More About Pat Musick
INTERPRETING HISTORY THROUGH ART
Pat knew from the age of four that she wanted to be an artist. Her mother hired a Navajo woman to take care of her, and Pat would sit watching for hours as she stitched lightning bolts, suns, and rattlesnakes using small glass beads. She understood then that art was emotionally powerful, but had no way of knowing that in the future, her art would change perceptions in the world.
As a young mother of three and the wife of a budding football coach, she found herself at Cornell University in the 1960s. Although Pat herself did not have a college degree, she learned how to discuss important political topics with some of America’s most influential scholars. When Vietnam and Civil Rights protests began to enter her personal life, Musick turned to art as a way to understand it all. Almost a decade later, this search for knowledge and understanding would lead her to cross paths with the astronaut she would eventually marry.
“In the sky, I began to see a moving light, and as it moved,
I said, ‘I wonder who those guys are up there and what they’re like?’ And six years later, I married one of them.”
-Pat Musick