Category Archives: Collections

Posts about our collections.

“Artists in the Archive” exhibition now on view in the Grossmann Gallery

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Image of artwork by Margaret Hart, featuring materials pulled from the Thompson Island Farm and Trade School collection at UMass Boston. Includes a collage of text beneath a drawing of Thompson Island, a photograph of a building, and outlines of students.

Thompson Island Boys School, Margaret Hart, from the Scrapbook of Thompson Island Farm and Trade School 1921-1928, inkjet prints and watercolor on rag paper collage, 2024. 

Artists in the Archive, an exhibition opening this week in the Grossmann Gallery on the fifth floor of the Healey Library, features original work by members of the Endpoint Collective–Deborah Carruthers, Gabriel Deerman, Margaret Hart, and Mark Roth–as well as multi-disciplinary and Indigenous artist Erin Genia. All artists worked directly with materials from the University Archives and Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston to address issues of climate change and social justice in this region.

The exhibition is curated by Carol Scollans, Professor of Art and Art History at UMass Boston, and will be on display through January 17, 2025. A reception will be held on Friday, October 25, 2024, from 4:00-5:30 p.m. Members of the university community and the general public are welcome to attend.

The Endpoint Collective is a group of research-based artists from around the world who have found value in challenging traditional subjects and processes in their artmaking practices. One of the central questions they posit is the transition toward a posthuman existence exacerbated by the looming environmental issues we face. Their work explores non-hierarchical positioning of human and non-human beings (such as animals, fauna, and the earth). By means of traditional and inventive research, group discussions, and the creation of artworks, the collective has found a distinct vocabulary for their originative endeavors. Through exhibitions of their shared work, the collective invites the public into a conversation about these thought-provoking concepts as well.

Through their respective works, each of the five artists investigates issues of connection, replication, and structure via process-based mechanisms including printmaking, collage, photomontage, painting, and textiles. The works present a fascinating investigation into these complex issues with multi-layered and process-centered resources while boldly engaging the viewer through rich imagery and provocative methodological approaches.

Image of artwork by Gabriel Deerman showing various images of printing blocks and blue lines.

Looking for Light Under the Ground (diptych), Gabriel Deerman, block printing ink on paper, 2024.  

Gabriel Deerman is a painter, printmaker, and draftsman exploring figurative and landscape based art.  Working from observation, his approach addresses globalization and climate change triggered by scientific and cultural human relationships to time and place. His distinctive approach questions traditional aesthetic experiences of the natural world as a way to bridge the human and nature divide.

Image of artwork by Margaret Hart showing a collage that includes a yellow jewel beetle, outlines of islands in the Boston Harbor, and text.

Boston Harbor Islands Jewel Beetle, Margaret Hart, inkjet print on rag paper collage, 2024.

Margaret Hart is a mixed media artist, using principally photography and collage as a way to investigate climate change, gender, technology, and personal narratives. Her work examines the philosophical potential of a post-human era questioning what the world is and what it could look like where humans are no longer the central characters of existence.

Photograph of various round artwork pieces by Deborah Carruthers hanging on a wall.

Re-Viewed, Deborah Carruthers, Circular birch panels, acrylic paint, 2024.

A Montreal native Deborah Carruthers is an interarts painter, installation artist, and composer who collaborates with scientists and activists around the world exploring environmental issues; particularly the distress caused by the lived experience of environmental change and human intervention called “solastalgia.”

Photograph of artwork by Erin Genia on a wall. Includes a face or facemask with various text statements in blue starts.

Call to Consciousness 3 Erin Genia, Ceramic, MDF board, acrylic paint beads, mixed media, 2024. 

Erin Genia, Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer specializing in Native American and Indigenous people’s arts and culture. Her work is focused on amplifying the presence of Indigenous peoples and seeks to invoke an evolution of thought and practice aligned with the natural world and the potential of humanity.

Group Gather Around Group after “Group Gathers Around Fir Tree” photograph from the Boston Urban Gardeners Collection, Mark Roth, acrylic on canvas, 2024.  

Painter and curator Mark Roth is based in New York and studies human behavior from a biological perspective. Using formal painting practices, Roth aspires to discover stories resonant to the Anthropocene or the current geological age during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

This exhibition is held in conjunction with the Thinking About Climate Change: Art, Science, and Imagination in the 21st Century conference which will be held in the UMass Boston Campus Center Ballroom on October 25-26, 2024.

 

The Grossmann Gallery is open during Healey Library hours.

University Archives and Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston collects materials related to the university’s history, as well as materials that reflect the institution’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, and local history related to neighboring communities. University Archives and Special Collections welcomes inquiries from individuals, organizations, and businesses interested in donating materials of an archival nature that that fit within our collecting policy. These include manuscripts, documents, organizational archives, collections of photographs, unique publications, and audio and video media. For more information about donating to University Archives and Special Collections, click here or email library.archives@umb.edu.

History Through the Foresters’ Eyes

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Guest author: Susan Steele, Director of TIARA’s Foresters Project

An appropriate story for St. Patrick’s Day? How about one involving a fraternal life insurance society founded by a group of Irish immigrants, an Irish genealogy group, and a university based in a state with one of the highest percentages of people claiming Irish ancestry!

Partners in Progress: It’s Not Just the Numbers
No, it’s not just the numbers… although they are impressive: 100 years of history, 80,000 records, 37,000 index entries, seventy volunteers, and thousands of hours in a twenty-year project involving three organizations!

Let’s Start with the Organizations
The Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters (now known as the Catholic Association of Foresters) was founded in 1879 as a fraternal organization that provided life insurance for its members. The organization also offered social and religious activities. In 2004, prompted by a decision to move to smaller headquarters, the Catholic Association of Foresters contemplated sending one hundred years of records to the shredder.

Saved from the Shredder
In 2003, TIARA (The Irish Ancestral Research Association) became aware of the historical and genealogical value of the Foresters mortuary records (life insurance policies). The following year, TIARA negotiated an agreement to take custody of the records. Hundreds of boxes were moved, and TIARA began a seven-year project of foldering, indexing, and arranging for the scanning of more than 20,000 mortuary records.

The Records Find a New Home
TIARA occupied basement-level office space and had several close calls with water leaks. Finding a permanent home for the Foresters records was a project goal. In 2011 this goal was achieved when the records were placed in the University Archives and Special Collections department in UMass Boston’s Healey Library. TIARA was honored for its preservation work with the first Joseph P. Healey Library Community Archives Award.

Partners in Progress
The award also recognized a growing partnership. When the records moved to University Archives and Special Collections, TIARA’s Foresters Project volunteers accompanied them. Volunteers continued to index the collection. Later, the development of a website data entry program enabled volunteers to work offsite. The year 2023 marks the twentieth anniversary of TIARA’s Foresters Project! Twelve of those years have been spent in a mutually beneficial relationship with UMass Boston.

From the Numbers to the Stories
What kept the project going for twenty years? It’s the stories contained in the records. In 2003, TIARA volunteers could open a mortuary record envelope and learn information about a great grandparent’s life.

James Lennon’s mortuary record envelope

In papers signed by an ancestor they could find a physical description, occupation, place of birth, local address, and the name of a friend. These envelopes containing life insurance applications also included correspondence, death certificates, and beneficiary information with names and ages of additional family members. In the years that TIARA held the records, volunteers answered requests for copies of more than 600 records. An early request introduced us to history broader than family knowledge.

Local Legend Becomes Reality
James Lennon’s cause of death was “by the bursting of a molasses tank.” Could this be the famous incident in the North End of Boston? James Lennon’s application page was filled with family history information but gave no hint of what was to come.

James Lennon’s Foresters membership application

A City of Boston death certificate included in the mortuary record, along with a search for newspaper articles, verified our conjecture. James’ multiple injuries were caused by the bursting of the molasses tank in the North End on January 15, 1919. Sorting by that death date, we found four more Foresters who died in the huge wave of molasses. Each of their stories lent more details to our knowledge of the incident.

City of Boston death certificate listing James Lennon’s cause of death as “mult[iple] injuries caused by the bursting of a molasses tank”

There will be future blog posts covering family history and a broad range of historical events contained in the Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters collection. Learn more about TIARA’s Foresters Project or search the Foresters Records Index. Contact library.archives@umb.edu to request access to the Foresters records.

A final St. Patrick’s Day fact: if you enter “Ireland” in the “Presumed Country of Birth” category in the search form and leave the rest of the form blank, you will see more than 11,000 results. And those results just cover Foresters deaths through 1935!

Melissa Shook: Inside and Out – Photographs on display in the University Hall and Grossmann galleries

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Melissa Shook: Inside and Out, a two-part exhibition in the University Hall Gallery and in the Grossmann Gallery on the fifth floor of the Healey Library, brings together photographs, video works, objects, and ephemera spanning six decades to honor the life’s work of artist, educator, and activist Melissa Shook (1939-2020). The exhibition is co-curated by Senior Lecturer II in Art History Carol G.J. Scollans and University Hall Gallery Director Samuel Toabe and will be on view from September 6 through October 29, 2022.

Woman stands in front of a mirror holding a camera, taking a picture of herself
Self-portrait, Melissa Shook, circa 1970s

Best known for her self-portraits and documentary-style photography representing and humanizing members of marginalized communities – including immigrants, queer people, elderly people, and people experiencing houselessness – Shook’s practice expanded throughout her career to include writing, book making, drawing, sculpture, video art, and social practice art through direct action and mutual aid projects. Shook joined UMass Boston in 1979, where she taught photography in the Art and Art History Department for thirty-one years, leaving an indelible mark on the department’s pedagogy as well as generations of students. A catalog with images of Melissa’s photographs will accompany the exhibition, including an introduction by Samuel Toabe, a contextual essay by Carol G.J. Scollans, and texts by Professor of Art Margaret Hart and Melissa’s daughter Krissy Shook. The University Hall Gallery presents the personal side of Shook’s practice, photographing and writing about her own life, as well as sculptural works and video experiments. Healey Library’s Grossmann Gallery features a large selection of her series -Streets are for Nobody, along with archival materials reproduced from the library’s collection of Melissa’s papers, as well as handmade books, sculptural objects, and a collection of her film and pinhole cameras. 

A public reception will be held on Saturday, September 17, 2022, from 2:00-4:00 p.m., starting in the University Hall Gallery.

The establishment of the Melissa Shook Documentary Photography Award in honor of the artist coincides with the exhibition. This fund will provide an annual prize to one or more UMass Boston students or graduating seniors who demonstrate exceptional skill or promise in photography, with a preference for documentary photography skills. The award will be presented this year for the first time to Chloe Tomasetta whose photographic work in 2021 documented busy street scenes in Boston’s historic Haymarket district during the height of the pandemic. 

The exhibition and catalog are supported by the Paul Hayes Tucker Fund as well as a generous gift by Caleb Stewart and Richard Snow. The Melissa Shook Documentary Photography Award is made possible with a generous gift by Nancy and Wendell Lutz. To contribute to the Melissa Shook Documentary Photography Award, please donate via this link.

For more information, please email UHGallery@umb.edu.

Melissa Shook donated her papers to University Archives and Special Collections in the Healey Library at UMass Boston. The collection contains files kept by Shook and includes correspondence, manuscripts, notes, interviews, research materials, workshop catalogs, show announcements, archival photographic prints, slides, hard drives, MiniDV tapes, DVDs, CDs, a VHS tape, and a selection of framed photographs and text from Shook’s 1994 publication Streets are for Nobody. Additional archival collections related to Shook include University of Massachusetts Boston, Art Department student photographs of the Healey Library, 1982-1984 and a collection of photographs taken by Shook for the Writers’ Workshop hosted by the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences.

For more information about these collections, please email library.archives@umb.edu.

In the Archives: Preserving Memory through Oral Histories

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Author: Jack Ott, Archives Assistant and graduate student in the American Studies MA Program at UMass Boston

Oral histories and recollections can provide priceless and often otherwise transitory narratives about the politics and emotional labor invested in belonging to a community. Organizations such as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Cumann na Gaeilge i mBoston (The Irish Language Society of Boston), and The South End Seniors recognize and celebrate the importance of personal interaction while conducting historical research, and UMass Boston is proud to include oral history projects sponsored by these groups, as well as many others, in its digital archives.

UMass Boston’s University Archives and Special Collection is fortunate to hold a range of oral history projects and collections, and a full list and brief descriptions of each collection can be found here. Through video and audio interviews, as well as written transcripts, researchers can explore personal histories shared by members of the UMass Boston community, the greater Boston community, and beyond. In these personal histories, we can learn not only about the Cape Verdean community in Roxbury and North Dorchester in the post WWII years from the Neighbor Voices project, for example, but also about how that past has been internalized, remembered, and shared with future generations.

Adalberto Teixeira wearing a cap and jacket with buildings in the background
Adalberto Teixeira, November 21, 2016. Teixeira was born in Fogo, Cape Verde and moved to Roxbury in 1976 where he got a job as a welder at the Quincy shipyard and as a teaching aide at the Madison Park Public School before becoming a community organizer and constituent services worker for the city.

From humorous anecdotes such as Inishbarra, Ireland native Johnny Chóilín Choilmín’s first taste of a hot dog on his 1955 transatlantic voyage to America (he was expecting a breakfast sausage…and was unimpressed), to the resilience and ingenuity of Alice Inamoto Takemoto crafting homemade buttons from peach pits as a 15-year-old interned in the Santa Anita assembly center in 1942, the oral histories in this collection transform historical records into vivid and deeply personal narratives. In so doing, oral histories testify to the epistemological value of reflection and challenge dominant standards of who controls how history is recorded and preserved. State records may tell us how many Japanese Americans were relocated to assembly centers and then moved on to internment camps, but oral histories such as Alice Inamoto Takemoto’s ensure that memories like lying in an army cot as it sinks into freshly poured tar melting in the California summer heat are not lost to posterity.

Alice Setsuko Inamoto Takemoto sitting at a piano, smiling with her hands folded in her lap
Alice Setsuko Inamoto Takemoto, June 24, 2011. Takemoto was born in Garden Grove, California. A lifelong musician, she attended Oberlin College on a full scholarship after being released from the Jerome interment camp.

In the Archives: Education on Thompson Island

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Author: Jack Ott, Archives Assistant and graduate student in the American Studies MA Program at UMass Boston

A large group of young male students playing band instruments, including a bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, a trombone, a trumpet, French horns, tubas, and others. A conductor raising his arm stands in front of the group on the right.
Farm School Band by John Wipple, 1862. Thompson Island hosted the first student band in the country.

UMass Boston’s Columbia Point campus may only extend as far into the Boston Harbor as our lovely Harborwalk, but less than a mile out to sea, across the Squantum Channel, lies Thompson Island, the insular home of a fascinating chapter in Boston’s agricultural and educational history. Continuously housing charitable, vocational, or educational institutions, Thompson Island has been an offshore repository for both Boston’s disadvantaged youth and its aspiring social elite. Since 1814, the island has been home to the Boston Asylum for Indigent Boys (1814-1832), the Boston Farm School (1832-1835), the Boston Asylum and Farm School (1835-1907), the Farm and Trades School (1907-1955), Thompson’s Academy (1955-1975), Thompson Island Education Center (1975-1986), and Thompson Island Outward Bound Education Center (1986 to the present). The University Archives and Special Collections department holds the records of these institutions and our Thompson Island collection chronicles this history, with the bulk of our archival materials focusing on the years 1814 through 1977.

A group of male students stands together. Some are holding gardening hoes with long wooden handles.
Students of the Boston Asylum and Farm School ready for farm chores. Date unknown, circa 1900.

The digital collection contains nearly 150 photographs of students and faculty members of the various school as well as student scrapbooks, student records, school newspapers, and correspondences between legal guardians and administrators. For further research, please take advantage of the collection’s finding aid. Anyone interested in accessing the physical collection should email library.archives@umb.edu.

In the early years of the Boston Asylum for Indigent Boys (BAIB), most of the boys who arrived on Thompson Island were between the ages of 3 and 12. As the years progressed, subsequent institutions placed a greater emphasis on education and kept boys into their teenage years, yet as in the days of the BAIB, many were still the sons of widows who were unable to financially support their children. Separated from their families and physically isolated on the small island, these boys were seen as in need of social reform and were the subject of what historian Trisha Posey describes as a rigorous “moral cultivation.”[1] Speaking specifically about the Boston Asylum and Farm School (BAFS), Posey explains that ideologically, the school idolized an agrarian past. Yet, as Posey notes, the BAFS was largely unsuccessful in shaping most of its students in their image; of the 500 boys who entered the school between 1833 and 1849, only 136 graduated to become farmers or apprentice tradespeople, the majority had run away (277), died (29), or gone to sea (9).[2]

Two photographs on the page of a scrapbook. The top photograph shows a person standing in front of a small airplane. The lower photograph is a portrait of a young man in front of a brick wall with "Bob [illegible]" written in pencil underneath.
A page from a student scrapbook displaying a shock of uncontrolled hair mirroring the potential freedom and defiance symbolized by the advent of air travel. Date unknown, circa 1921-1928. 

The adolescence chafing against the yoke of discipline and previous generations’ sensibilities can be traced directly in the collection. Photographs of early airplanes or mothers back home preserved in scrapbooks and student newspaper articles about baseball or Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Edmundson’s race to the South Pole offer glimpses into the youthful masculinity performed by these students physically removed from their hometowns. Thus, this collection contains both the evidence of a ruling class’s evolving pedagogical platforms of reform, as well as the excitement and bravado felt by young men in a contained homosocial space coming of age in a new, industrial world.

A young man stands on a dirt road facing a field with wire fencing at its fore edge. He is wearing a suit and dress shoes.
A student of the Farm and Trades School stands next to a wire fence on Thompson Island in formal attire while facing the camera, 1936.

References

Posey, Trisha. “‘Little Tanned Agriculturalists’: The Boston Asylum and Farm School for Indigent Boys.” Massachusetts Historical Review 16 (2014): 49–72.

[1] Trisha Posey, “‘Little Tanned Agriculturalists’: The Boston Asylum and Farm School for Indigent Boys,” Massachusetts Historical Review 16 (2014): 64.

[2] Ibid, 60.