When you meet Doug Norvell ’64, be prepared to hear a fish tale. Before long, you’ll find out about many of his passions, not the least of which is a unique institute in one of the more remote places on earth.
Along the way, you’ll see a stroke of organizing genius that is pure art.
Silvered and pushing 70, Norvell tackles life with the same kind of zest that took him hitchhiking to Mexico right after he graduated from Port Arthur’s Thomas Jefferson High School in 1956. It seems he’s been setting new goals and mapping new destinations ever since.
He earned a bachelor’s degree from Lamar in economics and history, graduating in 1964, and began a career in academe, earning a Ph.D. in agricultural economics at Texas A&M in 1970. His career included service for the state department in Afghanistan, work as a professor in marketing and international business at Texas A&M, as well as teaching in Harvard Business School’s branch campus in Central America, and at other universities.
Today, he’s a man with a new passion—The Amazon Institute for Indigenous Arts in Iquitos, Peru. Want to visit? Don’t plan to drive. With a population of around 500,000, it’s the largest city in the world without a road leading in. Water locked, Iquitos has steamships that travel the Amazon, airplanes that fly across the Andes to other Peruvian cities, and a huge fleet of riverboats carrying people and cargo that travel the tributaries.
Norvell has traveled to South America many times. He ended up in Peru in 2006 in a quest to land a peacock bass, a prize game fish of the Amazon River basin. Instead, it was he who got hooked. BRUSH WITH DESTINY
Norvell took along an old aluminum case, freshly coated with self-etching primer, intending to have it decorated by a local artist.
"It would be a good conversation starter," he said. "The only piece of luggage like it in the world." That makes a suitcase easier to find in baggage claim, but, for a globetrotting consultant like Norvell, conversations create opportunities.
Applying brush to the project was Cliver Flores Lanza, a professor at the Victor Morey School of Fine Arts, or Bellas Artes, a government-funded school offering college degrees for young artists of the Amazon basin.
“We got to be buddies, and he took me over to the art school,” Norvell said.
The school, a converted 1920s-era hospital building in the art deco style, needed some repair. As the pair toured the facility, carefully skirting puddles and drips from the leaky roof, Lanza painted a picture of challenge. Norvell saw instead opportunity.
With salaries for faculty and staff provided by Peru’s Ministry of Education, and facilities by the local community, the institute had promise. The greater challenge was for the 75 students, half of whom dropped out simply because they could not afford materials.
"It is horrendously expensive,” he said. “Most of the art supplies are imported from England. I said, ‘So, it’s a money problem. We’re gonna fix that.’”
A NOVEL APPROACH
Back home in Nauvoo, Ill., Norvell drew on his experience as he wrote up an application for a Fulbright Senior Scholarship from the state department.
His idea was to create a non-profit organization within Bellas Artes, the Amazon Institute for Indigenous Arts. This organization would partner with an Iquitos lodging company to host artists from around the world who want to experience, and be inspired by, the raw beauty of the Amazon jungle.
“It would be the ultimate sustainable eco-tourism,” Norvell said. “Artists would come, experience, create and then they go home.”
Setting up the foundation would keep money separate from the state-run institution where it might end up channeled to other purposes, Norvell said. Likewise, to reduce the temptation a large endowment might present, he requires funds be expended every year on scholarships, or direct support of students to buy the materials they need.
“The Institute is modeled after Providence, R.I.’s municipal department of Art, Culture and Tourism,” said Norvell. “Research led us to the Providence program, and I hope to replicate both their techniques and successes.”
The first major effort of the Institute will be a visiting artists program, where artists from the industrialized countries come to Iquitos, travel deep into the rainforest and paint, sculpt or print.
For $75 a day, visiting artists are provided room, board, studio space and river travel. The accommodations are swank, with two high-end hotels to choose from, the Victoria Regia and Hotel Acosta. For the more adventuresome, students will take artists deeper into the jungle for $10 per day. Two jungle lodges, the Helconia and Zungaro Cocha, are options as well. Daily fees are split between the hotel company and the institute helping build more classrooms and buy more materials at Bellas Artes, providing scholarships for students from low-to moderate-income families, and providing for faculty salary supplements, professional development and other activities.
About the time Norvell applied for the Fulbright Scholarship, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had issued a statement urging all U.S. missions overseas to reach out to “marginalized” peoples. “There’s nobody more marginalized than the river dweller in the Amazon Basin, living on the edge of civilization,” Norvell said. The institute was formed in December 2006 with support from the Fulbright Commission and the Cultural Affairs Office of the U.S. Embassy. “Everything just fell together,” he said.
Norvell is now working on appointing a board of directors, and is already dreaming of expanding courses and taking the program farther into the jungle to other towns in the Amazon basin. “We have strong Peruvian leadership,” Norvell said. “I’m the spark plug, a whirlwind. I get them whipped up, and then I leave,” Norvell said.
Watch for him at the airport. He’s the fellow with the suitcase brightly painted with faces of the people of the Amazon basin, as well as fish, reptiles and animals. And he’s got a fish story to tell you.
