The Willow Room Terrace is, for its occasional visitor, a place of quiet contemplation overlooking the Great Lawn. On the East-facing side of the terrace is a modern sculpture of a Mother and Child, fashioned of stone surfaced with a thin layer that has acquired a green patina.
I very much admire it and wondered when and by whom it was created, for it bears no inscription. No one seemed to know. Nor is it mentioned on any of the searchable pages of this MLRA website.
In pursuit of its provenance I indexed and performed phrase searches on an archive of files, kindly provided to me by Ann Campbell, which comprised the 510 issues of the residents’ journal Medford Leas Life dating back to August 1971. Importantly, most archived issues originated well before the first use in January 2004 of computer-based composition. These 321 earlier issues had been scanned and converted to text using optical character recognition in a Herculean task performed by David Bartram!
Just as well! The sole issue of MLL describing this sculpture was in January 1984. The reported occasion was auspicious through its connection with Lewis Barton who founded Medford Leas a dozen years earlier and who had just retired as President. Shown below is the image of the article:
Text from MLL January 1984, Page 5, emphasis added.
Presented to Medford Leas by the anonymous donors of the unrestricted Arboretum Fund administered by the Arboretum Oversight Committee. A few of our trustees and residents attended the unveiling ceremony led by former president Lewis Barton.
Marjorie Michael, a Katonah, N.Y. sculptor-photographer, was contacted this past summer and the “Mother and Child” piece was selected. She says, “To me this piece is a celebration of life . The mother embraces her child yet looks up to the creator of all life. “Mrs. Michael, mother of six grown children, has done many sculptures on the mother and child theme. Trained at Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., she has recently exhibited in Miami, Georgia, Tennessee, and N. Carolina, NYC and Westchester County where she presently lives.
Ms. Michael is also an award-winning photographer. Her photographs of tropical flowers have appeared on covers of the Fairchild Tropical Garden horticultural magazine. She is the sculptor-author [with Virginia Olsen Baron] of the book*,
“A Woman’s Journey: Sculpture by Marjorie Michael“, (Alfred Knopf, 1976). Her busts include one of Quaker economist-poet , Dr. Kenneth Boulding.
This sculpture is located on the Willow Room Terrace. It was unveiled December 1, 1983
Photo by Paul Deuell
Coda: The Willow Room terrace will be reconfigured as a dining place this year. Jane Weston is committed to finding a home for this sculpture as a centerpiece in a future refurbished Courtyard.
More about the sculptor:
This self-published booklet by the artist contains photographs of clay figurines of female subjects whose depicted emotions range from sorrow to celebration.
(Available used from Amazon).
In 1994, the Sunday New York Times published a lengthy article on Marjorie Michael, who had died of ALS the previous year. Her hands had been spared from the deterioration wrought by her condition, and she continued to mount exhibitions. In her later years she championed gay civil rights.
Subscribers to The New York Times can read the archived article online at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1994/03/20/493805.html?pageNumber=507.
Text and photographs: Fred Kahan.