Collecting area: Counterculture

Born in Reading, Mass., on Sept 13, 1948, Jeff Albertson was still a student at Boston University, working on the staff of the BU News, when he was hired as a photographer by the Boston Globe. Reflecting the youth culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, his photographs earned him positions with several prominent Boston alternative media outlets. Covering news, music, and the political interests of his generation, he served as photo editor for the Boston Phoenix and associate publisher for the Real Paper, and his work appeared regularly in mainstream publications such as Rolling Stone, People, and Boston Magazine. After becoming photo editor for the Medical Tribune News Group and moving to New York City in the 1980s, he met and married Charlene Laino. In later years, he became involved in early efforts to create websites devoted to issues surrounding health. Albertson died in 2008.

As a photographer, Albertson covered a wide range of subjects, with particular focus on music and social change. The many thousands of prints, slides, and negatives in the collection include stunning shots of Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and John Lee Hooker, activists such as Abbie Hoffman, politicians, and public personalities. The collection also includes several photographic essays centered on poverty, old age, fire fighting in Boston, and prisoners in Massachusetts (among other issues) along with a wide array of landscapes and street scenes.

An alumnus of both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Boston College, Victor Aronow was involved with the anti-draft and anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, and the movement against U.S. involvement in Central America. Aronow was also involved with socialist, anarchist, and other leftist movements and organizations. Some of these organizations include the United States Socialist Labor Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the New America Movement. Most of his activism was focused in Massachusetts, but he also engaged with organizations that offered support to Central American movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Aronow practiced law, serving as defense counsel for Arthur Montour also called Kakwirakeron in U.S. vs. Kakwirakeron, as well as a member of the Wounded Knee Legal Defense team.

Aronow’s collection consists of a series of subject files containing magazines, books, leaflets, correspondence, clippings, newspapers, and fliers from a range of national and international leftist organizations. Aronow was a member of The Boston Draft Resistance Group, Newton Draft Counseling Center, and the American Friends Service Committee. As a member, Aronow collected files from these groups including correspondence, publications, meeting minutes, newspaper clippings, and his personal notes. While practicing law, Aronow gathered court records for cases he worked on, including both his work as a member of the Wounded Knee Legal Defense team, where he worked defending the rights of the Oglala Sioux tribe members who were involved in the attempted liberation of Wounded Knee in 1973, as well as a member of the defense counsel in U.S. vs. Kakwirakeron in 1990. The collection contains files gathered from multiple trials related to Wounded Knee including correspondence between lawyers and defendants, court records and legal filings, newsletters, press releases, funding appeals, and fliers.

James Baker was a member of the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune (later the Renaissance Community) in the early 1970s, and a key contributor to the Free Spirit Press, the commune’s publishing operation. Part promotion, information, and entertainment, the Free Spirit Press magazine ran for four issues in the winter and spring 1972-1973.

The Baker collection consists of the surviving materials from the production of Free Spirit Press concentrated heavily in the period between winter 1972 and summer 1974. Accumulated mostly while preparing a brochure for the commune, the manuscript material contains copies of the commune’s by-laws and membership rolls, comments from community members on how they wished to be represented, and a story board for the brochure and series of quotes from community members to be included. The second half of the collection contains hundreds of images, mostly 35mm negatives, taken of or by the commune and its residents. The images depict the production and distribution of Free Spirit Press and the commune band (Spirit in Flesh, later called Rapunzel), but they also include several rolls of film taken by commune members of major rock and roll acts of the era, including the Grateful Dead, Taj Mahal, Jethro Tull, Santana, Chuck Berry, Hot Tuna, and Fleetwood Mac.

Beginning in a treehouse in Leyden, Mass., during the summer of 1968, the Brotherhood of the Spirit (later the Renaissance Community) grew to become the largest commune in the eastern United States. Founded by Michael Metelica and six friends, and infused with the spiritual teachings of Elwood Babbitt, the commune relocated several times during its first half decade, setting down at different points in Heath, Charlemont, Warwick, Turners Falls, and Gill, Mass., as well as Guilford, Vt.

Produced at UMass Amherst, this video (digitized from a 16mm motion picture original) provides a largely laudatory glimpse of commune life during the boom years of the Brotherhood of the Spirit, probably around 1973. Sound quality in the video is highly uneven, often poor, particularly in the first two minutes.

Having joined the the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune in 1973, Dan Brown remained a member for a decade as it evolved first into Metelica’s Aquarian Concept and then into the Renaissance Community. Throughout his time as a member, he photographed his fellow communards as they moved through a variety of localities, including Turner’s Falls, Gill, and Warwick, Mass. Since leaving the community in 1983, he has written and lectured regularly on its history for audiences throughout the region.

One of the principle photographers of the Brotherhood and Renaissance Community during the period 1973-1983, Brown preserved an archive of approximately 450 photographs documenting the commune from its founding in 1968 through the time of Michael Metelica’s death in 2003. In addition to his own work, he collected and preserved images of many other photographers, most notably Gary Cohen.

Born and raised in France, the photojournalist Lionel Delevingne studied education at l’Ecole Normale in Paris, but settled permanently in the United States in 1975. Based at first in Northampton, Mass., he became a prolific photographer of American social movements while working for the Valley Advocate and other publications, covering the early years of the Clamshell Alliance and the antinuclear movement in considerable depth. His work has been exhibited frequently and published widely in the mainstream and alternative press, including the New York Times, Le Figaro Magazine, Die Zeit, Newsweek, Washington Post Magazine, Mother Jones, and Vanity Fair.

The Delevingne collection includes remarkable visual documentation of the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and beyond, including some of the its most iconic images. Beginning with coverage of the Seabrook occupation, Delevingne covered the movement as it spread throughout the northeastern U.S. and internationally. The collection includes exhibition prints, prints for publication, and digitized images ranging in date from the mid-1970s through 1990s. Copyright in the images has been retained by Delevingne.

An author and activist, Steve Diamond worked for the newly formed Liberation News Service in 1968 covering stories like the student strike at Columbia University. After more than a year of internal strife resulting from ideological differences, the alternative news service split into two factions, with Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo leading a new division of LNS in rural New England. Diamond, among those who left for New England, settled into life in a commune on old Ripley Farm in Montague, Massachusetts. His experiences during the first year on the farm are recorded in his book, What the Trees Said. Diamond later worked as a writer and consultant for Green Mountain Post Films, editor of the Valley Advocate and Boston Phoenix, and as a contributor for The Atlantic Monthly, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Village Voice.

This collection consists chiefly of Diamond’s correspondence and writing, including drafts of his book chapters, stories, and articles; research notes; and diary entries. The collection also contains printed articles by and about Diamond, digital images, and audio recordings.

Ray Mungo’s Famous Long Ago (1970) and Steve Diamond’s What the Trees Said (1971) are classic visions of late 1960s counterculture and of life in New England communes. The communes on which Mungo and Diamond settled, Packer Corner and the Montague Farm, became the center of what might be considered a single extended community, embracing the Wendell Farm and Johnson Pasture and Tree Frog Farm in Vermont. The Farmers themselves were, and remain, a diverse group, including photographers, novelists, and poets, artists, actors, and activists.

An umbrella collection, the Famous Long Ago Archive contains a growing number of collections relating to the communes at Montague Farm, Packer Corners, Johnson Pasture, Wendell Farm, and Tree Frog Farm. These range from the papers of Steve Diamond, Raymond Mungo, and Jonathan Maslow to Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner (the latter of whom lived at Montague Farm), the records of the Liberation News Service, the Alternative Energy Coalition, and Musicians United for Safe Energy, to the photographic collections of Roy Finestone and Stephen Josephs. View all the Famous Long Ago Collections.

Collections include:

• Alternative Energy Coalition Records
• Antinuclear Activism Collection
• Susan Dalsimer Papers
• Stephen Diamond Papers
• Roy Finestone Collection
• Green Mountain Post Films Collection
• Anna Gyorgy Papers
• Stephen Josephs Collection
• Randy Kehler Papers
• Steve Lerner Papers
• Liberation News Service Records
• Jon Maslow Papers
• Kevin McVeigh Papers
• Montague Nuclear Power Station Collection
• Raymond Mungo Papers
• Musicians United For Safe Energy Collection
• Carl Oglesby Papers
• Stephen L. Saltonstall Collection
• Peter Simon Collection
• Paul Williams Papers

Thomas Weston Fels is an artist, author, art historian, writer, and curator. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, 1946, Fels spent his teenage years at The Putney School, a private boarding school in Southern Vermont. Upon completion, Fels enrolled in Amherst College, and after graduating in 1967, moved to the Montague Farm commune. 

Fels lived on the farm from 1969 to 1973, and was an integral member of the larger communard community, extending from the Wendell Farm and Johnson Pasture, to Packer Corners and the Tree Frog Farm. While there, Fels associated with prolific writers, artists and photographers of 1960s counterculture, such as Harvey Wasserman, Ray Mungo, Peter Simon, and others. 

Sometime after leaving the commune, Fels returned to school, attending Williams College. He graduated in 1984, earning a Masters in the History of Art. Following the completion of his degree, Fels was awarded multiple prestigious fellowships. In 1986, he became a Chester Dale Fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while between 1998-1999, he was a Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow of the Huntington Library, California. His career has seen him employed by numerous museums across North America, ranging from the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art in California, the Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum in Vermont, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Quebec. 

 Fels has organized many exhibitions throughout his career, some internationally. In California, Fels’ exhibition Carleton Watkins: Western Landscape and the Classical Vision was presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art; while his exhibition Fire and Ice: Treasures from the Photograph Collection of Frederic Church at Olana, was shown at both the Dahesh Museum in New York, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

In addition to his curatorial duties, Fels’ work as a researcher and writer has led him to publish a variety of catalogs and companion pieces to his exhibitions alongside various articles and books. In 1989, he published O Say Can You See: American Photographs 1839-1939, and in 1994, he edited a single issue of Farm Notes, in some ways a successor to the Montague Commune’s Green Mountain Post (formerly New Babylon Times). In 2008, Fels published the memoir Farm Friends, reflecting on his life, the counterculture era, and his time on the Montague Commune. In the same year, Fels helped found the ‘Famous Long Ago Archive’ at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; collecting the personal papers of several members of the communard community. These collections contain articles, manuscripts, photos, posters, oral histories, and more. He continued to reflect on the Montague Farm, publishing Buying the Farm in 2012, providing an in-depth history of the commune, connecting with communards decades later, while chronicling the farm from its beginning in 1968 through the following thirty-five years of its existence. 

Since 2013, Fels has been showcasing his unique cyanotypes throughout the American Northeast, and by 2015 his art would take him to Europe and the United Kingdom. In 2016, his large, life-sized renderings were subject to sale at one of the world’s most renowned auction houses, Christie’s London. Beyond his photography and historical work, Fels can be found giving lectures throughout New England, or at his home in Southern Vermont. 

The Thomas W. Fels Montague Farm Collection reflects the work of the many friends he made while living on the Montague Farm. Their works make up the bulk of the collection, containing articles, manuscripts, publications, photographs, posters, and audio recordings. Of particular interest is the 25th Anniversary reunion of the Montague Commune. The 10-day celebration is memorialized through photos, audio recordings, and a publication. 

A wave of experimentation in communal living in New England reached a peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with dozens of communities spread across the landscape of western Massachusetts and Vermont. Nina Finestone joined the Johnson Pastures in Guilford , Vermont, in 1969, however after the main house there went up in flames on April 16, 1970, killing four people, she joined a number of its residents who moved to the nearby Montague Farm in Montague, Massachusetts. Nina married a fellow Montague farmer, Daniel Keller, and the couple moved to Wendell in 1980.

Providing exceptional visual documentation of life at Johnson Pasture, the Montague Farm, and Wendell Farm between 1969 and 1990, the Finestone collection is centered on the lives and family of Daniel and Nina Keller. All images were taken by Roy Finestone, Nina’s father, with a medium format camera using color transparency film.