Hierosgamos: From Requiem to Revival

October 16 – 30, 2023
Main Library, L2
Gallery Hours
Monday – Thursday, 5-9 pm
Saturday, 9-5
Sunday, 1-5

When artist Connie 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 Connie’s recent donation of her partner, 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.  Connie’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 Bill Noble’s papers and some of Connie’s photographs for Hierosgamos are now available at the Library’s Archives and Special Collections. 

Join us for an opening reception and gallery talk on Wednesday October 18 at 6:30 pm.

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.

Scout Cambridge Profiles Cambridge Documentary Photographer Olive Pierce

Cambridge City Council Hearing at Rindge Tech auditorium on the death of Larry Largey, young people from the Roosevelt Towers area, October 1972, copyright Olive Pierce.

Thank you to Scout Cambridge for their recent article, From Rent Control to Riot Squads: The Photographs of Olive Pierce, profiling the amazing work of documentary photographer Olive Pierce as well as the work we do in the Cambridge Room.

Radical Newsletters: An Exhibition

The inaugural issue of the Hard Times Bulletin, describing the anger felt by the death of teenager Larry Largey  while in police custody from the collection of the Cambridge Newsletters and Newspapers (052).

Exhibition Location: 2nd Floor of the Main Library

Cambridge has a history of activism, especially during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s when political debates and protest around police brutality, racism, and rent control took center stage.

In later decades, activism turned towards issues of homelessness and scientific testing, although rent control continued to occupy Cambridge’s political scene.

This exhibition shows examples of newsletters that grew out of Cambridge activism. From the inaugural issue of Spare Change News, a newspaper created by the homeless, to the anti-rent control publication, Eagle’s Eye, these newsletters capture the zeitgeist of the city.

An anti-rent control newsletter from the early 1990s.

 

The inaugural issue of Spare Change.

 

A City in Protest: Olive Pierce’s Cambridge City Council Portraits, 1970-1972

Rent Control Hearing, 1971, copyright Olive Pierce.

A City in Protest:  Olive Pierce’s Cambridge City Hall Portraits, 1970-1972

Exhibition Location: L2 during Special Events and 2nd Floor of the Main Library

This exhibition includes black and white silver prints of Cambridge City Council meetings Pierce took 45 years ago, capturing clashes between politicians and the people. Pierce recently donated this series along with several other important works, spanning her 40-year career as a documentary photographer to the Cambridge Room, the Library’s Archives and Special Collections.

Pierce graduated from Vassar College in 1945. In 1948, she traveled as a secretary to a U.N. Medical Mission to Poland where she began taking pictures. The experience of photographing war-torn Warsaw and Auschwitz inspired Pierce’s interest in photography.

With Berenice Abbott and Paul Caponigro as her teachers, Pierce embarked on a professional career as a photographer.   In 1965, she received a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and began to focus on documentary work with the city of Cambridge as her subject.

She spent the next decade as a freelance photographer, working for the Cambridge Chronicle, while embarking on two major documentary projects: photographing the turbulent Cambridge City Council meetings (1970-1972) and the children of the Jefferson Park Public Housing Project in North Cambridge (1973-1975).

In 1986, Pierce published No Easy Roses: A Look at the Lives of City Teenagers, featuring pictures she took during her tenure as a photography teacher at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.   In 1991, Pierce received another Bunting Fellowship to work on Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community (1996). Nine years later, 73 year-old Pierce traveled illegally to Iraq under the auspices of Voices in the Wilderness to photograph children. In 2001, she received the City of Cambridge’s Peace and Justice Award.

Pierce’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Portland Museum of Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Farnsworth Art Museum.

The Best Books about Cambridge You’ve Never Read

On left:  The Secret of Question Nine:  How We Lost Rent Control by Bill Cunningham, 1996.  On right:  Don Leslie, world renowned sword swallower and native Cantabrigian.

The Best Books About Cambridge That You’ve Never Read

The Cambridge Room, the Library’s Archives and Special Collections, has a vast collection of books on every subject imaginable about Cambridge, Massachusetts.  We’ve selected a few of our favorites – featuring bohemians, activists, hippies, teetotalers, revelers, restaurateurs, writers, design gurus, and urban planners.

With titles like, Peaking through the hole of a Bagel, Lewd, and Baby Let me Follow you Down  – what’s not to love.  These books are rare gems – one of a kind – in our collection and touch on the vast and unusual history of Cambridge.  Stop by the Cambridge Room on the second floor for more recommendations.

Exhibition Location: The Sakey Room on the first floor of the original Library building.