An Interview with Amy Schultz by Rhett Morgan, Kirkus Reviews

When Amy J. Schultz was a teenager in Florida, her boyfriend offered her a corsage for their homecoming football game, a chrysanthemum adorned with ribbons and a tiny plastic football helmet. At the time, she thought those extra flourishes made it look like a “monstrosity.”

Schultz had no idea that just a few states over, in Texas, teenagers were attending homecoming games with corsages—aka “mums”—that took those simple adornments to a staggering other level. It wouldn’t be until years later, as an adult living in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, that Schultz saw the Texas-size version bursting with a ridiculous amount of ribbon, baubles, trinkets, photos, and whatever else could possibly fit.

“It was just so visually stunning and different from what I grew up with,” Schultz says of the first Texas mum she saw. “I just thought to myself, Is this a joke?”

As a photographer, Schultz was instantly captivated and quickly realized it was no laughing matter when she attended a local mum-making party. She was quickly “fired” from helping to construct the mums. (“It turns out that I’m terrible at it,” she confirms.) So instead, Schultz started taking photos, capturing the tremendous amount of work and seeing something much more meaningful among all the ribbon. She had plenty of questions about how her adopted state had fostered such a surprising tradition, but the answers were less than satisfying.

“I’m sorry. You can’t just shrug and say, ‘Everything’s bigger in Texas,’” Schultz says. “I had to know. I had to understand this thing.” She started researching and found plenty of newspaper articles, but no real answers.“I just felt like nobody was digging deep enough,” Schultz explains. “Nobody was telling the whole story.”

By 2019, Schultz had left working in communications and development in higher education to start her own studio practice that combined photography with writing; by putting these two skills together, she was able to offer clients a full storytelling package. But she also wanted to put her talents toward something bigger and more personal. That bigger thing ended up being mums.

That year, Schultz became the artist-in-residence at the Arlington Museum of Art, affording her time to take pictures, dig into archives, and conduct interviews all around Texas. The resulting photos and stories were exhibited at the museum, and then Schultz expanded on the writing, creating her first book, Mumentous, which Kirkus Reviews describes as “a tale rooted in a particularly Texan love of maximalism, but one that also tells a larger story of the human need for ritual and pageantry.”

In the book, Schultz blends photos with her personable, energetic writing. It perfectly captures her infectious surprise, curiosity, and delight for the tradition as she recounts meeting different people while hunting better and better mums. In one memorable interview, Schultz is tickled to find a high school couple with a girl proudly wearing a mum larger than her entire body:

“I attempted to direct my questions to both of them, but it took only a minute for me to understand that the real relationship, at least today, was between the girl and her mum.…Her white and silver mum incorporated at least thirty flowers. It protruded from her body at least ten inches and hung like an armor breastplate from her delicate neck.…The girl-to-mum ratio was hypnotic, and yet I felt compelled to look at her face. Maybe it was the memory of my mother’s voice telling me never to stare. Maybe it was just a matter of not knowing where to begin to look.”

Throughout the book, Schultz mines the mums for all the amusement they can provide, but without making fun of the tradition. Early on, she identifies the mums as something positive, a form of self-expression, and even a more meaningful metaphor. “What I heard about mums reminds me of somebody talking about quinceañeras or bat mitzvahs,” Schultz says. “It’s a rite of passage. It means something.…It’s not just a thing a boy gives you.”

Having studied business and marketing in college, Schultz was drawn to investigate mums economically. “Maybe that’s a different point of view than other artists might take,” Schultz says, but the price of a professional mum (which can be upwards of a thousand dollars) multiplied by the number of Texas high schools made her realize the business of mums was as big as the mums themselves.

Schultz found mum-makers so economically influential that they could dictate what was manufactured in China. (Rose gold was big in Texas that year.) She found organizations offering mum support: training seminars, entrepreneurship courses, budgeting classes, even trade-secret sharing. What surprised and delighted her was that all this activity was accomplished almost entirely by women; she realized there were thousands upon thousands of women making mums, using the money to pay for college or their homes. “And they weren’t competing with each other,” Schultz specifies. “They were helping each other.”

Schultz says that looking at things through her camera is usually when they become clear to her, so it was while shooting these women across Texas that the important generational and family components around mums came into focus. “There was this sort of universalness about it,” Schultz says. “There’s a…timelessness about women getting around a table and crafting together. It feels like something women have been doing together for a really long time.”

Schultz acknowledges that mums feel out of reach for many students who lack the time, money, or family support that others have—which is driving the very real “anti-mum” sentiment that she discusses in the book. But through her travels she found many contemporary teens who are putting their twist on the tradition. “What is so cool about this tradition now is that many students are realizing, ‘I don’t need a boy to have a mum,’” Schultz says, citing all the different boys, same-sex couples, or single girls without a lot of money who have decided to take part by creating more modern interpretations of the classic oversize mum.

Schultz saw this in particular in one of her personal favorites: a pared-down mum the size of a golf ball and worn as a ring. “That girl was kind of parodying the tradition,” Schultz admits, but to her, this example speaks to how creatively kids can use mums to feel like they are included. “Everything on the football field is something you have to try out for and be accepted to do,” Schultz says. “But anybody can have a mum.”

Since the release of Mumentous, the Texas Historical Commission has adapted Schultz’s photography and storytelling into a traveling cultural heritage exhibit that will be displayed around the state and hopefully encourage more people to consider what’s really going on with all that ribbon and all those baubles.

For Schultz, the meaning behind mums, and what makes them such a fascinating subject, is that they are so big because they are stuffed with the items that make each Texas teen an individual. “Do you remember the things you put on your wall as a kid?” Schultz asks. “It’s not just homecoming. A mum is a collectible. It’s a memento.…And it’s all the days leading up to that moment you eventually decide you’ve outgrown it and you put it away in the closet. That’s meaningful.”

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris, France.
Story was originally published in Kirkus Reviews on July 21, 2024.