TSU alumnus leaves her mark on African-American museum.
The phantom fingerprints of a Texas-born and Houston-educated art conservation student are all over the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which officially opens Saturday in Washington.
LaStarsha McGarity helped polish and wrap Chuck Berry’s 1973 cherry-red Cadillac Eldorado convertible in off-site storage before its transport for exhibition. Those spotless keys on an organ that traveled with James Brown, the Godfather of Soul? She cleaned them.
Shoes from entertainers and athletes were preserved by the 26-year-old from San Antonio,
who stabilized pairs owned by rock ’n’ roll pianist Fats Domino and jazz bandleader Cab Calloway, as well as tiny black leather hoofers used by a young vaudevillian named Sammy Davis Jr.
“They are the cutest things I’ve ever seen. They fit in the palm of your hand very easily — and they’re adorable. You can tell he had danced in them quite a bit,” McGarity said from Buffalo, N.Y.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture tells the stories of black people in the United States. It is the only national museum dedicated exclusively to documenting African-American life, art, history and culture.
McGarity’s hands helped make that happen.
Change of plans
Learning more about the creative work of black Americans was her goal in 2009 when she graduated from East Central High School in San Antonio and started working toward an art degree at Texas Southern University. She wanted to become an art educator, but never caught the passion for teaching.
Her career aspirations shifted in 2010 when then-TSU President John Rudley painted over aging works he deemed “eyesores” by Harvey Johnson, a student of the university’s legendary professor and muralist John Biggers, who died in 2001. (He started TSU’s esteemed art department in 1949 and has a piece in the new museum.)
“Like the rest of the community, I was really outraged by that,” McGarity said. The next semester, she changed her minor to chemistry to learn more about preserving art.
“Art conservation really is a blend of art and science,” she said. “You have to have the technical skill to do the work but you also have to understand the chemistry of it.”
She also started shadowing the New York City conservators the university hired to restore the murals and others pieces on campus.
She graduated from TSU in 2013 with a zeal for art conservation and spent the next year searching for an entry point into her chosen profession.
In 2014, the National Museum of African American History and Culture announced a Mellon Fellowship in Conservation that sought students with knowledge of art and coursework in chemistry.
McGarity was back in San Antonio working as a bill collector in November 2014 when she learned about the opportunity, five days before the application was due.
That deadline set off the professional sprint of her life. She took off work, caught a Megabus to Houston and stayed with a friend at TSU, where she needed to collect transcripts and recommendation letters while updating her résumé and writing an essay.
She finished on the due date. A few weeks later, she was selected, and she started working in Washington in January 2015.
Through nudges from Alvia Wardlaw, TSU’s museum director, and other mentors, she spent eight months in that internship and then worked behind the scenes in Smithsonian museums until this July as an intern conservator, a digitization contractor and a conservation technician.
She helped clean glittery dresses worn by the 1990s R&B girl group En Vogue for an AfricanAmerican exhibit at the Smithsonian’s American History museum.
So much has come full circle. A mural painted by Houston artist and Biggers acolyte Kermit Oliver was McGarity’s first conservation treatment at TSU.
She helped digitize the collection by taking photographs of objects for the institution’s website and other publications.
Her flashiest work was helping to prepare Berry’s Cadillac “without causing any damage to the original paint,” she said.
Her vanity project was preventive conservation on the shoes — adding interior foam and batting to stop damage by stress such as leather creasing.
“This is something I did for myself,” she said. “All of the shoes that go on display needed support on the inside so they don’t start to sag or deform over time. I think I did 28 pairs.”
That work included the gargantuan task of stabilizing basketball great Shaquille O’Neal’s shoes (he reportedly wears a size 22) .
‘So overwhelming’
McGarity was mentored by art historian Wardlaw, one of the nation’s foremost experts on African-American art and a Biggers authority who has served on the African-American museum’s scholarly advisory committee for the last decade.
Wardlaw and McGarity were in Washington last week for a preview of the museum where a 1968 Biggers oil painting, Ghana Women Dancing, donated by Houstonians Gerald and Anita Smith is on display.
“When I finally went to the museum and saw it mostly complete, I was so overwhelmed by how much work we had accomplished and how much this story needed to be told and how wonderfully it was told,” McGarity said. “It was just so overwhelming to think that I was at least part of it.”
Wardlaw is back in the nation’s capital for this weekend’s celebration, but her mentee will miss the grand event.
That’s because McGarity started a master’s degree in art conservation at Buffalo State in New York this fall, and Saturday is the program’s annual demonstration on protecting metals in artwork.
“It’s that kind of focus and establishment of priorities that has really gotten her where she is,” Wardlaw said.