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.