Q&A: Tennessee State Museum art and architecture curator Jim Hoobler

Jim Hoobler, who is retiring at the end of June, has served as the senior curator of art and architecture for the Tennessee State Museum since 1991.

For more than 45 years, Hoobler, 69, has been preserving, restoring and highlighting local and state history through his work on the Tennessee Historical Society, the Metro Historical Commission, the Nashville City Cemetery Commission and the Tennessee Art League, as well as the state museum.

In addition, he served as the chief consultant for the Executive Mansion’s decorative and fine arts, and curator of the State Capitol, and is a prolific author and editor of books and articles on art and history.

Tennessee State Museum Chief Curator and Director of Collections Dan Pomeroy described Hoobler as "the perfect man in the perfect place many times."

We asked Hoobler to talk about his career and some of the highlights.

Q: How did you decide to pursue your career in art and history?

A: I fell in love with history and art very early. In high school, in Atlanta, my church had us take career counseling in our junior year. They told me that I should be a museum curator.

Q: I know you were very instrumental in the restoration and preservation of the Tennessee State Capitol, Downtown Presbyterian Church, the City Cemetery and Carnton. Tell us a little bit about those projects.

A: I had worked around the Capitol since 1975, and by the mid-80s I noticed structural deterioration. At that point I was the director of the Tennessee Historical Society. The House and Senate finance chairs were members, and they loved our Capitol and our history. I reported on the deterioration, and asked them to fund a restoration. They took that to Gov. (Lamar) Alexander, and he created a Capitol Restoration Commission. I have been an advisor to them ever since. 

The Downtown Presbyterian Church, like our Capitol, is a William Strickland building. I also saw it in need of restoration, and Ridley Wills led a fundraising effort for projects that I planned out on stabilizing and restoring the structure and the interior finishes. It is a National Landmark, and the finest surviving example of Egyptian Revival architecture anywhere.

City Cemetery is our city outdoor history classroom. The founders of our city, educators, ministers, enslaved persons, Fisk Jubilee Singers, the man who named the flag “Old Glory” all are buried there. I have been on that board for many years, and we do an annual living history tour there.

I first saw Carnton in 1975. A tenant farmer lived in it at that time and the owner was retired in Florida. I tracked the owner down, and got permission to take (a battlefield tour group) into it. There I found that the roof had a large hole in it and part of a bedroom had collapsed. I called the owner, described the condition I had found, and suggested that he could get a large tax deduction if he donated it to a tax-exempt preservation group. It is now a beautiful house museum.

Q: What other Nashville-area buildings are in dire need of preservation?

A: Right now Music Row is our most endangered historic area. Dozens of buildings with a fascinating music industry history have been bulldozed recently. We need to respect our history better than that, and celebrate what brings most of the tourist to Nashville by preserving that story.

Q: I know you are intimately familiar with the state Capitol. Please share some of the most intriguing facts about it.   

A: Our Capitol is one a small handful of pre-Civil War state capitols that still is in use, and still has almost all of the constitutional officers, governor and legislature still working out of it. It is where African American male suffrage and women's suffrage were ratified. So it is a monument to voting rights.

Q: The state museum claims the largest public art collection in the state and I know that you were responsible for finding and purchasing much of the collection. What percent of the entire collection is on display at any given time? What are a few your favorite pieces?

A: There are around 9,000 pieces of decorative and fine art owned by the state. Of that, about 2,000 are paintings. At the present time there is about 1% to 2% of the collection on exhibition. This is frustrating, but that is the model for most museums. The hope is that given adequate staffing the collection could be rotated frequently. 

(Two of his favorites are "a very significant" painting of the Cherokee settlement of Toqua, which is the only 18th-century view of a Native American settlement done from on-site sketches, and then copied into a painting. The Fritzi Brod painting "Near Gatlinburg" is another favorite.)

Q: What is the weirdest item in the collection? And what is the oldest item in the collection?

A: The weirdest item in the collection is the thumb of John Murrell.  Some of the fossils are definitely our oldest items. One of my favorites is a horseshoe crab fossil from Tennessee.

Q: The state museum is known for its extensive Civil War collections. With the recent developments with civil rights issues and the growing controversy over Confederate statues, how do you think the museum's Civil War collection will be changed?

A: The Civil War collections are some of the most extensive in the country, by state. We have changed our portrayal of the war as the years have gone by, and change is a constant. I am certain that interpretations will continue to evolve. We now have more African American voices in the interpretation of their history, and those voices will make changes, I am sure, into how the past plays out in the present.

Q: For people who have not been to the state museum, what should they definitely not miss when they visit?

A: My favorite areas of the collection are, of course the decorative and fine arts pieces. The public has always enjoyed the Native American, frontier and Civil War exhibits.

Q: Historic photos have been a big part of your collecting. Can you talk about that and why they are so valuable to historians of the future?

A: The historic photographs are documents showing us our past. I used the Giers photographs of the interior of the Capitol as a guide for the restoration of those spaces.  They also document our now-destroyed buildings in Nashville and across Tennessee.  They show individual's actual appearance — not an artist's rendering, which sometimes were created to flatter. I love photographic history and have done several books on that.

Q: With this being the state museum, does Elvis have a presence?

A: Well Elvis has definitely not left our building. We have a number of items relating to him, ranging from a guitar, to records, movie posters, theater lobby cards, a TCB pendant, photographs, paintings and many other items.

Q: What are your retirement plans?

A: I have a new book contract, and starting soon I will be working on one about Nashville’s history as reflected in our built environment — a then-and-now look at what has been built here, how it was first used and how it is used now. I am still on the Metro Historical Commission board. I am still active at the Downtown Presbyterian Church, and we are looking at rehanging our art collection there and doing some new things in our church history room. The City Cemetery Association is still an active interest. I also look forward to doing more traveling now.

Reach Ms. Cheap at 615-259-8282 or mscheap@tennessean.com. Follow her on Facebook at facebook.com/mscheap, and at Tennessean.com/mscheap, and on Twitter @Ms_Cheap, and catch her every Thursday at 11 a.m. on WTVF-Channel 5’s “Talk of the Town.”