PARSONS FOUNDING SISTERS
Frank Alvah Parson, William M. Odom and Van Day Truex redefined American taste for the 20th century, representing an alternative history of modernism in the USA than that of the Bauhaus diaspora. Parsons Founding Sisters places of birth demonstrate how NYC always served as a refuge for gay men and women escaping patriarchal heteronormativity.
Western Massachusetts born Frank Alvah Parsons
Director of New York School of Fine and Applied Art, 1911-1930,
expanding the school of art curriculum to include applied arts like costume design, interior decoration, and commercial illustration
Georgia born
Protoge and domestic partner of Frank Alvah Parsons was founder and first director of the school's Paris branch, the Paris Ateliers, established in 1921, and directed the School from 1930 until 1942. He renamed the school to honor his partner Parsons School of Design in 1941
Kansas born
Parsons and Odum’s protege became Director, and later President, of Parsons School of Design from 1942 to 1952. He was previously a student of Odom, and directed Paris Ateliers, from the early 1930s until its closure at the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
The collection consists of five photograph albums of his travels and social interactions are documented in the albums' captioned photographs, One scrapbook, documents Truex's apartments and the home of William Odom
By the late 1960s, big changes were coming to Parsons interior design and in 1970, Alabama born Allen Tate,Founding Chair, of the newly renamed Department of Environmental Design, which included architecture, landscape and urban design to the curriculum. In the oral histories, you can hear voices from this generation at Parsons, for example the great interior design historian Texan Stanley Barrows before he ran away to FIT in 1968. Tate’s pedagogical philosophy is preserved in the archives as well.
Allen Tate