Harriet Matthews Tribute: Abbott Meader, Tom Higgins, Duncan Hewitt, James Ffrench, Luke Johnson

Harriett Matthews (21 June 1940–23 June 2026)

Earlier this summer, on 23 June, Harriett Matthews passed away, leaving a house and barn filled with a lifetime of artwork. By a felicitous coincidence, our fall issue is dedicated to Mapping, a theme made all the more resonant as this collection of reminiscences maps her lasting impact on her colleagues and students.

Abbott Meader was there when Matthews first interviewed at Colby in 1966, becoming the college’s first full-time female studio faculty member. Tom Higgins was hired by Matthews to teach painting and served as her colleague from 1974 to 1978. Duncan Hewitt (Colby ’71) went on to become a noted sculptor, while James Ffrench (Colby ’85) is now a noted carpet dealer and chair of the Colby College Museum Board of Governors. Finally, Luke Johnson now teaches in her former studio.

The photo above, taken by Harriett’s friend John Meader, offers a wonderfully rich portrait of who she was. This portrait captures her unique laugh (remembered by three of our contributors); her enduring love of her native “Kan City”; her quirky sense of humor, reflected in the playful images displayed behind her; and her precise drawings, embodied by the neatly organized, perfectly sharpened pencils above her desk. If you look closely, you’ll even notice the missing tip of her right index finger, lost while sculpting, a moment recounted here by Tom Higgins.

A gathering to remember Harriett Matthews will be held at Colby College on Sunday, 18 October, at 3:00 p.m. in the Parker-Reed Room of the Schair-Swenson-Watson Alumni Center. All are welcome. Please RSVP to Sarah Yakawonis (syakawon@colby.edu) by 11 October.

—Véronique Plesch

Abbott Meader

I can see her, a young Harriett Matthews, coming through the doorway of the Bixler Building and walking toward me. She had arrived for an interview to become the first female full-time studio faculty appointment in the history of the college. If hired, she would teach sculpture, drawing, and a bit of art history. This was 1966. The slides of work that Harriett had sent us had impressed us greatly. The woman worked in wood carving, drawing, and welded steel! She got the job!

In her early days at Colby, she and I would often have a cafeteria lunch together to talk about art and swap in-class stories. We learned from each other, comparing notes and discussing our artistic undertakings and our teaching experiences. It was clear from the start that Harriett was a serious and determined person, and also one with a great sense of humor—her own laugh was distinctive, frequent, and memorable—and she valued good companionship, enjoying dinner parties, events, and outings with friends. Harriett delighted in the small things of daily life, finding them both magical and moving.

She became a distinguished sculptor, teacher, and mentor with a hands-on approach. She taught and inspired generations of students through her creativity and belief in the transformative power of art. Her artwork explored both wilderness and domesticity. The works she produced over her lifetime, especially in welded steel, are both elegant and emotionally deep. She was an artist. An artist and teacher who loved her work. Who loved her house, but also traveled widely. She loved her flower garden and the birds who flocked to her feeders. She also loved the mystery of mountains and the vast, eternal wonder of the sea.

Tom Higgins – Memories of Harriett Matthews

Because of Harriett, I had the opportunity to move with my wife and infant daughter to Maine over fifty years ago. Harriett interviewed me at a College Art Association conference, and she thought I was worthy of a follow-up interview with Jim Carpenter, her department chair. Thus, I had the privilege of being her colleague from 1974 through 1978.

What I came to admire about Harriett was her honest conviction regarding her artistic vision, which was initially grounded in her studies with her mentor, Leonard deLonga (at the University of Georgia), and which never succumbed to passing fads in the art world. She was dedicated to her teaching and imparted to her students this sense of personal creativity as well as a committed work ethic. She was determined, because of this devotion, to avoid having to take a turn as department chair, feeling that she could better serve her students by focusing on her teaching and growth as a practicing sculptor. As far as I know, she completed her career without ever having that title.

One particular event comes to mind when Harriett lost part (if not most) of a finger in a late-night studio accident. This mishap, however, did not slow her down or curtail her production for very long. Another memory that stands out is from 1992, when we were both attending another College Art Association conference, at which time she came to communicate the tragic news that Jim Carpenter and his daughter Jane had both died in a drowning accident in Puerto Rico. This was a shared moment of grief.

Not many years ago, I had the pleasure of viewing a show of Harriett’s very strong and personally expressive drawings that resulted from her sojourns in Greece. As a painter who loves to draw landscapes, I had an immediate emotional connection to her work. Although I did not see Harriett often in later years, I felt an affection for her and am deeply saddened that she is no longer with us.

Duncan Hewitt – Harriett

I have felt Harriett Matthews’ presence for almost sixty years, and I don’t know if I will be able to convey just how much it has affected me. She was my teacher at Colby College—drawing, but foremost sculpture—and my introduction to sculpture.

With Harriett there was an immediate recognition that I was going to make things for my own reasons. I felt her unspoken excitement and delight in this. At the same time, and just as crucially, I was not going to be able to bypass the intrinsic formal qualities within the language. There ought to be sculptural “blood” in your work, and this likely will be a rigorous, if quirky, process. Somehow I was bumped into a kind of three-dimensional visual humor, which she fostered without ever overtly teaching it. If these two qualities, finding my own structure and grasping the language, might easily be at odds, with her they weren’t.

Harriett was immersed. She was a highly skilled craftsperson working with a difficult material: metal. She drew as a means to explore the source (first in Italy, then in Greece) for her work and for the act of drawing. If her subject matter was from elsewhere, the place where all this came together was in Clinton, Maine—a home, a museum, and, if you opened the back kitchen door, and you were in her fully equipped metal shop. Above her kitchen table hung a portrait of Harriett painted by Lois Dodd. Nearby was a barn with an immense body of fully developed work. Once, among numerous trips there, I saw a piece referencing Etruscan architecture, which, in her hands, had become a complex of metal domes. Within those she had situated a glass cylinder holding a single Italian porcupine quill, a jolt but just right—and a connection that made all the difference.

She worked nonstop—pushed it—growing a remarkably caring imagination. There was, as revealing as anything else, her laugh, kind of an explosion. All at once you would feel a space open up—empathy and questioning.

After my first two semesters in her sculpture class, I headed off to my roommate’s New Hampshire farmhouse. The idea was to paint the house in the morning, and to make sculpture in the afternoon, one piece a week. Upon hearing about this, Harriett loaded me up with a stack of art magazines and books. When I returned to college in the fall, she asked me how many credits I wanted to take in sculpture that semester. I said twelve.

James Ffrench – To Harriett

I will never forget the first serious and meaningful discussion we had sitting on the staircase outside the drawing studio on the second floor of Bixler. It was during my first drawing class, and after sizing up my appearance as an oafish fraternity boy that I probably was, you took me out of class to set the record straight: drawing was hard work and I was in the wrong place with the wrong professor if I was looking for a gut class and an easy grade! At that point, no one could have guessed that I would end my Colby career as your student assistant for sculpture.

You truly changed my life. As you will remember, when I first declared my intentions of being an art major, my father was none too pleased—in fact, he threatened to make me withdraw from Colby if I didn’t pursue a “serious course of study”—until he met with you. The conviction and dedication that you demonstrated to him regarding your life and work convinced him that this was perhaps something worthwhile for his son to pursue. (As an aside, your impression on my father was equally long-lasting as it was on me: almost every time I spoke with him until his own passing, he inevitably asked, “How’s Harriett doing?”). More importantly, however, your conversation with my father made me realize that while I was right to pursue this new passion of mine, it was going to take a strong work ethic, and I was going to have to take it seriously!

Being your student was incredibly hard—but rewarding—work, and my fondest memories of Colby continue to be the time I spent in the sculpture studio and the times spent helping you photograph your own sculptures during my senior year. From you I learned to always question what I was making/doing with a very critical eye . . . how I could do it differently, or better . . . how to see other possibilities in exploring the same idea through different spatial relationships, etc. In short, you trained my eye. My art history classes taught me about art, but you taught me how to look at art. This is an ability I use every day in my post-Colby career and is ultimately the one thing responsible for any success I have achieved. Thank you!

While I am saddened that I won’t get to experience your heartfelt guffaw of laughter and your tender, caring nature—albeit sometimes hidden by a gruff exterior—this is not a time for regret, rather a time for celebration of your life and the countless influences you have had on so many. I was incredibly fortunate to have had you as a teacher and a mentor for the past forty-plus years, but I am most proud and honored to have been able to call you my friend. A friendship I know will last for eternity in my heart and soul.

Luke Johnson

I teach drawing at Colby College, in a narrow, rectangular room on the second floor of the Bixler Art Center. Even when the floor is freshly waxed before the semester begins, the air still smells faintly of India ink and newsprint, as lingering evidence of continuous use. During slideshows on perspective, I share a few drawings by Harriett Matthews, one of my predecessors in this studio, where she taught drawing from 1967–2013. Many feature wide expanses of the Greek islands and countryside rendered in energetic cross-contour lines. Undulating rows of apricot and olive trees dot the page, their rounded forms echoing her sculpture. Stone buildings weave among the patchwork of orchards and fields in ever-diminishing scale into the distance, the drawn lines evaporating into the atmosphere of the page. 

Through sustained observation over several decades of travel, Harriett’s drawings are evidence of an ongoing dialogue—a call-and-response with places as she saw them directly and as she understood them through the palpable sense of their histories. They are translations: form into contour, textures into pattern, differing tones defining the illusion of space. At moments, her lines jump free of the boundaries they otherwise define, shooting off like illegible cursive or a wave of sound, evoking the living energy or feeling of a place beyond what the purely descriptive alone can capture. When she erases, soft-edged white marks carve through these different strata of depiction like an elemental force—wind, weather, or erosion—tempering the decisive silver of the graphite. It is an active form of seeing, never still, never numb to what is being perceived. When I point to these drawings, part of what I mean to communicate to students is that they are now part of this dialogue too.

I only knew Harriett briefly, having met her during receptions at the Colby College Museum of Art. She spent a great deal of time with each work on display, and I overheard her bemoan the speed with which other visitors breezed through the gallery. Don’t they realize what they’re missing? The nuance of material, the qualities of line, the subtle humor of a particular image, all revealed to her careful attention and delight. “It’s incredible,” she said.