Managers3

ARTS: The Managers by Molly Rideout

The Lake View Terrace hotel has stood practically since the community’s founding in the 1880s. Originally designed as a boarding house for the vacationers who visited Green Mountain Falls each summer, the 10-room hotel served meals for 60 guests a day, including several dozen families camping in canvas platform tents in the valley behind. 

As a Green Box writer-in-residence, Molly Rideout teased from the historical archive the names and stories of the different women who ran the Terrace over the decades. Often older and single, widowed or divorced (or divorced and claiming to be widowed), Molly's work tracks the opportunities and limitations within which women worked at the turn of the 20th century in rural Colorado. 

And you are standing in front of the results – nine micro-essays installed on the front windows of the now abandoned Terrace building in downtown Green Mountain Falls.

This type of installation Rideout calls “Public Writing,” a form Rideout has used elsewhere in installations in Massachusetts, Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin.  This form is her response to how to blend public art and contemporary writing—recognizing that the act of opening a book, when you don’t know what to expect inside, can be daunting for many. She is interested in working with windows because they are a medium that people are comfortable looking at/through.

Molly shared with me that she totally fell in love with these women as she researched them. Although there was hardly anything about them in the public archive, she had to hunt for dots to connect through her research and writing. And she reminded me that these were all middle class white women—those with more clout than the women they hired as cooks and maids who remain anonymous. This type of work is always a humble reminder of who gets recorded in history and who (working class, BIPOC, queer, disabled) is never written about at all, if not actively erased.

I love Molly’s work because it makes visible a fragment of the invisible history that surrounds us at all time. When I experience Molly’s work, it evokes a sense of almost melancholy for me – Whose stories will we never know? Can we experience these amazing women if we don’t know the details of their lives from public archive? And how can art be a type of bridge for us to connect historical archive to our present experience of place? 

 Learn more at www.mollyrideout.com.

MOLLY RIDEOUT is a fiction and nonfiction writer and bookmaker who focuses largely on themes of place, rural history, and belonging. She often produces her work as public art or in handmade artist books. Recently, she was a 2022 Green Box Arts artist-in-residence and 2022 Mass Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction, the 2021 Writer-in-Residence at Edith Wharton’s “The Mount,” and a grantee of MASS MoCA’s North Adams Project. Her fiction-nonfiction chapbook Transient was published by Antenna::Paper Machine in autumn 2019. Her 2014-2015 project, "Public Writing, Public Libraries" included new writing installed in 13 Iowa libraries and was highlighted by the American Library Association and Poets & Writers. Other publications include River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Mississippi Review, Tampa Review Front Porch Journal, The Wapsipinicon Almanac, and Bluestem. She has installed her “public writing” in various locations across Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Colorado, and Massachusetts. Her artist books are held in the collections of Grinnell College, Colorado College, Michigan State University, and the Ohio State University.

Green Box Audio Tour
  1. Introduction and Hello! (UPDATED JUNE 2023)
  2. ARTS: Discover Green Box Arts and Meet Scott Levy
  3. ARTS: Green Box Co-Founders - "Green Box is for everybody!"
  4. ACCORDING TO THE KIDS: "What Do You Like About Green Mountain Falls?"
  5. HISTORY: Vintage Advertisements from Green Mountain Falls
  6. ARTS: Green Box Venue - The Farm Stand
  7. ARTS: "Open Skies" Installation by Brenda Biondo
  8. ARTS: Green Box Co-Founders: "You Can't Get that in New York!"
  9. HISTORY: Midland Depot
  10. ACCORDING TO THE KIDS: A local warning
  11. HISTORY: The Outlook Lodge
  12. SPIRITUALITY / HISTORY: Church in the Wildwood (with Pastor Darlene)
  13. ARTS: View of James Turrell Skyspace
  14. MUSIC: Adam Crystal's Green Box Theme
  15. ARTS: Green Box Co-Founder and President Christian Keesee on Green Box Arts
  16. SPIRITUALITY: Guided Meditation with Pastor Darlene
  17. ARTS: Nikki Pike's OVUM
  18. MUSIC: Green Box Artist-in-Residence Matthew Jamal's "Prayers and Palm Oil"
  19. ARTS: The "Shed" Artist Housing and Lakeview Terrace
  20. ARTS: EARTH.SPEAKS ámanikyatumɵ’ɵvi or “Resting Hand” 2023 -- by brooke smiley
  21. SPIRITUALITY: Aspen Grove and Tribute Walk
  22. ARTS: The Managers by Molly Rideout
  23. HISTORY: Sunshine Cottage - 7110 Maple Street
  24. HISTORY: The Armentrout House -- 10725 Ute Pass Avenue
  25. HISTORY: The Chapin House - 7210 Grand View
  26. HISTORY: Green Mountain Falls Hotel Site (Corner of Ute Pass and Hotel Streets)
  27. HISTORY: Aspen Lodge (11190 Belvidere)
  28. HISTORY: Hummingbird (11475 Belvedere)
  29. HISTORY: Harmony Hut and Westward Ho (11490 and 11496 Belvidere)
  30. ARTS: Schulhof's Curve - Public Art
  31. ARTS: Faime Walking - Public Art
  32. ARTS: Green Box Co-Founder Larry Keigwin on watching performance outdoors
  33. ARTS: Keith Haring Fitness Court
  34. ARTS: Heartmouth - Public Art
  35. ARTS: Skye by Brian Wall
  36. ARTS: Four Orbits - Public Art
  37. ARTS: Communication X9 - Public Art
  38. HISTORY: Sallie Bush Community Building (And An Exciting Update!)