The Denim Day display is currently on view in the Grossmann Gallery on the fifth floor of the Healey Library. This display features a collection of denim jeans that serve as an example of what survivors were wearing when they were sexually assaulted. The Denim Day campaign is an opportunity for survivors of sexual assault to raise awareness of rape myths and rape culture, where victims are often blamed for what they were wearing. The stories in the display cases were sourced from the Susan B. Anthony Project’s What Were You Wearing? exhibit. The Denim Day display is featured as part of a series of campus events for Sexual Assault Awareness Month hosted by UMass Boston’s Title IX Office for Students. For more information, email Brikitta O. Hairston, Title IX and Civil Rights Investigator for Students, at brikitta.hairston@umb.edu. The display will be on view through May 31, 2025.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Author: Sabrina Valentino, Archives Assistant and graduate student in the Public History MA Program, UMass Boston
Boston’s Little Syria, an exhibition currently on view in the Grossmann Gallery on the fifth floor of the Healey Library, takes viewers on a journey through Boston’s little-known first Arab neighborhood. Located in what is now Chinatown and the South End, Little Syria became home to immigrants fleeing blight and violence in Ottoman-controlled Syria and Mount Lebanon. The exhibition will be open through May 31, 2024.
The Boston’s Little Syria exhibition uses property maps, photographs, interviews, and memoirs of Syrian and Lebanese Americans who lived in this neighborhood to build a map of the creation and eventual migration of Little Syria, blending the history of the modern Middle East and Boston’s urban history. The items on display not only tell individual stories of the lives of immigrants, but also shed light on a rich cultural center in Boston that has been pushed aside and largely forgotten.
In the 1880s, immigrants from Ottoman-controlled Greater Syria chose to leave their homes to escape war, famine, and the collapse of the silk industry, leading many to build new homes in Massachusetts. Starting in what is now Ping On Alley, the community grew and created a thriving life for themselves, reaching 40,000 people expanding south down Shawmut Avenue by the 1930s. However, despite the community’s growth and success, the residents of Little Syria faced hardships such as being denied citizenship status, and eventually began to relocate due to the Boston Redevelopment Authority uprooting urban blocks.
Syrians sitting on a front step on Hudson Street, black and white photograph, photographer unknown, 1909. Courtesy of the Trustees of Boston Public Library.
The exhibition originated from a larger project that began with walking tours in 2022, and eventually grew to include an interactive digital map and a bilingual article published in the online journal Al-Jumhuriya as well as exhibitions at both MIT’s Rotch Library (2022-2023) and the Massachusetts Historical Society (2023).
The exhibition is curated by Lydia Harrington and Chloe Bordewich. Lydia Harrington received her PhD in Art and Architectural History from Boston University in 2022 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT in 2022-2023. She is currently the Senior Curator at The Syria Museum, which is one of the sponsors of this exhibition. Chloe Bordewich is a postdoctoral fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute and Critical Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Toronto and received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2022.
Boston’s Little Syria is sponsored by the Syrian American Council, the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, and the University of Massachusetts Boston.
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.
Connecting Ties: A Transatlantic Friendship and the Northern Ireland Peace Process, an exhibition opening next week in the Grossmann Gallery on the fifth floor of the Healey Library, illustrates through textile language the human dimension to the relationship between the United States, Ireland, and the Northern Ireland peace process.
A collage featuring three arpilleras at the core of this exhibition: Pat Hume, Tip O’Neill, and John Hume, Peacemaker. (Design and photo: Leisa Duffy, Copyright Conflict Textiles)
The exhibition is co-curated by Conflict Textiles, a unique transnational collection of textiles focused on conflict and human rights abuses, in partnership with John Hume & Thomas P. O’Neill Chair in Peace, INCORE, Ulster University, and the Joseph P. Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston. It will be on view from November 17, 2023 through May 2024. Prior to the exhibition opening, the Tip O’Neill textile will be unveiled at the Golden Bridges 2023: Conference Luncheon, where John Hume, Peacemaker and Pat Hume will also be displayed.
The Northern Ireland Conflict (“The Troubles,” 1969-1994), which focused on the division of the island of Ireland, left more than 3,600 people dead, many more injured, and impacted all sectors of society. From the mid-1970s, key individuals from the United States, including Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and Massachusetts Congressman Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, were involved in discussions and negotiations during the peace process, culminating in the Good Friday Agreement signed in April 1998. In supporting peace in Northern Ireland, Tip O’Neill worked closely with John Hume, the Nobel Peace Prize winner from Northern Ireland. This unique friendship and the contribution of John Hume’s wife Pat are illustrated in the exhibition.
Tip O’Neill, by Lisa Raye Garlock, 2023. Recycled, hand-printed, and hand-dyed fabrics (cotton, linen, silk, wool), Irish linen, felt, and neckties (provided by the O’Neill family), Conflict Textiles collection. (Photo: Lisa Raye Garlock)
The exhibition showcases three specially commissioned textiles highlighting the interconnections and work of these essential people in the peace process. The three textiles entitled Tip O’Neill, Pat Hume, and John Hume, Peacemaker are accompanied by several Northern Ireland textiles depicting the conflict and search for peace in the late twentieth century. Four of these pieces, on loan from Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council Museum Collection, were created in workshops in Northern Ireland in 2012 and 2013, during which two Northern Ireland communities explored the legacy of the conflict through textile language.
These textiles and many others on display draw their inspiration from early Chilean arpilleras, which are appliquéd picture textiles, handsewn from scraps of fabric onto hessian or burlap. Three Chilean arpilleras from the 1980s and 1990s narrate ordinary peoples’ experiences of the oppressive seventeen-year-long Pinochet dictatorship, which seized power in September 1973. An arpillera from neighboring Argentina articulates the human rights violations of the Videla regime (1976-1983) and the enduring, courageous protests by the Abuelas (Grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo.
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.
Elena del Rivero (Spanish, b. 1949) Letter from Home (Suffrage), 2019 Nylon 3.8 x 5.2 ft (117 x 150 cm) Installation view, Grossmann Gallery, Healey Library, UMass Boston. Copyright Elena del Rivero. Photograph by Jon Bakos.
Since the beginning of the semester, one of Elena del Rivero’s monstrous dishtowels, titled Letter from Home (Suffrage), has been on display in the Grossmann Gallery of the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston. Visible from the fourth and fifth floors of the library, the flag-artwork is presented on campus as part of the Arts on the Point public art program, directed by University Hall Gallery Director Sam Toabe. Del Rivero’s flag is one of nineteen with an identical design (in a range of different sizes) that have been, are, or will be flying across the United States. The number of flags references the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which legislated women’s right to vote in 1920. Del Rivero recognizes the de facto shortcomings of the change in legislation and the ongoing issues of enfranchisement with the stained forms on her work.
In addition to referencing American politics, Letter from Home (Suffrage) plants a flag in aesthetic territory. The dishtowel-banner alludes to a longer history of geometric abstraction within modern art and architecture. The grid of Letter from Home (Suffrage) recalls the basic structure of the Brutalist architecture of the Healey Library where it is installed; indeed, by this redoubling, it prompts illuminating reflections on the host site. Curiously, the library’s architect Harry Weese links our Columbia Point campus to the infrastructure of the District of Columbia.
Weese designed many of the Metro stations in the nation’s capital. Even as the dishtowel shares the geometries of these institutional structures, it markedly contrasts with the cold, rigid rationalism they communicate. In contradistinction, del Rivero’s use of a more humbly scaled, besmirched matrix tacitly advocates for a distinct logic: she celebrates human use and interaction with the grid.
Furthermore, throughout the twentieth century many male artists, from Piet Mondrian to Max Bill to Jasper Johns, were heralded as “geniuses” for their employment of the grid as a central motif. By translating and transposing the form of a gridded dishtowel into the realm of (public) art, del Rivero underscores the fact that textiles used primarily by women–and considered to fall in the lower category of “craft”—formally anticipate “groundbreaking” innovations of the avant-garde. Her flag labors to wrest the grid from the hands of male modernists and suggest it is an emblem of fluidity instead. Equally, the stains on the flag recall the marks and techniques of modernist painters like Jackson Pollock, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Helen Frankenthaler, who infused their canvases with thinned-down paint. Thus, del Rivero’s project subtly asks us to revise the history of visual and material culture: Letter from Home (Suffrage) posits a reconsideration of gender binaries as well as hierarchies of cultural production between “art” and “craft.”
Beyond para-citing the grids of modern architecture and art, del Rivero’s dishtowel design also recalls the geometric bands and fields of actual flags. Most flags are condensers of a collective political or civic identity. Indicative of the weight of flags as symbols, we even pledge allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. Hence, in some sense, del Rivero’s banners unite the 19 diverse locations where they have been shown in a constellation of feminist politics. They ask us to dream of a yet-to-fully-exist (and perhaps always utopian) feminist political polity—as well as a corresponding imagined community who would rally around its flag. Nevertheless, raising a feminine-coded banner implicitly issues real calls to action too. Letter from Home (Suffrage) can be read as a reminder that engagement in our domestic politics is an urgent matter—a fact that increasingly rings true following the June 24, 2022, overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973).
Thus, the artwork calls attention to our nation’s broader aesthetic and political context as well as the specific site where it hangs, prompting curious audiences to consider United States history and investigate UMass Boston’s histories, herstories, and their stories.
University Archives and Special Collections houses construction photographs of Healey Library and the Columbia Point campus. Substantial holdings documenting feminist politics in Boston and Massachusetts include:
