Alice Austen House

On September 27th The Alice Austen House, nationally designated site of LGBTQ+ history, hosted the Staten Island virtual edition of Bookends. In a discussion and reading celebrating the legacy of Audre Lorde’s teaching, three former students of Lorde’s Hunter College program read their poetry and shared memories of their time in Lorde’s inspirational Hunter College literature program. Poets: Donna Masini Donna Masini was born in Brooklyn and has always lived in NYC. Her latest collection of poems, 4:30 Movie, an elegy for her sister, explores personal loss, global violence, and the ways in which movies shape our imaginations. Her first collection of poems, That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994), was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She next published a novel, About Yvonne (W.W. Norton and Co., 1997) which the New York Times called “a stunning novel of sexual obsession.” In 2004 she published her second collection of poems, Turning to Fiction (WW Norton and Co). Melinda Goodman Melinda Susan Goodman has been an adjunct professor at Hunter College since 1987 when she was chosen by Audre Lorde to take over Lorde’s poetry workshops. Goodman has also taught 0-4th Grade (reading level) at Spofford, a maximum-security juvenile detention center in the South Bronx, adult literacy in the Bronx and Brooklyn, and GED for at risk youths in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Melinda studied poetry at Hampshire College with Jamaican poet, Andrew Salkey. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University and a MA in American Literature from New York University. Goodman was a member of the editorial collective of Conditions, the first international lesbian literary journal. Her poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction have received awards from the Astraea Foundation, the Key West Literary Seminar, the New York Foundation on the Arts, the Key West Literary Seminar, and the Los Angeles Review. Rosette Capotorto A poet and author of Bronx Italian, Rosette Capotorto is a two-time recipient of the Edward Albee Fellowship Award. Rosette’s work has appeared in The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture, and in Curragia: Writings by Women of Italian Descent. She read her poems “Mother of A Priest” and “Broken Windows,” which documents Hoboken’s renaissance.

The Alice Austen House known affectionately as ‘Clear Comfort’ by the Austen Family will host an exhibition exploring the theme of home in the work of photographer Lora Webb Nichols in the fall of 2023. The exhibition will be curated by Nicole Jean Hill and supported by the Alice Austen House. In this virtual discussion we will view photographs from the Nichols archive and discuss the artist’s connection to home and its representation in her work. Nicole Jean Hill is an artist using photography and video to explore familiar spaces and activities within the American cultural and natural landscape. Nicole Jean Hill is the co-curator of the Lora Webb Nichols collections, housed at the American Heritage Center in Laramie, Wyoming. Lora Webb Nichols (1883-1962) created and collected approximately 24,000 negatives over the course of her lifetime in the mining town of Encampment, Wyoming. The images chronicle the domestic, social, and economic aspects of the sparsely populated frontier of south-central Wyoming throughout the early 20th century. Nicole Jean Hill has been working on preserving this archive in collaboration with Nancy Anderson since 2013, including digitizing the photographs, organizing the corresponding text, recovering the photographer’s diaries and letters, and collaborating with the Grand Encampment Museum and the American Heritage Center to secure a permanent home for the negatives. Nancy Anderson has been a teacher, librarian, and rancher and continues as a gatherer and source of stories and artifacts associated with Carbon County, Wyoming. Her home is Heap-o-livin, Encampment, Wyoming, the former home of Laura Webb Nichols. Victoria Munro is the Executive Director of the Alice Austen House, a nationally designated site of LGBTQ+ history and the only museum in America to represent the work of a solo woman photographer, Alice Austen (1866-1952). Victoria is an Art and Art History Educator, Maker and Photographic Curator. Victoria consults and speaks on LGBTQ+ curriculum development and historical and current LGBTQ+ interpretations in public and private institutions. Victoria is the Board President of the Museums Council of New York City and serves on the Executive Board of Historic Artists Homes and Studios. Lora Webb Nichols (1883-1962) created and collected approximately 24,000 negatives over the course of her lifetime in the mining town of Encampment, Wyoming. The images chronicle the domestic, social, and economic aspects of the sparsely populated frontier of south-central Wyoming. Nichols received her first camera in 1899 at the age of 16, coinciding with the rise of the region’s copper mining boom. The earliest photographs are of her immediate family, self-portraits, and landscape images of the cultivation of the region surrounding the town of Encampment. In addition to the personal imagery, the young Nichols photographed miners, industrial infrastructure, and a small town’s adjustment to a sudden, but ultimately fleeting, population increase. As early as 1906, Nichols was working for hire as a photographer for industrial documentation and family portraits, developing and printing from a darkroom she fashioned in the home she shared with her husband and their children. After the collapse of the copper industry, Nichols remained in Encampment and established the Rocky Mountain Studio, a photography and photo finishing service, to help support her family. Her commercial studio was a focal point of the town throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

The Alice Austen House hosts a virtual conversation between JEB (Joan E. Biren) and executive director Victoria Munro to discuss the process of digitizing and re-presenting her legendary The Dyke Show. From 1979 to 1984 JEB created a slideshow titled Lesbian Images in Photography: 1850-the present which she toured throughout the USA and Canada. In 2017 to mark the amendment of its national designation to include LGBTQ+ history The Alice Austen House was fortunate to host a very special gathering to experience JEB’s presentation of the Alice Austen segment of The Dyke Show. Since that incredible meeting, JEB has been a close advisor and mentor to the Alice Austen House as we embarked upon the work of centering and celebrating Austen’s lesbian identity and creating programming to support this mission. This program is one of three virtual lecture series generously funded by Humanities NY. "This program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature"

The Alice Austen House is thrilled to announce it is collaborating with Ann Shelton and Denny Dimin Gallery to produce a solo exhibition in the spring of 2024. Shelton will be visiting our site for research in November when her solo exhibition will open at Denny Dimin Gallery For more than a decade, Ann Shelton has explored the micro, marginal, bleak and traumatic counter-histories of plants through her photographic and performance-based art work. Linking gender politics and the climate crisis in a critical moment, i am an old phenomenon bears even greater significance as she reinvestigates lost knowledge pertaining to plants and their relationship to female ontology through the figure of the witch. This talk is the second of a four-part speaker series on artist and historian inspiration by the Alice Austen House collections, and the series is co-sponsored by Humanities New York and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.