four persons who deserve wider recognition

In the last week of October, I will begin to teach my latest online course for Drake University, as part of their Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) course offerings. Titled ACCOMPLISHED BUT INSUFFICIENTLY PRAISED, over four weeks, with one presentation each week, I'll be sharing what I know about the lives of Four People Who Deserve to be More Widely Known. Looking forward to it.

Ruth Suckow exhibition at Bettendorf IA Library

Good news! This is an installation view of the traveling exhibition about the life and work of Iowa novelist and short story writer Ruth Suckow (pronounced Soo-Co). It was organized and produced by Iowa writer Barbara Lounsberry (UNI professor emerita of literature), who is also the president of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association. I was fortunate to be asked to design the exhibition panels, the banner and the shipping crate.

The above is how the exhibition looks, as currently installed at the Bettendorf Public Library in Bettendorf IA. Bravo! What a neat, professional way of setting it up. 

This is hardly its first exhibition. The initial traveling show took place in January of this year at a location near the extreme western edge of the state, and it has now proven so popular among Iowa libraries and history centers that it has been booked for more than a year in the future. With each display, there are also various public events, such as a presentation at the Bettendorf Library on Thursday, April 18, at 1:30 to 2:30 pm, titled Profound Realism: The Rediscovery of Ruth Suckow, featuring Michael and Hedy Hustedde. The exhibition is on display at Bettendorf from April 14 through May 12. 

Other libraries or history centers who would like to host the exhibition in the future will find information here.

Ruth Suckow / most promising writer of fiction

Ruth Suckow (pronounced soo-co) (1892-1960), an Iowa-born novelist and short story writer, was at one time expected to become one of the most accomplished writers of the Modern era. She was, in the words of literary critic H.L. Mencken, “the most promising young writer of fiction, man or woman, now visibly at work in America.” It was not a light endorsement, since Mencken also had high praise for James Joyce, Eugene O’Neill, and Theodore Dreiser.

She lived until 1960, having published nine novels in which she invariably tried to convey the experience of living in the American Midwest. From her awkward family name, her roots are undoubtedly German, which may be one of the reasons why Mencken was drawn to her writing. But as she herself recalled, “There was nothing German in our home except noodle soup, a tree and frosted cookies at Christmas, and brown-covered copies of Die Gartenlaube [a popular German magazine].”

In fact, her origins also go back to Puritan New England, to the “different drummer” proclivities of Unitarians and Transcendentalists. As she was growing up, her father was a Congregational minister in Iowa, in the course of which the family moved from one community to another. In her own lifetime, Suckow lived in at least sixteen Iowa communities, among them Hawarden (her birthplace), LeMars, Paullina, Algona, Fort Dodge, Des Moines, Grinnell, McGregor, Manchester, Earlville, Bettendorf, and Cedar Falls. At other times, she also lived in Greenwich Village in New York, and in California.

In recent decades, there has been a focused effort, by writers who admire her work, to restore at least some portion of Suckow’s literary prominence, to encourage a new awareness and appreciation of her work. As a result, in 1966, six years after Suckow’s death, the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association was established. In the years since, that organization has gathered annually to share their findings about her work, while also enabling a range of events.

Under the leadership of Iowa writer Barbara Lounsberry, who is currently the president of the RSMA, funding support was obtained from Humanities Iowa, for the design, production and distribution of a traveling exhibition, titled Ruth Suckow: An Exhibition about Her Life. The exhibit consists of eight full-color printed panels, each measuring 24 inches wide by 36 inches high. Using photographs, book covers, and critical excerpts, the exhibit tells the story of Suckow’s Iowa childhood, the sequence of her published work, and assessments of her accomplishments by various writers and scholars.

The exhibit was completed in 2023, and was first exhibited at the public library in Hawarden IA (where Suckow was born) from January 1 through 28, 2024. It has proven to be popular, and current requests to host it (for one month) at libraries, historical centers, or other non-profit locations in Iowa have now been scheduled through the middle of 2025. The following is an incomplete listing of exhibition dates and locations:

February 4 - March 3, 2024 at Burt Public Library
March 10 - April 7 at Orange City Public Library
April 14 - May 12 at Bettendorf Public Library
May 19 - June 16 at Urbandale Public Library
June 23 - August 4 at Cedar Falls Public Library
August 11 - September 8 at Polk City Public Library
September 15 - October 13 at Robey Memorial Library, Waukon
October 20 - December 1 at Ruth Suckow Public Library, Earlville
December 8, 2024 - January 5, 2025 at Kendall Young Library, Webster City
January 12 - February 9, 2025 at Drake Community Library, Grinnell
February 16 - March 16 at Manchester Public Library
March 23 - April 20 at LeMars Public Library
Also scheduled in 2025 for Atlantic, and Shenandoah libraries

To apply to host the exhibit in 2025 or later, go to the RSMA website at <ruthsuckow.org>.

newly published book on Blanche Ames Ames

Above I’ve been writing about the Ames family for more than 50 years. I myself don’t know of a family that is more colorful or complex. I refer to those descended from the marriage of Union General Adelbert Ames (Reconstruction governor of Mississippi) and Blanche Butler, who was the daughter of the notorious General Benjamin F. Butler.

One of their sons was Adelbert (Del) Ames, Jr., an artist and optical scientist who devised the well-known Ames Demonstrations in psychology (such as his Distorted Room). One of their daughters was an artist and equal rights proponent named Blanche Ames Ames. She has that double name because she married Harvard orchid expert Oakes Ames, whose ancestors had made their fortune providing shovels to those who went west to pan for gold or who worked on the Transcontinental Railroad.

Ames, Iowa, is named for a prominent family member. George Plimpton’s mother was an Ames, and it appears there is also a link to Aldrich Ames, the famous spy. My main interest has usually been the artist and scientist Del Ames, about whom I have published various essays over the years and, more recently, have produced a series of three short online videos.

But I’ve also always been intrigued by Del’s sister, Blanche, in part because he and she worked in tandem on art and science research in the years before the outbreak of World War I. In recent years, there have been various efforts to unearth and celebrate the achievements of Blanche Ames Ames, whose magnificent self-designed mansion is now Borderland State Park in Massachusetts, just south of Boston, a site that is well-worth the visit.

Last year, a 55-minute film was produced, titled Borderland: The Life and Times of Blanche Ames Ames. And now, most recently, a new book has just been published about the shared lives of Blanche Ames and her husband. Titled Blanche Ames Ames (1878-1969) and Oakes Ames (1874-1950): Cultivating That Mutual Ground (Eugene OR: Resource Publications), it was written by Elizabeth F. Fideler, a Harvard scholar who has published earlier books about aging, retirement and related concerns. Especially for those who are interested in the Ames family, women’s studies, and the chemistry of married life, it is a praiseworthy overview of the accomplishments of an amazing American woman. 

hoop and holler when little pig got under skirt

Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 106—

My father had a brother-in-law, Uncle Henry Hargis, who had married my Aunt Elizabeth. She had been long since dead and the only thing remembered about her was that she went on wearing hoopskirts years after they were given up, because her legs were too weak for skirts pressuring against them, and that a little pig had got under the hoop one day and the more she kicked and screamed the higher he jumped.

exquisite image / the index of american design

Poster design © Roy R. Behrens (2022)

Roy R. Behrens, poster from a series that pays tribute to the Index of American Design (1935-1942). This particular painting, by Daniel Marshack, documents a woman's gymnasium outfit. The original watercolor painting is in public domain at the National Gallery of Art.

Nobel Prize checks freshly written pay the bills

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Snap Shot. Digital montage (©2021). 

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Ione Robinson, A Wall to Paint On. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1946, pp. 152-153—

When I made a drawing of [American writer Sinclair] Lewis [who had just received the Nobel Prize] I had to take the train out to his country house. I was all in when I arrived but the afternoon and the trip back were so amusing I forgot how tired I was.

I made the drawing in his study, while Mr. Lewis wrote out checks to pay his bills with the Nobel Prize, and there were freshly-written checks all over the desk and the floor. I would have liked to paint him in that foreground of blue paper, which only increased the redness of his face and hair. He looked just like a carrot.

In a basket beside his desk there was a tiny baby with a wisp of red hair on the top of its head. Each time Mr. Lewis would finish a check, he would talk to the baby: “Isn’t it wonderful, Michael, that Daddy has won the Nobel Prize?” I had an awful time making the drawing because he was never still, but his face had made such an impression the moment I saw it that the drawing was fairly successful.

On the train back to New York Mr. Lewis joked a great deal about receiving the prize and the fuss that it had created throughout the country, especially among other contemporary writers. He told me how mad Theodore Dreiser was…and then he added that Dreiser ought to be tinting “fish plates.” I didn’t get the connection, and I don’t think there was any, as Mr. Lewis had had about ten highballs!

Gertrude Käsebier's Portraits of Lakota Sioux

Article from The Iowa Source July 2021, p 10

On the evening of June 25, 1906, during a performance at Madison Square Garden in New York, a millionaire named Harry Thaw drew a pistol. Standing only two feet feet behind a prominent architect and socialite named Stanford White, he fired three times into his back, killing White instantly.

Thaw had recently married a chorus girl and actress named Evelyn Nesbit. In an effort to be straightforward, she revealed to him that, several years earlier, as a teenager, she had been sedated and seduced by White. At the time of the shooting, the public was well-acquainted with Nesbit. She was a popular model for artists and photographers, and a “Gibson girl” celebrity.

The best-known portrait of Nesbit, made in 1903, is an iconic image in the history of photography. The woman who made it, Iowa native Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934), is now widely considered to be one of the finest photographers of the Modernist era. That ranking is not only based on her portrait of Nesbit—indeed, she was far more accomplished than that.

Käsebier (née Gertrude Stanton) had a photographic studio on Fifth Avenue in New York at the time that she photographed Nesbit. Her photographic career had taken off late in the 1890s, when Alfred Stieglitz published and exhibited her photographs. She was, he asserted, “the leading artistic portrait photographer of the day.”
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Below Roy R. Behrens, Death Announced, 2021. Digital montage. Among the background components is a press photograph (not by Gertrude Käsebier) of the public appearance of Evelyn Nesbit (shrouded) after the assassination of Stanford White by her husband, Harry Thaw.

Roy R. Behrens, copyright © 2021

if memory serves me right here are my origins

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Above Roy R. Behrens, In Point of Fact (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Henry Miller, quoted in Robert Snyder, ed., This is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974), pp. 119-121—

If my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line, Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievski (and other Russian writers of the nineteenth century), the ancient Greek dramatists, the Elizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Céline, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its "message" which I got first and which I will never shake off.

a woman's lone journey around the world / 1890

LIFE magazine cover (August 26, 1909)

Lilian Leland, Traveling Alone: A Woman’s Journey Round the World. New York: American News Company, 1890—

Darjeeling [India] is an exceedingly pretty place, unlike anything I have seen before. It is laid in terraces on the side of the mountain. Looking down from the hotel, the streets form an interlaced and zigzag pattern. I should never know how to get to any given house in the place. It  is like one of those labyrinth puzzles that you try to get to the center of without crossing a line. The safest way is to do as Alice did in the “Looking-Glass House,” turn your back to a place, and presently you find yourself walking in at the front door.

Entangled threesome | a walking Läocoon

Coles Phillips "fadeaway" magazine cover illustration (1916)

Above Magazine cover illustration for the October 1916 issue of Good Housekeeping by Coles Phillips (1880-1927). As shown in this example, he was especially known for paintings in which edges of the figure merge with the background. Tragically, he died of tuberculosis at the early age of 47. We reproduced another work of his in an earlier blog post.

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Ford Maddox Ford as quoted by Simon Nowell-Smith, compiler, The Legend of the Master (London, Constable, 1947), p. 44—

I was once walking with him [Henry James] and Mr. John Galsworthy…[whose] dachshund Maximilian ran sheep, so, not to curtail the animal’s exercise, the Master had provided it with a leash at least ten yards long. Mr. Galsworthy and I walked one on each side of James listening obediently while he talked. In order to round off an immense sentence the great man halted…He planted his [walking] stick firmly into the ground and went on and on and on. Maximilian passed between our six legs again and again, threading his leash behind him. Mr. Galsworthy and I stood silent. In any case we must have resembled the Laocöon, but when Maximilian had finished the resemblance must have been overwhelming. The Master finished his reflections, attempted to hurry on, found that impossible. Then we liberated ourselves with difficulty. He turned on me, his eyes fairly blazing, lifting his cane on high and slamming it into the ground: “H…” he exclaimed, “you are painfully young, but at no more than the age to which you have attained, the playing of such tricks is an imbecility! An im…be…cility!”

League of Women Voters \ Hard Won Not Done

Of related interest, see The role of American women in the development of camouflage during World War I (an exhibition), and Chicanery and conspicuousness: social repercussions of World War I ship camouflage (an illustrated essay).

A Sweet Disorder in the Dress / Robert Herrick

Above A parody of a painting by either Angnolo Bronzino (Jacopo Carucci) or (possibly) Pontormo, titled Portrait of a Lady with a Lapdog (c1537), providing current portraits of the charming, smart, beautiful women, Mary and Lola, with whom I delight in life.

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Robert Herrick
Delight in Disorder (1648)

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthralls the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribands to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, that when art
Is too precise in every part.

League of Women Voters Poster 2016

Women's Equality Poster © Roy R. Behrens

Above It's always gratifying to use ones skills and expertise in promoting worthy causes, the equal rights of women in this case. The story of the struggle for equal rights (for women and others) is a fascinating history, and one that is always on-going. This is a poster we designed pro bono to announce Women's Equality Day (August 20, 2016), on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Black Hawk and Bremer Counties in Iowa.

Designer Jessica Barness Is e'stäneSHiNG

Jessica Barness, Kent State University

Jessica Barness is prolific and e'staneSHiNG. See site above. Latest publications include special issue of Visible Language (Critical Making: Design and the Digital Humanities) and Emigré Magazine Index in July 2016 issue of Design and Culture: The Journal of the Design Studies Forum.

Jacquie Colvin | Self-Portrait Parody

Self-Portrait Parody © Jacquie Colvin c2008

In past years, as a way of acquainting my students with the intricacies of image adjustment (and modification) using Adobe Photoshop, I have sometimes used a "self-portrait parody" problem, in which students integrate photographs of themselves into public domain images of past historic works of art. An early problem, sometimes the results are amazing, sometimes not. Shown above is one of my favorite solutions (c2008), produced by Jacquie Colvin, a student who later went on to become the graphic designer at the Grout Museum District in Waterloo IA, as well as an excellent mentor for student interns who have subsequently worked with her. The artwork of which this was a parody (the pair is reproduced below) was Self-Portrait in a Straw Hall, by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Lebrun (c1782).

•••

Eudora Welty, "A Sweet Devouring" in The Eye of the Storm: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 281—

All that summer I used to put on a second petticoat (our librarian wouldn't let you past the front door if she could see through you), ride my bicycle up the hill and "through the Capitol" (shortcut) to the library with my two read books in the basket (two was the limit you could take out at one time when you were a child and also as long as you lived), and tiptoe in ("Silence") and exchange them for two more in two minutes. Selections was no object. I coasted the two new books home, jumped out of my petticoat, read (I suppose I ate and bathed and answered questions put to me), then in all hope put my petticoat back on and rode those two books back to the library to get my next two. The librarian was the lady in town who wanted to be it. She called me by my full name and said, "Does your mother know where you are? You know good and well the fixed rule of the library: Nobody is going to come running back here with any book on the same day they took it out. Get both those things out of here and don't come back til tomorrow. And I can practically see through you."

The model (left) and the mimic

Postage & Currency | Tony McDermott

Block of stamps © Tony McDermott (2014)

Above and below Proposals for postage stamps and currency for an imaginary country called Sfumato, designed by Tony McDermott, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a class called Graphic Design I, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

•••

Polly Gardner, quoted in Elizabeth Stone, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us. New York: Times Books, 1988, p. 61—

In town, they called my grandfather Applejack. Do you known what applejack is? It's before moonshine becomes moonshine. If you won't wait for it to ferment, it's applejack. My grandfather just drank a whole lot of applejack. And dated other women. Finally my grandmother said, "Enough is enough," and she left him, which was pretty strange for the 1920s. She raised her six children herself. She did people's laundry by night and was waitress at the Greyhound bus station in the day. The one poignant note: even though she'd thrown him out, she did his laundry for him until the day he died.

Currency © Tony McDermott (2014)

Block of Stamps | Amber Wessels

Synergistic Block of Stamps (2013) © Amber Wessels

Above Synergistic block of stamps on the theme of Art Deco Miami, by graphic design student Amber Wessels (2013) at the University of Northern Iowa.

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Rabbi David Aaron in Endless Light: The Ancient Path of the Kabbalah. Berkeley Trade, 1998—

One man who came to me for advice because he was contemplating a divorce told me mournfully why he thought the marriage went wrong. He said, "I know what my problem was. I was looking for a Ferrari and I got a Ford." I said, "I think the problem was you were looking for a car."

Jorunn Musil | Juicebox Interactive

Book cover design (2008) Jorunn Musil

I have often wondered: what would I prefer to be, a teacher or a parent? Having taught for more than forty years without having been a parent, I think I prefer to be what I am. Parental commitments are never-ending, largely under-appreciated, and all too frequently painful (unbearably so at times, for sure).

In contrast, teachers are so fortunate. Our commitment to any one student is brief, while the illusion of having contributed to a young person's success—when and if a student excels—can remain in ones memory for decades, and in fact can even continue to grow, if a former student then moves on to other, greater accomplishments on his or her own.

I have so many memories of that kind. And in part they remain vivid because I also have thousands (thousands!) of slides, prints, publications, and digital image files of work that was made by my students in class.

Above is one example: it's the front cover (dust jacket) of a book by Geraldine Schwarz (pertaining to Norwegian immigration in Iowa) titled Our Natural Treasure: Genevieve Kroshus (South Bear Press, 2008). Not just the dust jacket, but the entire book (every aspect of it) was designed and prepared for printing by Jorunn Musil, who was at that time an undergraduate in one of my graphic design courses at the University of Northern Iowa.

There were twenty students in that class, each of whom submitted a proposal for how they might design the book, inside and out, and in the end, Jorunn's design was selected. Later, she went on to many more achievements (including a long list of student awards), earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2010, then embarked on a highly successful career as a web designer.

And now she has taken an even more ambitious step—earlier this year, she and a couple of partners launched their own, new digital design agency in downtown Des Moines, called Juicebox Interactive. Here is the company website, as well as a feature on Jorunn herself.

Clara Barton | Kenneth Meisner

Portrait of Clara Barton (2012) © Kenneth Meisner

Above In a class about designing digital images, I asked my students to invent "interpretive portraits" of extraordinary men or women from the past, sung or unsung. Kenneth Meisner chose to celebrate the achievements of teacher, nurse and humanitarian Clara Barton (1821-1912).

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Clara Barton, The Story of My Childhood—

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.