An Assignment that Took All of My Creative Juice for the Past Month

"The Arduous Adventures and Atypical Activism of the Artist, Abby Williams Hill, Alliteratively Abbreviated"

About a year ago, I was commissioned by several librarians at the Collins Library at the University of Puget Sound, including the now retired, Jane Carlin, a huge artist’s book fan, to research and create an artist’s book about the life of Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943). Her diaries, letters, artifacts, and plein-aire paintings are all archived at the Collins Library. I had never heard of her and had some misgivings about diving deeply into the work of a landscape painter who was likely just creating advertisements for the railroad companies who commissioned her, unconsciously reinforcing the values of Manifest Destiny.

After attending a meeting last winter where I met some of the other 12 women artists who had been selected to participate in this project, I learned that Abby Williams Hill was a huge advocate for social justice and I became intrigued.

If you watch the hastily-made video attached here, you will learn that I had some challenges identifying with Abby at first. She was an upper middle class, white woman, raised and educated in Grinnell, Iowa, with a strong Christian training. Her world and mine seemed far apart. But the fact that she was educated at various art schools including the Arts Students League in NYC, made me feel the beginnings of a connection between us. I had a scholarship to attend their Saturday classes to study figure drawing while I was a senior in high school. I can still remember the strong smell of turpentine as I entered that building and at age 17 - that powerful smell enveloped me and I felt like I had arrived home. Knowing that this woman had walked halls that I had entered in 1970, maybe 80-90 years before I did, was the first step I had to enter her world.

She camped with her children, three girls who were adopted, and one son with significant health issues and disabilities, all over the wilderness surrounded by cougars and bears. Her camping expeditions to complete railroad companies’ commissions were definitely ground-breaking activities for a bourgeois woman of her era. One of her favorite places to take her children was Vashon Island where I lived with my family from 2003-2011. She camped mostly in the Burton neighborhood at the southend where we lived during our first year on the island (so another connecting point). Back in Abby’s time, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was mostly undeveloped, with thick woodsfilled with all manner of wildlife. When we lived there we were told that it wasn’t so long ago, when you could just reach into any stream in the fall and grab your salmon dinner. Those days are long gone. My young son and I used to walk down to the bottom of the hollow where we lived, to one of the un-dammed, salmon-running creeks that went into the Salish Sea; if we saw two or three fish jumping, we were thrilled.

As I read more about Abby’s life and meandered through her letters and diaries, I learned what a strong advocate for social justice that she was, and it was there that I got hooked. Although some of her attitudes about education, might not be considered very progressive now (her naivety was very much marked by the ingrained values of “settler-colonial whiteness”), she was still outside the box of her time for various reasons. Allowing her children to have a very creative and “wild” education outdoors was looked disapprovingly by some while others were envious of the ways she was raising her kids. Her desire to learn from tribal elders and women at the Flathead Indian Reservation (and elsewhere) was truly an exception to the racist attitudes of her time, as was her relationship with the Tuskegee Institute and Booker T. Washington.

Her advocacy for universal health care and labor laws to protect children was admirable, and she was relentless in writing to politicians to make a difference.

If you’re curious to learn more about her life, work, and activism, you can go directly to the UPS archive.

It’s important to mention that the materials used for making this artist’s book included a very old file box found in our attic from the early 1900s. The first owner of our home was a publisher, a church official, who clearly paid all of his bills. He was a very engaged consumer of specialty items (like kilts from Scotland - his last name was McPherson) and other fancy items like haberdashery in Tacoma, and he kept over a dozen boxes of files of his receipts from taxes, utilities, groceries, hotels, and telegrams. They number in the thousands and will be donated to the Tacoma Historical Society. I’m amazed that the subsequent owners of our house never did anything with the boxes.

One of the boxes in the attic had an intact filing system that seemed perfect for organizing the alliterative texts about Abby’s life, but I needed something to reinforce the filing paper (because it is fragile and brittle in places) so I used some of the more interesting receipts to make the paper a bit stronger for those who actually turn the pages of this artist’s book. All of the drawings at the top of each page of text are mine and feature locations where Abby spent time in the mountains or by the beach in Laguna Beach, CA.

While I was intensively working on this project, Israel was bombing Gaza and friends all over the world were participating in anti-war protests. My heart was full of despair about the situation. Previous to my husband’s cancer journey and the pandemic, we were both active in street protests and interventions, but due to my grief, sleep deprivation, and my son’s ongoing mental instability, I chose not to go out into the streets to join others in protest. I chose instead to post images of my work on social media, digital work from over 20 years ago, that exposes the contradictions and racism of the Israeli state and my empathy for the terror-filled lives of those living inside that conflict. I also discussed my perspective on the issues with those who seemed detached from the whole thing and kept myself informed. While I missed the solidarity of being with other activists, this is what my body/heart can accomplish in this time.

Hopefully by the end of this week, I’ll have finished my long lingering post about my journey into meditation for you to read. Thanks for reading this and spending time with the video of the book. Let me know if you have questions.