OF
THE
Photos by Glenn Triest
!ENTERTAINMENT I
Nancy Jones has an extensive personal collection of Mexican art
and artifacts.
78
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1990
rom the din-
ing room
ceiling a
proud and
whimsical
Guatemalan horse, a
marionette, looks down upon
a tiny clay taxi, its driver and
passenger forever waiting for
the journey to begin.
Birds, flowers, fanciful
animals are intertwined in
the elaborate candelabra
which graces a bookCase. An
intricate tissue paper cut-out
honoring the Mexican Day of
the Dead is framed on the
wall, along with an Edward
Levine painting of a solitary
child playing his trumpet on
the rooftop of a tenement
building.
Outside, in the cool autumn
air, a Tyree Guyton trash can
glows with its bouquet of crut-
ches, all of it painted a sunny
yellow.
Nancy Jones lives here. If
you look carefully at her
home, the piles of books in
Spanish and English on art,
history, literature, architec-
ture, music; the careful collec-
tion of art, most of it delicate,
colorful pieces of folk art from
Mexico, but also stunning,
haunting works of local ar-
tists; the attention to color
and detail, the indifference to
what is expected — you begin
to understand something
about the woman herself.
Ms. Jones is an art
historian, a film maker, a
teacher. She speaks Spanish
fluently. Although she values
beauty and tradition, hers are
not always in areas general-
ly accepted.
The music she listens to is
as likely to be blue-grass as
opera; she loves them both.
The art she treasures is as
likely to be an exquisite piece
of Mexican pottery as a
valuable oil painting.
She is indignant about the
aestheticism which trivializes
folk art, which she loves and
which surrounds her. These
things "are very eloquent,
very beautiful," and as wor-
thy of being sanctified as
Etruscan artifacts, she says.
She is a voracious reader.
She has a passion for
knowledge, a passion which
began iri an obsession with
the Spanish language.
"It began in the womb," she
says. Her mother, Frances
Rubin, was married to Jack
Shifman. They had been mar-
ried a year. He was 22 when
he left to fight, and die, in the
Spanish Civil War.
When her mother later
married Dick Jones, Jack's
father became Nancy Jones'
"third grampa," the one who
lived with them, the one she
loved the best. He was the
grown-up who read to her,
took her on walks, and was
always there for her. There
must have been a mythology,
a legend that grew up about
her father, her mother's first
husband, "Grampa" Shiff-
man's only son. Ms. Jones felt
connected to him, wanted to
be connected to him.
When, as a ninth grader at
Mumford High School she
began to take Spanish, "it
just gripped me so deeply I
was absolutely driven to
learn it. I fell in love with it."
She walked home from school
talking out loud to herself, a
running narrative of what
she saw around her, using
every precious word she knew
of that precious language.
She spent six years in col-
lege learning everything she
could about the Spanish
language, history, literature.
"It wasn't until I went into
psychoanalysis that I got to
the roots of that irrational
obsession. The connection
was the fixation with Jack
Shifman and the fact that he
died in Spain."
By now married, with two
young children, she was sear-
ching for some other field to
study. "I was down in the
basement, doing laundry, and
of course you have these
revelations when you're doing
laundry. Suddenly, down from
Mt. Sinai, comes this revela-
tion."
It struck her that she didn't
want social work or guidance
and counseling or any of
those socially useful voca-
tions which she had been