Collecting area: Arts & literature

The family of Roxana Kingsbury Gould (nee Weed) farmed the rocky soils of western New England during the late nineteenth century. Roxana’s first husband Ambrose died of dysentery shortly after the Civil War, leaving her to care for their two infant sons, and after marrying her second husband, Lyman Gould, she relocated from southwestern Vermont to Cooleyville and then (ten years later) to Shelburne, Massachusetts. The Goulds added a third son to their family in 1869.

A rich collection of letters and photographs recording the history of the Kingsbury-Gould families of Shelburne, Massachusetts. The bulk of the letters are addressed to Roxana Kingsbury Gould, the strong-willed matriarch at the center of the family, and to her granddaughter, May Kingsbury Phillips, the family’s first historian. In addition to documenting the complicated dynamics of a close-knit family, this collection is a rich source for the study of local history, rural New England, and the social and cultural practices at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

A landscape painter and photographer, Alonzo “Lon” Klaw was born in 1885 to Antoinette Morris and Marc Klaw, the attorney, theatrical impresario, and partner in the powerful Broadway production partnership of Klaw and Erlanger. Lon and his wife Alma (Ash) lived on a farm, Almalon, near Carmel, New York, but spent large parts of each year at their home in Santa Barbara, California, traveling frequently to Europe, particularly after his father’s retirement in 1927.

The several hundred photographic prints from Lon Klaw reflect his interests in landscape and travel and the influence on his work of the Photo Secession on his aesthetic. Approximately half of the collection consists of American views, primarily from southern California, depicting bucolic scenery, grazing cattle, and trees, but there are occasional portraits and views of the built environment in California and street scenes from New York. Taken during a European trip in 1929 or 1930, the remainder of the collection includes images of Cannes and Paris. Klaw typically printed each image several times to produce different visual effects.

A feminist, filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, writer, and New Yorker, Susan Kleckner helped to define the Feminist Art Movement. Born in 1941, Kleckner was instrumental in uniting Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) with Feminists in the Arts in 1969, and in 1970 she became a founder of the Women’s Interart Center, which still fosters women artists in the performing, visual, and media arts. A talented and prolific visual artist, she produced several important video documentaries during her career, beginning with Three Lives (made in collaboration with Kate Millet in 1970), which is considered the first all-women produced feature documentary. Her work often reflected a feminist commitment to the cause of peace: she participated in and photographed the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in England during the mid-1980s and in 1987, she curated a major year-long installation on Broadway called WindowPeace. A brilliant teacher, Kleckner was the first woman to teach photography at the Pratt Institute and she worked at the International Center for Photography in New York from 1982 until her death in July 2010.

A wide ranging and highly diverse collection, the Kleckner Papers document a life in art and activism. The diaries, letters, notes, and essays in the collection are augmented by hundreds of photographic prints and artwork in a variety of media.

An award-winning photojournalist, Janet Knott was one of the first woman to become a staff photographer at the Boston Globe. Over a 31-year career, she covered a broad range of topics, from local assignments to longer-form photo essays and international coverage, producing iconic images of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the late 1980s famine in the Sudan, and the violence accompanying the Haitian elections of 1987. She was only the third woman recognized with the Robert Capa Gold Medal and, among many other awards, won first place for spot news from the World Press Photography Foundation. After leaving the Globe in 2007, she became Chief of Staff for Boston City Councilor Salvatore La Mattina, representing East Boston and the first district.

The Knott Collection contains an array of letters, ephemera, and photographs documenting both her photographic and political careers. There is an extensive body of work from her years working as a photojournalist at the Boston Globe comprised of slides, negatives, prints, and contacts sheets.

The Mill River flood of 1874 was one of the great man-made disasters of late nineteenth century western Massachusetts. Following the collapse of an earthenwork dam on May 16 of that year, 600,000,000 gallons of water coursed through Williamsburgh, Skinnerville, and Leeds, destroying factories and homes, bridges and roads, and leaving 139 deaths in its wake.

The nineteen images in the Mill River Flood collection are a small sampling of a series of 110 stereographs taken by the Knowlton Brothers of Northampton to document the devastation caused by the flood of May 1874. The collection also includes one view taken by F. J. Moore of Westfield, who issued his own series of 21 stereographs, and one by an unidentified photographer.

"J.P. Konsevich, Truck driver," ca. 1934

J.P. Konsevich, almost certainly Joseph Peter Konsevich (born Oct 22, 1921 in Millers Falls, Mass.; death May 9, 1988 in Westfield, Mass.), was one of the over 99,500 men to join the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Massachusetts. The Emergency Conservation Work (March 31, 1933 – Jan. 1, 1942; renamed, Civilian Conservation Corps in 1937) was just one of the many relief programs established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to aid in the effort to curb rising unemployment and to lift the “spiritual” morale of the country. In Massachusetts the main work accomplished was in tree planting, firefighting, and tree and plant disease and insect control, although several recreational facilities were also built in the forests and parks. Konsevich served on one of the latter projects, as a member of the 116^th Company, stationed at Camp S-62 in Wendell State Forest.

This combination of two homemade photograph albums thoroughly documents the CCC 116th Company, and their camp in Wendell State Forest. Of the over 800 photographs, 518 are identified, with the majority being portraits of the men at camp facilities. The local landscape of concern to the company is also featured, including the Connecticut River, Erving, Greenfield, Northampton, Northfield, Turners Falls, and especially documentation of the aftermath of the flood of March and April, 1936. A small set of photographs additionally document Konsevich’s presence at the Chicago World’s Fair (Century of Progress Exposition of 1933).

The writer Zane Kotker was born Mary Zane Hickcox in Southbury, Connecticut, in 1934. After graduating from Middlebury College (1956), Kotker led a busy life working short stints in and out of Manhattan as a secretary, researcher, writer, teacher, and editor, collaborating on the side with a friend to publish a little magazine while earning a master’s degree in history from Columbia University. In 1965, she married a fellow writer, Norman Kotker, and while raising their two children, David (born 1967) and Ariel (1969), the couple began writing in earnest. An editor at Horizon Books, Norman used his weekends to write his first book, The Holy Land in the Time of Jesus (1967), following up with two novels, Miss Rhode Island (1978) and Learning About God (1988). A stay-at-home, free-lancing mother, Zane used her “free” time for writing as well, completing her first novel by taking advantage of a babysitter on Tuesday and Friday mornings, and going on to publish five other novels, numerous short stories, and a volume of poetry. Norman Kotker died in 1999 years after first being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Zane Kotker continues to write and publish; her novella Goodnight Ladies was released in 2016.

The records of a highly productive literary couple, the Zane and Norman Kotker Papers contain manuscript drafts, notes, research materials, correspondence, and reviews. Reflecting both the co-operation and the competition connecting married writers, the collection offers insight issues ranging from the financial challenges of supporting the writing careers of two novelists to the challenges of a woman attempting to define herself professionally during the early 1970s and the publishing scene in New York City in the 1970s through 1990s. The collection also include materials related to the founding of the Well Spouse Association–Zane was a founding member of the organization created to provide a support system for individuals caring for chronically ill and/or disabled spouses–including her nonfiction writing published under the name Maggie Strong.

The oldest active Polish folk dance ensemble in the United States, the Krakowiak Polish Dancers of Boston was formed in 1937 by a group of young ladies of Polish heritage interested in promoting Polish culture through the mediums of song and dance. The club opened its membership to young men in 1947, and was offcially incorporated in 1957. Since its formation, the dancers have appeared throughout the U.S., Canada, and Poland, and the group has received recognition and awards worldwide, including a special performance before his Holiness Pope John Paul II in 1983.

The collection includes programs for performances from the club’s earliest days, tickets, newspaper clippings featuring articles about the group, and copies of the organization’s constitution describing the group’s mission and membership.

Founded in August 1968 by Marshall Bloom and a group of colleagues from the Liberation News Service. From the outset, the Montague Farm Commune was a center of political and cultural (and countercultural) creatvity. In its first year, it was the headquarters for the Montague branch of the Liberation News Service and Farmers were involved in a range of other causes. Most famously, in 1974, Farmers lit the fuse of the antinuclear movement. Rallying against a proposed nuclear power plant in Montague and Farmer Sam Lovejoy’s act of civil disobedience that felled a weather monitoring tower set up in preparation, the Farmers carried waged a campaign of non-violent direct action that became the hallmark of antinuclear groups across the country. Their actions against the Yankee Rowe and Seabrook (N.H.) power plants were instrumental in dampening further development of nuclear power in the United States. In 2003, the Farm community agreed to sell the Farm property to Zen Peacemakers.

The photographs in this collection were taken by three members of the Montague Farm Commune: early members Anna Gyorgy and Tony Mathews, and Tony’s wife Susan Kramer. The photos depict daily life on the Farm and its residents, primarily in he period between 1978 and 1981, including farm work, sugaring, domestic chores, family and children, holidays, and celebrations, such as May Day. A handful of images, mostly by Mathews, go back to the earliest days of the Farm, and there are later images from the 20th and 25th reunions. Of special notes are over 100 images taken by Kramer during the occupation of the Seabroon Nuclear Power Plant in May 1977, at which 1,414 occupiers were arrested.

With an MFA in theater from UMass Amherst (1979), Doug Kraner built a career of thirty five years that grew from scenic design for the stage into production design for feature films and television. After his time in Amherst, Kraner taught at SUNY Stonybrook and worked on and off-Broadway, but by 1981, he moved to Hollywood and began a film career as set decorator for My Dinner With Andre (1981). Among dozens of credits as art director or production designer, Kraner worked on commercially successful films such as Uncle Buck, Lean on Me, Sleeping with the Enemy (which was the start of a long and productive working relationship with the director Danny Cannon), Extreme Measures, and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. He received an Emmy nomination in 1983 for Little Gloria… Happy at Last, and in his work on the television show Gotham in 2014-2015 earned both Emmy and Art Directors Guild Award nominations. After a lengthy struggle with cancer, Kraner died on April 4, 2016.

Organized project by project, the Kraner collection includes a cross-section of work from a production designer in the film and television industries from the 1980s to 2010s. Although the depth of coverage and contents vary from film to film, the files may contain anything from rough concept sketches to finished designs, photographs of three-dimensional models, and schematics for the construction of sets, and in the aggregate, the work documents the transition from paper-based to purely digital production techniques. Kraner retained a small number of sketches from his time as a graduate student at UMass Amherst, two sketchbooks, and a portfolio of his work for film.