Artist Talk: Hierosgamos: From Requiem to Revival
Wednesday October 18, 2023
6:30 pm
Main Library, Lecture Hall
REGISTER HERE
Join us for a reception and gallery talk by Constantia Thibaut as she discusses her latest artwork, Hierosgamos: From Requiem to Reunion.
When Thibaut’s partner, Bill, died in 2018 after a long illness, she created a series of portraits that represent his struggle with his fatal illness during the last months of his life when he was in hospice. Thibaut based these portraits on the many hundreds of photographs she took of Bill with her cell phone and digital camera.
“I have been through a profound experience as a witness to my partner Bill’s illness and death, and these artworks are my visual testimony,” writes Thibaut. At the hospital, where Bill spent the last months of his life, a great drama unfolded. I attempted to catch fleeting images of it with my camera. Bill died with tremendous gravitas, seeming to transcend the condition of a helpless victim of a dread and fatal disease. It was as if I, in witnessing this event, as a mere conduit, a mere medium, were transported to another and a greater, though mysterious, dimension of existence. It was a humbling experience. I wondered at how it could be at once so sorrowful and at the same time so beautiful.”
This exhibit complements Thibaut’s recent donation of Bill Noble’s papers. Noble was a staunch advocate for rent control and worked tirelessly on behalf of Cambridge tenants in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a founding member of the Cambridge Tenants Union (CTU) and its predecessor, the Cambridge Rent Control Coalition (CRCC) and was an active opponent of the expansion of Harvard, MIT and other large Cambridge institutions into city neighborhoods. Thibaut’s tribute to Bill in this exhibition shows the deeply personal side of such a public figure so well known in Cambridge activist circles. Both Noble’s papers and some of Thibaut’s photographs for Hierosgamos are now available at the Library’s Archives and Special Collections.
Connie Thibaut is a graphics and mixed-media artist who studied painting for five years at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where she was exposed to the Surrealist painters whose work became a strong inspiration. Later, at Massachusetts College of Art, where she graduated with a BFA and a MSAE (Master’s of Science in Art Education), she learned about the Surrealist women painters and created a Surrealist reinterpretation of an Old French romance for her thesis show. She has studied with and been influenced by Boston area artists such as the late Conger Metcalf (Neo-Romanticism) and more recently Adria Arch (Abstract Expressionism). Although she has retired from teaching, she continues to create art that is informed by her life experiences and which reinterprets the traditions of the Renaissance, Fantastic Art, and Expressionism.
The Cambridge Room 