Marilyn Jensen Houlberg

Marilyn was a mentor to me as a graduate student, and a good friend who shared a rare and important viewpoint on the arts of the African diaspora. I will truly miss her.

Wow! :( Say it isn't so. I was thinking and speaking of her of the other day and decided to check in after not speaking to her for months. Deeply, deeply saddened. Haiti has lost a champion and the art world a great thinker.

Marilyn was one of my favorite teachers at SAIC. She inspired and challenged us - made us think. I remember her as energetic and passionate, inquisitive and mischievous. She was great. A deep loss.

Marilyn's work was an adventure in the visual expression of culture, thought and spiritual connection. She will always be remembered for her vibrant personality and missed by the Chicago academic community.

Marilyn was a Chicago institution. She mentored and inspired not only students, artists, and scholars, but also people from diverse walks of life who crossed her path. She was creative, generous with her time and thoughts, kind, and fun. She is very much missed in this city where she made her home.

Marilyn was an inspiration to so many of us in the field of African art. She was extraordinarily kind and generous to several generations of scholars and students. Marilyn merged life and art like nobody else, and will be greatly missed.

Marilyn was a great scholar and a rare personality. She was truly an ethereal being who was at home with people and personalities that most of us would overlook. She was the essence of creativity and knew it when she saw it. Always on the cutting edge, she had an intellect to which most ordinary beings can only aspire. She was a great friend and she contributed much in her life. What more can one ask from a life? We loved and love her and will cherish what she gave us.

Marilyn was my one and only professor of African Art History when she offered a course at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s. The class was mesmerizing, and my interests took a more explicit turn toward the arts than I could have anticipated. Marilyn was a dear friend as well as an intellectual inspiration (who lived Georges Bataille's dictum to great glory, that people "need the strange"), and Polly and I miss her greatly.

She was a role model for me from afar, a wonderful scholar whose work i will pass along to my students and they will, I'm sure pass to theirs. And who would want a role model without a terrific sense of humor?