Big! In November, art professor Joseph Smith had a one-person show at 55 Mercer Street Gallery in New York City of his recent sculpture and drawings. Created this year, these pieces are much larger in scale than Smith’s usual work. He used wood, stone, steel, wax, and wire—much of the time in combination—to create them. Smith’s art was also on view in a group show at the Saul Kolfler Gallery in Providence, Rhode Island, this fall.

Going Back to School Lois A. Brown, assistant professor of English, read from the Memoir of James Jackson: The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1883, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months by his Teacher, Miss Susan Paul, the earliest-known biography by and about an African American, November 8 at the historic Abiel Smith School in Boston (the first public school in the country for African American children and part of The Museum of Afro-American History). Brown first saw a reference to the 1835 book and its author three years ago, while combing through nineteenth-century newspapers. She later found five copies of the book’s first edition. After Brown rediscovered the memoir, she sought a reprinting of the book, and the new edition of the Memoir of James Jackson, with an introduction by Brown, was reissued in 1999. The story of how Brown found this unique piece of African American history was featured this September in the Boston Sunday Globe. Currently on leave from MHC on a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, Brown is spending the year at Harvard University’s DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research.

What's new with you? Send news for “New & Notable” to Janet Tobin, Office of Communications, or email jtobin@mtholyoke.edu.