By Sun Smith-Foret

In their beautiful memorial tribute to their mother, Marjorie’s children wrote about her early years in the bosom of her family where she lovingly practiced the domestic arts as learned from her grandmother. Marjorie sewed. She excelled in sewing, designing and constructing her own wardrobe beginning in High School. She continued sewing for her children, outfits and costumes. She learned rug hooking and became expert in that craft. In the ‘70’s after her husband passed on Marjorie moved to St. Louis where we met through her daughter Becky who was my son’s teacher at New City School. We shared a large studio on New City’s then vacant second floor with our weaver friend, Margaret Grant. Our respective passions for the domestic arts drew us together and again, through Becky, into the independent design class of Leslie Laskey, Prof. of Design in the Washington University School of Architecture.

Marjorie Hoeltzel

Leslie took our interests and talents seriously and brought us forth as artists. With Jane Sauer we attended every textile workshop offered by Craft Alliance and with Jane and Barbara Simon we began attending workshops around the country. We were active in MOFA the Missouri Fiber Artists Association which is still going strong. A group went to Japan for study. Marjorie exhibited her textile art, comprised in recent years of the quilt form pieced from deconstructed silk ties and sometimes tiny labels. Her craftswomanship is meticulous. She exhibited regularly and widely. For years, and continuing to the present, she showed through Art St.Louis, always with a piece in the bi-annual Fiber Focus juried exhibition. One of her quilts was accepted into Quilt National in 2007, I believe. She was represented in St. Louis by Locus Gallery and did arge commission works including a major liturgical collaboration with Luanne Rimel and a corporate installation for Edison Bros. Several pieces were in process in her studio in late December when Dawn Ottensmeier and I last laughed together and dined on Marjorie’s famous soup and watched a film. The three of us had/have a new project together.

Marjorie was a generous confident, friend, and as a fellow artist faultless in her design sense and critical thinking about textile art.

Marjorie made getting older seem effortless and fun.The St. Louis art community is the richer for having had her among us. We already have her firmly in our hearts. We will simply miss her effervescent and wise presence.

By Suzy Farren

Marjorie Hoeltzel died at the age of 90 on January 7th of a massive stroke. The St. Louis Beacon wrote a lovely piece about her, and in her obituary in another newspaper, her children wrote: “her primary and unforgettable gift to us all is her ferocious, tenacious love.” Marjorie wrote specific directions for her memorial service (seven pages, according to the Rev. Ann Kelsey, who presided at the memorial wearing a gloriously colorful vestment created by Marjorie). And so on January 28, Trinity Episcopal Church overflowed, as friends and family came to remember and celebrate her life. After the service, people gathered outside as Marjorie’s ashes were placed in the earth outside the church. Those gathered placed spades of earth over her ashes and then raised their glasses in a champagne toast to her life. A month before her death, Marjorie met with me for an interview for the Missouri Fiber Artists’ newsletter. Here’s what happened. Marjorie Hoeltzel died at the age of 90 on January 7th of a massive stroke. The St. Louis Beacon wrote a lovely piece about her, and in her obituary in another newspaper, her children wrote: “her primary and unforgettable gift to us all is her ferocious, tenacious love.”

Marjorie Hoeltzel

Marjorie wrote specific directions for her memorial service (seven pages, according to the Rev. Ann Kelsey, who presided at the memorial wearing a gloriously colorful vestment created by Marjorie). And so on January 28, Trinity Episcopal Church overflowed, as friends and family came to remember and celebrate her life. After the service, people gathered outside as Marjorie’s ashes were placed in the earth outside the church. Those gathered placed spades of earth over her ashes and then raised their glasses in a champagne toast to her life.

A month before her death, Marjorie met with me for an interview for the Missouri Fiber Artists’ newsletter. Here’s what happened.

As I prepare to interview Marjorie Hoeltzel, I make a mental note to ask her what her secret is. How is it, at 90, she is physically stunning: slim, stylish, with cropped white hair, funky glasses, dressed as an artist should dress – simply and dramatically? But when I meet her, we get to drinking a glass of wine and talking about the latest George Clooney film, her art, Japan, gay marriage, the pop-up scarf store and oh so many things, and the subject of her age never comes up. Instead, I begin to love a joyous, talented, curious, nurturing woman.

Marjorie and I meet on the afternoon of December 4th in her 13th floor condo in the Central West End. She has lived here since 1981. So stunning is her home – so filled with objects of art that that have been caringly selected and simply displayed – that, when she offers a tour, I greedily accept. As we move from one room to the next, she pauses to talk about the art, most of which was made by her friends. In one room, shelves with brilliant-colored spools of thread cover an entire wall – each lovingly positioned by color. We walk up the spiral staircase to the roof and then outside to the rooftop garden area. Even on this gray December day, I am transported into Marjorie’s world of beauty and simplicity. “Be careful,” she cautions as we descend the spiral staircase. In the gray afternoon, we sit in her cozy living room. She fixes tea, and we talk. She was born in 1921 in Kansas, and it was her grandmother who taught her to sew. She was an only child, and her father died when she was 12. Making clothes, she remembers, was her solace.

She married Orval Hoeltzel when she was 20. He worked for a large company, and he was transferred to a different location every three years or so. The couple had three children, and Marjorie sewed their daughter’s clothing, as well as her own.

From Fort Worth, to Kansas City, to Chicago, to St. Louis to Mobile, they moved over the years. In the late ‘60s, they moved to New Jersey – Marjorie “kicking and screaming.” To her surprise, she liked it. By 1970, the children were married and settled, and Marjorie had her first studio in the New Jersey house. One day, after a trip to Nantucket, she and Orval went to the A&P for groceries. On their way home, he died at the wheel of the car. He was 51; she was 49.

She had said when she’d left St. Louis the first time that she’d never come back. But two of her children were here, so she moved to St. Louis in 1972. “When I moved here, I knew I had to do more than I was doing,” she recalls. And so, in 1975, she took a class in basic design at Washington University – with Leslie Laskey. “He was tough,” she recalls, but he opened her eyes. “He was an amazing teacher. He spoke to each one of us, and he didn’t want us to plan. He helped me see things differently.” It was a grand time, and Laskey has been her mentor – and friend -- ever since. Some of his art is among her most cherished possessions.

Around the same time, she fell in with Sun Smith-Foret, Jane Sauer, and Barbara Simon. “I don’t think I could have called myself an artist by myself,” she muses. But with Laskey’s support and the company of Sauer, Smith-Foret and Simon, she gained confidence. For years, the women shared a garret studio over what is now the New City School. She describes those years as “a time of enormous creativity.”

Marjorie took classes at Penland and Haystack and began to develop her artistic voice. She had kept all of her husband’s neckties after his death, and in 1975, she made her son a vest out of them.

An article by Robert W. Duffy in the St. Louis Beacon, described her work: “She created objects of no functional purpose other than to delight the eye and the senses...what she produced, with bits and pieces of fabric or cast-off neckties, arranged with careful, architectural balance and structure, with taste, and with a strong foundation in craft, is a transformation, a variety of visual magic, an elevation of the basic and the anodyne to the noble status of art.”

But back to our interview. Marjorie is bored talking so much about herself. She wants to know about me. And so she suggests we go to the studio across the hall that she shares with her friend Junko. When I accept a glass of wine, she smiles broadly.

The studio is...orderly. Some of Marjorie’s latest colorful pieces adorn one wall. On another wall, there’s a piece by Luanne Rimel, a stitched piece with a photograph of Marjorie’s hands. Shelves cover another wall, artistically stacked with baskets containing Marjorie’s materials. Everything is in its place. Marjorie warns me: “Don’t describe me as neat!” I promise not to. But still!

She telephones Junko and invites her over. She is eager for the black birds to come as they have for the last few late afternoons to settle in the treetops outside the 13th-floor studio. But they don’t show up. As we sip our wine, the light begins to fade. Junko arrives, and we speak of Japanese film, Italian film, and of textiles and life. Junko shows me her part of their studio – her work. And finally, the wine finished, the day near its end, it is time to leave. Marjorie ushers me back to her condo, where I admire once again, the artistry of her space. I put on my coat. We hug and promise to get together after the holidays. Warm somehow, despite the December chill, I drive home feeling completely happy, eagerly anticipating the fun Marjorie and I will have together in the future.