Welcome back! 2017 is here, and I am back to posting my ramblings about my experiences in the Ramonat Seminar. In addition to spending time with my family and friends back home in St. Louis over winter break, I was able to spend some time further organizing my research project. After some consideration, I decided to narrow my project to focus on two of the three “Holy Trinity of artists”—Ade Bethune and Rita Corbin. This way, I can focus the relationship between gender, social activism, and art within the Catholic Worker Movement. Also, the time restraints of my project make narrowing my project in this way a necessity. Currently, the digital project that I am envisioning for my research has the tentative title of Labor of Love: the Women Artists of the Catholic Worker Newspaper.
For each artist, I have identified primary source material that I will be traveling to retrieve in the coming weeks. For Ade Bethune, I will be traveling to St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota to visit the Ade Bethune Collection (I excitedly received a Myser Grant to cover travel costs!). The collection is a very rich resource of Ade Bethune’s papers, books, artwork, correspondence, book manuscripts, drawings, memorabilia, sketchbooks, photographs, journals, engravings, and more. Visiting the archive will be a valuable resource for me to retrieve scans of the artwork for my digital project as well as retrieve additional information about Ade Bethune’s involvement with the newspaper.
Researching Rita Corbin has been difficult from the beginning—little research has been conducted on her, and her artwork is not currently held in an archive. However, through some emailing and even Facebook messaging, I discovered that Rita Corbin left a large corpus of her work to the New York Catholic Worker newspaper headquartered in New York City, which I will hopefully travel to in mid-February. Additionally, Corbin created a yearly Catholic Worker Calendar for decades that her daughter, Maggie Corbin, continues to produce. Maggie Corbin has sent me the 2017 calendar containing reproductions of her mother’s artwork. I am excited to receive it and look through it!
Although most of my primary sources will come to me only after I make my research trips in February, the artwork and sources I have already come across make me very excited to develop my project through the semester. Additionally, my research has proven to be very pertinent to the events of the past week, in which women across the country used themselves, their labor, and artistic skill to stand up for justice in marches across the country. As cited on her website, Rita Corbin was once asked, “Do you believe the artist has a social responsibility?” She responded, “Everyone has a social responsibility.” This semester, I am hoping that I can follow in the footsteps of Corbin and use my studies at Loyola and work in the Ramonat Seminar to exercise my social responsibility to advocate for love and justice.