Collections: R

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.  

The collection includes publications, ephemera, periodicals, and other communications from a range of radical groups. Much of the collection relates to the sedition trial of Raymond Luc Levasseur and the Ohio Seven, but ranges into related topics, including political prisoners, Communist and revolutionary action, Puerto Rican independence, African liberation movements, and anti-Klan and antiracist activity. It is organized into six series: Ohio Seven (3 boxes), Political Prisoners (2 boxes), John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (1 box), Subject Files (5 boxes), and Radical Periodicals (4 boxes).