A catalogue that stays close to home
Finding family feeling in art history
| Jenny Carson '89G at home in Washington, D.C. (Ben Barnhart photo) |
In 1990, a year after receiving her M.A. at
UMass, Jenny Carson delved into researching the American art collection
at the Springfield Museums where she was a curatorial intern. Nine years
later, with assistance from several UMass alumni, colleagues, and friends,
Carson’s early research blossomed into a handsome, 256-page catalogue
titled Selections from the American Collection of the Museum of Fine
Arts and the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum.
During her three years of studying art history at UMass, Carson was struck by the department’s family-like atmosphere.
“There was a real sense of community and support for each other among the students and faculty,” she says, now seated in her dining room in Washington, DC, and surrounded by the trappings of real family life – toys piled in a corner, tiny socks and T-shirts neatly folded on the table.
That UMass camaraderie is also evident in Selections from the American Collection which includes contributions by Carson’s classmates Stephen Fisher ’89G, former registrar at the Springfield Museums and now curator at Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum; Mary Kinnecome ’90G, also a former curatorial intern at the Springfield Museums; and Springfield Museums director Heather Haskell ’87G, who also wrote the foreword. Other contributors include Mount Holyoke College art professor Paul Staiti ’74G; Gloria Russell ’81G, art critic for the Springfield Union-News and Sunday Republican; and UMass art history professor Bill Oedel.
The catalogue contains 100 photographs of paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and decorative arts with a natural emphasis on New England artists, including local names such as Leverett native Erastus Salisbury Field (1805-1900). Staiti describes Field’s narrative painting, Historical Monument of the American Republic: “This kind of twisting historical spiral resembles a form of religious rhetoric known in orthodox Calvinist churches as a jeremiad . . . which Field would have known from listening to sermons at the North Amherst Congregational Church . . . .” Also included in the catalogue is the late Northampton artist Leonard Baskin’s bronze sculpture Prophet (Homage to Rico Lebrun) and UMass professor Richard Yarde’s painting Johnny’s Gone.
Carson’s research of the Springfield Museums’ American collection helped earn her a Ph.D. from the City University of New York where she enrolled in 1990 and focused her study on nineteenth-century American art. And, as if researching the Springfield collection and pursuing a doctorate weren’t enough, Carson was also curator at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Historic House Museum in Hadley from 1990 to 1992, where she became fascinated by the historical connection between the house, its family and the valley.
“I’m really interested in cultural history,” she says with a slight trace of the soft, rounded southern accent that remains from her youth in Louisiana. “That’s my slant.”
Carson’s doctoral thesis on American painter Benjamin West completed her CUNY degree last February, and she’s now an adjunct faculty member at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, while raising three young children with the help of husband Steven ’92G.
The following excerpt is taken from her description of New England Scenery, the 1851 oil painting by Frederic Edwin Church of the Hudson River School, a detail from which adorns the catalogue’s cover.
— Ben Barnhart
