Collecting area: Arts & literature

An attorney from Northampton, Mass., Carl Russo was a co-founder of the Florence Poets Society in 2004 with his friend Tom “Twilite” Clark. Born in Watervliet, NY, Russo worked as a social worker for several years after graduating from the University of Buffalo in 1967. Moving to Massachusetts to take a position with the Veterans Administration, he left social work for the law, earning his degree at Western New England College and setting up practice in Northampton. Creative and community-minded, he was a member of the city’s Arts Council and produced shows for Northampton Community Television and co-hosted a radio show on Valley Free Radio, in addition to writing poetry and supporting other local writers. Russo passed away in October 2012 at the age of 63.

The Russo Collection consists of drafts of Russo’s poetry, his poetry notebooks, and scattered ephemera from the Florence Poets Society.

Jerry Russo is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Educated at Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Russo’s photographs have been exhibited at a variety of galleries in the Boston area and New York City. In 2023, he completed artist residencies in Cape Ann and Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Russo describes his intention as a photographer, he identifies his primary goal as being “as sincere and empathetic as possible … [to be]  a kind observer of the world around me. I’ve always lived my life intensely soaking up the environment with a non-judgmental (but truthful) eye and using my images as a reflection of that.” 

In March of 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Russo began working on an oral history project to interview visual artists and creatives all over the world. During the next two years, he completed 249 interviews via Zoom. In the interviews he captures the artists’ thoughts on wide range of topics and themes including living and working during the pandemic with its enforced solitude and lockdown; the ways in which the pandemic has had an impact on their creative process, shifts in narratives, and use of materials; and whether the work they created referenced the pandemic, the Black Lives movement, or politics in the U.S.  

In the summer 1962, future Harvard student Steve Saltonstall became one of the early wave of white northerners who went into the Jim Crow south to work for civil rights. During that summer, he worked with SNCC to organize public accommodations in Cairo, Ill., and with an AFSC crew to help clear brush from a drainage ditch near Circle City, Missouri, encountering local resistance in both places. Saltonstall later became an attorney and currently practices in Vermont.

The Saltonstall collection consists of approximately sixty photographs taken by John Engel during his tour with an AFSC crew during the summer of 1962. While most of the images depict the crew’s work near Circle City, Missouri, six photos document a civil rights rally in Cairo, Ill. The images are available in digital form only.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert Sawin and his wife Elizabeth (nee Young) lived on Taylor Street in Holyoke, Massachusetts, with their three children, Allan, Ralph, and Alice. Elizabeth’s brother, also named Allan, traveled in the west during the 1880s, looking for work in Arizona, Utah, and Montana.

The bulk of the Sawin-Young Family Papers consists of letters exchanged between Elizabeth “Lizzie” Sawin, her sisters, and Jennie Young of nearby Easthampton. Later letters were addressed to Beatrice Sawin at Wheaton College from her father Walter E. Sawin, who contributed to the design for the Holyoke dam. The photograph album (1901) kept by Alice E. Sawin features images of the interior and exterior of the family’s home, as well as candid shots of family and friends and photographs of excursions to nearby Mt. Tom and the grounds of Northfield School.

One of the most frequently published photographers in Life magazine during the late 1960s, Rowland Scherman is noted for an iconic portfolio that documents the worlds of politics, culture, and the rock music scene. Born in New York in 1937, Scherman attended Oberlin College and began his career in the darkroom at Life before winning an assignment as the first official photographer for the Peace Corps in 1961. His work blossomed after becoming a free-lancer two years later, with assignments that included the civil rights March on Washington and the presidential campaign of Lyndon Baines Johnson. He covered the Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan broke on the national scene, the Beatles’ first concert in the U.S., Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency, and Woodstock, and he went along on a memorable tour with Judy Collins. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines and books, including Life, Look, Time, National Geographic, Playboy, and Paris Match, earning wide acclaim, including a Grammy Award in 1968 for the portrait that appears on the cover of Dylan’s greatest hits album. Scherman relocated to London in 1970, then to Birmingham, Ala., in the 1980s, and finally to Cape Cod on 2000. He continues to shoot portraits, photo essays, and abstract work.

This rich collection consists of nearly the entire body of work from Rowland Scherman’s long career in photography, including negatives and transparencies with a small selection of prints. Negatives from the March on Washington and the Peace Corps are in the collections of the Library of Congress.

Jennifer P. Schneider, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician certified in Internal Medicine, Addiction Medicine and Pain Management. She is the author of 15 books and numerous articles in professional journals. She is a nationally recognized expert in two addiction-related fields: addictive sexual disorders and the management of chronic pain with opioids. She also has experience and interest in the area of osteoporosis and its drug treatment, and maintains an email support group for people who have experienced atypical femur fractures related to the use of bisphosphonate medications. Dr. Schneider has written several articles in medical journals about egg donation and its potential long-term risks. Now retired from direct patient care, her professional activities include writing, lecturing at conferences, serving as an expert witness in legal settings, and appearing as a media guest on television and radio. One of her main current activities is to teach a remedial 21-Continuing Medical Education course on appropriate prescribing of controlled substances for chronic pain, under the auspices of Professional Boundaries Education in multiple locations in the U.S. 

The collection contains Dr. Schneider’s published articles, books, and book reviews on sex addiction and its effects on the partner; use of opioids in the treatment of chronic pain; femur fractures caused by the usual osteoporosis treatment with bisphosphonates; and potential cancer risk from egg donor protocol. In addition to her professional work, the collection also documents the family history of Raphael Patai and Naomi Nir along with their children, Daphne Patai and Dr. Schneider, through extensive correspondence, original paintings by Naomi Nir, a journal kept by Nir and Raphael Patai from 1949-1951. SCUA holds the papers of Naomi Nir and Daphne Patai.

After retiring from a career as a nurse and a health coach, Jean Schnell immersed herself in the photography world. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibits and shows throughout the New England region including the Moakley Courthouse in Boston, the S&G Gallery in New Bedford, Mass., the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, and the Davis Orton Gallery in Hudson, N.Y. In 2017, Schnell was a Critical Mass finalist.  Her Quaker meetinghouse photographs have been featured in Lenswork and Yankee magazines. The Friends Journal published her article “Framing the Light: Quaker Meetinghouses as Space and Spirit” accompanied by her photographs. 

In 2014, Schnell embarked on a project to photograph the twenty-three Quaker meetinghouses in Massachusetts. As a lifelong Quaker, Schnell sought to document the significance of the meetinghouses both as historic buildings and as spiritual spaces. Her collection contains photographic prints of the scenes she captured along with her notes, research materials, and various publications that include images from the project.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Founded in 1964, the Science Fiction Society at UMass Amherst is one of the oldest university based clubs of its kind in the United States. From the beginning, the members of the Society built a library to share books and periodicals, eventually amassing one of the largest circulating science fiction collections on the east coast, and they encouraged members to write their own fiction, at various points publishing their own magazine.

The Science Fiction Society Collection contains thousands of issues of science fiction periodicals from the golden age of the 1940s through the late 1990s. The collection includes essentially complete runs of major titles such as Galaxy and Analog, as well as minor and more ephemeral magazines.

A life-long resident of Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, and a third-generation Spiritualist, Louise Shattuck was an artist, teacher, and noted breeder of English cocker spaniels.

Shattuck’s work as a teacher, writer, artist, and dog breeder are documented in this collection through decades of correspondence and diaries, artwork, publications, and newspaper clippings. Of particular note are the materials associated with the Spiritualist history of Lake Pleasant, including three turn of the century spirit slates, samples of Louise’s automatic writing, a ouija board and dowsing rods, and an excellent photograph album with associated realia for the Independent Order of Scalpers, a Lake Pleasant.

Ron and Rick Shaw performing on stage, ca. 1970.

Folk singer-songwriter twins Rick and Ron Shaw were born on February 1, 1941 in West Stewartstown, New Hampshire. Both learned to sing and play music from a young age, and many of the songs that they learned became hits with the folk revival of the 1960s. While undergraduates at the University of New Hampshire Rick and Ron, along with friends, put together a group called the Windjammers, then the Tradewinds, before finally becoming The Brandywine Singers. As The Brandywine Singers, they signed with the William Morris Agency and recorded and released two albums. At the height of their popularity in 1966, The Brandywine Singers were forced to disband when Rick was drafted to serve in Vietnam. While Rick was in Vietnam, Ron continued to perform as part of the Pozo Seco Singers with Don Williams and Susan “Pie” Taylor. When Rick returned from service in 1968, both brothers were working as teachers before coming together again to perform as The Shaw Brothers. In 1972, Rick and Ron became members of The Hillside Singers, who recorded and performed the hit song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” The Shaw Brothers signed to RCA Records and released several albums and performed with the likes of Bob Hope, John Denver, and others. The Shaw Brothers retained a strong connection to their home state of New Hampshire and their annual summer concert series at Prescott Park in Portsmouth, New Hampshire drew large crowds. Ron passed away in 2018, and Rick in 2021.

Spanning fifty years of recording and performing, The Shaw Brothers Collection documents the bulk of Rick and Ron’s musical career as well as the greater New England folk music scene through promotional material such as posters and contracts, clippings, recordings and sheet music. There is also artwork by Rick created for a children’s book as well as personal journals.