By Heather Matthews
Staff Writer, Manchester Mirror

Marjorie Backer Enman, 89, is among the artists being exhibited at New Hampshire Instiute of Art's "Early Years" exhibit. (Heather Matthews/Manchester Mirror)




(Heather Matthews/Manchester Mirror)




(Heather Matthews/Manchester Mirror)




(Heather Matthews/Manchester Mirror)

A year ago, Marjorie Backer Enman, 89, checked the mailbox at her retirement home in Manchester and found the most recent New Hampshire Institute of Art continuing education brochure. She was surprised and puzzled to see a photo of herself from the 1930s on the front cover.

“There my picture was on the front page,” said Enman.

The photograph was taken during a class at the Institute and showed Enman and several of her classmates painting. Enman said she called NHIA to tell them that she could name every single person in the photograph.

Administration, said Enman, was thrilled. They were also surprised to learn that anyone from the class of 1938 was still alive. Indeed, they were so excited by the discovery, that the Institute’s president came to see Enman at her home and took her out to lunch.

“They said to me, ‘We didn’t think any one was still living.’ They were fascinated I knew so many people in the pictures, who they where and what they were doing. That was a long time ago,” she said.

But Enman’s memory never faded and without having to see their work, Enman could rattle off the names and information about most of her classmates.

“After all those years, Marjorie still knew. It was great,” said Stephanie Bergeron, former development assistant at NHIA. “She scrap-booked everything to do with the school. She even had an original course catalogue from the 1934 degree program. We spent hours with her.”

More than simply a fascinating lesson on the Institute’s early years, those hours spent with Enman bore fruit and plan for an new art exhibition at the Institute grew and turned into “The Early Years,” featuring works from Institute students and faculty members from the 1930s through the 1950s.

The show will exhibit the work of 16 artists from that period, some still living, other having passed away, but all contributing to the Institute’s history. And it’s that history that the exhibit makers would like to pay homage to.

“With institute moving forward and becoming a force as a fine arts college, it’s important to honor our historical integrity. We want people to recognize our history and how it made us what we are today,” said development director Jessica Kinsey. “People can see how things have changed and yet remained the same throughout the years.”

Since her graduation from the Institute in 1938, Enman has remained in touch with most of her classmates and kept all of their contact information in meticulously updated address books. She announced the possibility of the show through her Christmas cards to her classmates and began borrowing back her own work for the exhibit.

Slowly other works, in addition to Enman’s, began trickling in from several artists including Carl Tait, 88, of LaGrange, Ga., who attended the Institute with Enman and had his first exhibit at the Institute in January. Enman’s small apartment served as the drop-off location for all the work before the Institute could retrieve them. Bergeron said that the Manchester Historical Association also had several pieces by former students, which they loaned to the NHIA for the exhibit.

Sara Zela, executive assistant to the Institute president, said without Marjorie there would not have been an exhibition.

“Thank god for Marjorie,” she said.

Enman graduated from NHIA, then the Manchester Institute for Arts and Sciences from the school’s four-year art course degree that allowed graduates to teach art in the public schools in Manchester.

She went on to teach in the public school system in Manchester until 1942, but retired when she met her husband, Arthur, because it was not acceptable for married women to teach at the time. Eventually she returned to teaching, this time to the Portsmouth junior high school, and art classes at the YWCA.

Enman never planned on being an artist. Originally, she hoped to be a librarian, but the Great Depression caused her father to loose his job in the mills and ended her chances to go away to college.

“I had (a few) choices,” said Enman. “I could go to Hesser College for business and that turned me off immediately or I could become a nurse.”

Enman, who was very actively involved with the Girl Scouts at the time, received a phone call from the head of the organization in Manchester, telling her that if she wanted, Enman could go to the Institute with a four-year scholarship.

“I went to my high school art teacher – a little bit of a thing from England – and asked her if she thought I would be good enough for art school,” said Enman. “‘Marjorie, you are as good as you think you are,’ she said to me, but that wasn’t the answer I was looking for.”

Enman and her father decided she would try it out and, if at the end of the sixth months, if she didn’t like it, she would find something else to do. But, Enman didn’t need that long.

“I went for just one week and I was crazy about it,” she said.

She spent the next four years studying things like reverse painting, where the artist works backwards starting the painting with the highlights, jewelry making, oil painting and block printing.

Enman says that her years at the Institute were some of the best of her life.

“We had such a good time,” she said. “On the weekends we’d go off painting. Of course my mother was always fussy about where I went, but we were a good group. We had wonderful parties and would go to the beach and take all of our paints with us.”

Enman no longer paints, and while she has produced a large body of work, she rarely sold anything. Instead, she gave her paintings away as gifts. The “Early Years” exhibition at NHIA, on display until August 19, is her first.

“It is very exciting, she said.