It’s uplifting to read a story about someone who made a positive contribution to the World and brought happiness to her students.
Excerpted from The San Francisco Chronicle 3.31.2022
As a professor at San Francisco State University, Julie Marshall taught her students to use art to work through personal issues, a process she employed during her own four-year struggle with a bone marrow disorder.
“She really began to believe that art teachers were going about it the wrong way,” said her sister, also an art educator. “They were teaching students how to hold a brush. Julia thought the ideas you were trying to express were what art was all about.”
Her main courses at SF State were called “Art for Children,” and “Curriculum and Instruction in Art,” both requisites for the K-12 single-subject teaching credential in California. Her classes were always full, usually with a waiting list.
“The thing that was so cool about it is that we were making art at the same time we were learning how to be teachers of art,” said Lisa Hochtritt, who studied under Marshall and went on to teach art at Half Moon Bay High School.
“Julia had a kiln, she had paints, she would bring in tons of art-making materials. And she didn’t just give us assignments. She’d do the work with us, too. She was curious about everybody and everything and made it so much fun,” Hochtritt said.
As a professor at San Francisco State University, Julie Marshall taught her students to use art to work through personal issues, a process she employed during her own four-year struggle with a bone marrow disorder.
During long treatment sessions, she’d take the intravenous infusion in her left arm to leave her right arm free to draw interpretations of the IV drip bag that was her inescapable companion. Her goal was a triptych of paintings that re-imagined the drip bag as personal totem. Each painting was offset by a mouse, a rabbit and a canary to symbolize her own vulnerability.
Marshall finished the first two and was at work on the third when she went into the hospital on Feb. 10. She died five days later at UCSF Parnassus from complications related to aplastic anemia, a disease in which bone marrow is unable to adequately produce blood cells. She was 74.
“Julia had always used visual imagery to extend her verbal ways of thinking about issues that concerned her, both involving the world at large and her own thoughts,” said her husband Leonard Hunter, retired professor of art at SF State. “Once she got terminally ill her emotions overwhelmed her logical mind, and the paintings represent her sense of urgency and what fate held for her.”
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