In Memoriam:
Terry Corbin, Pam Kirchener, and Barbara Miller
Tarrance Corbin.
Tarrance Corbin.In the past year, several of the Cincinnati art world's most important and creative people have died: Terry Corbin, teacher extraordinaire and superb abstract painter; Pam Kirchener, Director of Contemporary and Modern Art at Cincinnati Art Galleries; and Barbara Miller, founder, with her late husband Norman, of The Miller Gallery on Hyde Park Square. All were friends and colleagues of mine, and I'd like to at least remember the lives of these three fine people.
Tarrance Corbin came to teach painting at UC-DAAP in the 1980s, the first full-time African-American to do so. He brought an intense passion and rigorous standards to teaching, as well as a catalytic new leadership to, with, and amongst African-American artists who live and work here (Terry was around the same age as Jymi Bolden, Thom Shaw, Joyce Phillips Young). I frequently guest lectured in his graduate drawing classes, and guest critiqued in the graduate painting classes he taught. Students were spellbound by his abilities, his passion, his demand for excellence. We were two of the founding members of Umoja (the word means sharing in Swahili), a group of African-American artists determined to mentor incoming African-American students at, for example, The Art Academy of Cincinnati; my role was to try to get their own work exhibited in area museums and arts centers. Corbin's leadership was invaluable; his commitment of time extraordinary. He opened his studio to thousands of students, faculty, friends, artists, making it a gathering place for younger artists, including those from The Art Academy, where he guest taught, and NKU, fertilizing creativity in this most exciting of venues. His bold abstract paintings, generally very colorful, sometimes in shades of black-white-grey, undermined geometric abstraction with their emphases on curvilinear shapes as well, giving the eye a field (day) for movement. His last show, while dying, was at Cincinnati Art Galleries, a show which must have been booked by the late Pam Kirchener, who was Director of American Paintings, and of finding area talent to show there.
Pamela Kirchener, 2006. Photo courtesy of Sarah Oliver Schmitt.Pam had a heart as large as a Montana sky, and a love of art which went back decades to her early work in The Closson Gallery downtown. She was an indefatigable supporter and promoter of artists like Michael Scott, Tom Bacher, Greg Storer, Leslie Shiels, and Kevin Kelly, whom she probably met at Closson's and continued to assist at CAG. She had an exceptional eye, an ease with sales, one of the town's warmest smiles; she was also brilliant, a superb writer and critical thinker. She expanded the direction of CAG healthily. She was a woman one could trust.
I grew up in Paddock Hills, a neighborhood hidden on a hill midway between North Avondale and Bond Hill. Leafy cul-de-sac streets made the neighborhood ideal for young families; mine lived in two different houses there. On the first street, Perth Lane, Norman Miller's parents had sold their house to their newlywed son, Norman, and his Kansas City-born, CCM graduate Barbara Milgram. Their house was three from ours; I really knew them my entire life (Norman worked for the old Miller Dairy, which he sold to French Bauer). Their two children Alan and Laura were born there.
Barbara Miller. Photo courtesy of the Miller Gallery.Barbara's idea to open an art gallery, fifty years ago this year, started in the basement of that Perth Lane house. Women, particularly from her affluent background, didn't work then. She had a good eye, immense enthusiasm, a warm personality and rich alto voice. That gallery moved to Hyde Park Square—where it has had several locations as it expanded—but The Millers decided never to leave that location. My good friend Bob Off (who arrived here in 1970) and I spent many a Saturday morning on The Square, and a necessary stop was always The Miller Gallery. Barbara insisted on having coffee and doughnuts, and comfortable chairs, sofas, and loveseats—a rarity in a gallery to this day—and people like us would wander in and say hello. We would note small watercolors by a Bill Jackson which we would both buy and other incidental pieces we could just barely afford. Buying the art was part of The Miller Experience, a kind of welcoming other family, dog and all. Barbara was kind and gracious, warm and welcoming, attitudes usually sorely lacking in art galleries, museums, arts centers where a pervasive condescenscion pervades. To this Barbara was alien; she would have considered such bad manners, quite correctly. Hundreds of others obviously felt this warmth, which was utterly genuine, and absolutely a key ingredient in their hugely successful venture. When she felt excluded by West Fourth Street and The Contemporary Arts Center, I encouraged her to link up with The Cincinnati Art Museum (these were the prototypes for benefit parties). Tragedy was never far away– son Alan died at 15, and Barbara kept losing immediate family in Kansas City, but she held her remaining family together with single minded strength and dignity; reserves of strength were within her. Barbara and Norman built an impressive stable of artists and clients, and learned to work with decorators and art advisors.
I was never on The Square without popping in to say hi to Barbara in particular. I was never pressured, as a critic, to write about their shows, as on some level, I think, I remained little Danny Brown to her. She worried like a mother hen when I began my lengthy illnesses in 1987.
I went in to say 'hi' on what happened to be the 47th anniversary of the gallery. Long widowed by then, and ready to turn the gallery over to daughter Laura and her husband Gary Gleason, she remarked to me, "I guess I've always been nothing more than a Jewish princess."
"Nothing could be further from the truth," I rejoined. "You have been a pioneer, and a truly great lady."
