Marianne Custer Theatre Collection
This collection consists of theatre costume designs, set designs, photographs, fabric samples, and production posters from Marianne Custer’s career as resident designer and head of the MFA design program in Theatre for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from 1974-2018, as well as several designs from other theaters. The collection contains a set of designs from a Municipal Theatre of Hungary production of Medea, and the designs for the original production of The New Majestic Follies and Lyceum Gardens Revue, which later became the Broadway production Sugar Babies. Also included is a professionally bound, but unpresented, proposal to Clarence and Marian Brown for the establishment of funding and endowments for the theatre program at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
The designs consist of a variety of materials, including paper, posterboard, color copies, and matboard, as well as several art mediums, including pencil and ink sketches, paintings, and collage. Play posters are from the Clarence Brown Theatre and Carousel Theatres at UTK, and the Hunter Hills Theatre, which was located in Gatlinburg and served the UT Theatre Department as a summer performance space from 1966 to 1978. Also included are five thumb drives and several CDs containing production photographs and digital copies of designs.
Dates
- 1973 - 2018
Conditions Governing Access
Collections are stored offsite and must be requested in advance. See www.special.lib.utk.edu for detailed information. Collections must be requested through a registered Special Collections research account.
Conditions Governing Use
The UT Libraries claims only physical ownership of most material in the collections. Persons wishing to broadcast or publish this material must assume all responsibility for identifying and satisfying any claimants on www.special.lib.utk.edu for detailed information. Collections must be requested through a registered Special Collections research account.
Extent
44.25 Linear Feet (One Hollinger box, 1 half box, 21 flat boxes)
Abstract
This collection consists of theatre costume designs, set designs, print and digital photographs, fabric samples, playbills, and production posters from Marianne Custer’s career as resident designer and head of the MFA design program in Theatre for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Also included is a professionally bound proposal to Clarence and Marian Brown for the establishment of funding and endowments for the theatre program at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
Biographical / Historical
Marianne Custer was born July 12, 1947, in Minneapolis, MN to Herbert Thomas and Evelyn Florence (Jacobsen) Custer. As an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, she worked briefly in theatre as a mime, but realized that costuming was her true passion after volunteering to assist the theatre designer.
Custer completed an MFA in Costume design from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1973, and worked as the Resident Costume designer for the University of Colorado, Boulder, before accepting a position as costume designer and assistant professor for UT in 1974. Also included in her body of work are set/scenic designs and direction of several productions. She would go on to help found the Master of Fine Arts program in design at UT in the early 1980s, and continued as resident designer and head of the MFA design program until her retirement in 2018.
Alongside her work at UT, Marianne Custer has also designed internationally for the Theatre des Halles, the National Theaters of Germany and Hungary, and the Municipal Theatre of Istanbul. Her work has appeared on Broadway, off-Broadway, and with several regional theatres and repertory companies. Custer’s work has been showcased in many exhibitions, including three appearances in the Prague Quadrennial Exhibition, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, for World Stage Design in Toronto, and in Theatre Design and Technology, the journal of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc. (USITT).
The University of Tennessee awarded Custer with the 1998 Thomas Jefferson Prize, honoring a tenured or tenure-track faculty member who has demonstrated excellence in research and creative activity, as well as the James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award in 2006. She has won the Triangle Award for Costume Design in North Carolina, and the Knoxville Coalition Award for Costume Design. In 2009 she won the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Costume Design for the production of Alice at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland.
Arrangement
This collection consists of twenty-one flat boxes, one record box, and one half box, divided into two series:
- Series I: Plays 1973-2018
- Series II: Mixed Materials
Repository Details
Part of the Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Repository