collection, such as a display of artworks by Waldo Pierce. Pierce was a friend of the Schneiders when they operated the Treehaven art school near Tuscon, Ariz., beginning in the 1940s. He'd been a fishing/drinking buddy of Ernest Hemingway's, and he chronicled the writer's "Key West mob" in his paintings. Markle says it's hard to single out shows, but he admits to a few favorites: a 1996 series on post-modernism with American Indian artist James Luna and Cuban artist Alberto Rey; a 1996 exhibit of stonework by American eclectic environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy; and "The Rise and Fall of Taste," a provocative 1989 show by artist David Geise, who was later picked up by a prestigious gallery in New York City. In 1988 the Schneider had an exhibit of photos of famed installation artist Christo's gigantic "wrapping" of islands in the Caribbean. Markle later took SOSC students to help with Christo's umbrellas project near San Diego. Claude-Marie Ward of Ashland, a member of the Schneider's original board, says Markle was able to see possibilities for the museum others might not have seen. She applauds his knowledge of art history, and especially modern art. Heiter says Markle was willing to bring unusual or controversial exhibits to town. "He brought one called `Trashformations,' in which people collected what they found from cork to cans and you name it," Heiter says. "I personally wouldn't put it in my house. But it has a following. It's like what you see at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art." Markle says both his half-time jobs kept expanding over the years. "It was like having two full-time jobs and trying to finish a Ph.D.," he says. "It drove me crazy." He's finally finishing his doctoral dissertation and says he looks forward to teaching at SOU full-time. Being part of a regional art center will change the museum, he says. The Schneider will have access to classrooms and seminar rooms and an auditorium for films and artist lectures. "We've never had an adequate place to do that," he says. SOU has begun a search for a new director who will also be expected to teach and run the museum. "Incredible," Markle says. "They have to work something out." If the hardest part of his job was juggling teaching and the museum, he says the best parts were making a lot of friends, running the museum's educational mission and having an impact on the way people think about the world. Meanwhile, he can be forgiven if he likens the Schneider to a child. "It grows from infancy, it has a bad adolescence, it becomes a young adult," he says. "That's where it is now." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA