From mirrorindy.org
Janet Fry’s great-great-grandmother’s journal from 1875 is the subject of a new exhibition at Storage Space Gallery
When Janet Fry’s mother gave her a pocket diary from her great-great-grandmother, Caroline Currey Kelso, she put it in her nightstand drawer. It stayed in that drawer for almost two decades, but it also remained in the back of her mind.
In May 2024, Fry, 72, pulled the diary out. It had big bold numbers across the front: 1875.
“It was in a wooden box,” she explained. “At some point, somebody made a wooden box to keep the diary in, so that it wouldn’t get destroyed or harmed.”
It soon occurred to her that the diary would be 150 years old in 2025. So Fry, an artist and former Indianapolis Star online producer and designer, started thinking of a way to showcase the diary’s anniversary.
The resulting exhibition opens Oct. 17 at Storage Space Gallery, including recorded diary excerpts, enlarged reproductions of the diary pages themselves, and Fry’s own art.
But before Fry could round up her friends to read excerpts from the diary, or form her own artistic responses to it, she first had to transcribe it.
“I have a very strong magnifying glass that actually belonged to my mother,” she said.
The diary was written partly in pen and partly in pencil, which was sometimes smudged. Through the process of deciphering it, she came to know her great-great-grandmother, who wrote about everything — from mundane daily tasks to giving birth — in the sparest prose imaginable.
A real housewife of 1875 Illinois
Caroline Currey Kelso was born in 1839 in Kentucky, and spent much of her life on the Illinois prairie. She married William Kelso (1831-1915), a Hoosier, at the age of 15. According to ancestry records, she had at least 10 children, but might have had more children that died in infancy. Kelso died in 1880 at the age of 41 in Arcola, Illinois.
“She repeatedly talks about being lonely,” Fry said. “She’s surrounded by nine or 10 children, and she has visitors from time to time, but she’s still lonely.”
Fry saw connections between Kelso’s loneliness and feelings of isolation she sees in the world today.
“But the other thing that I felt was very relevant is what I’m calling her lack of agency over her own body,” Fry said. “She just really had no way, seemingly, to prevent pregnancy, and she just became pregnant time and time again. Every other year she was giving birth.”
Kelso kept the diary for the entire year. In her diary, despite the fact that she became pregnant around late January, there are only hints of that pregnancy in her entries as the day approaches. On Oct. 4, she wrote that she had to work all day despite not feeling very good. And then on Oct. 7 she wrote, “I had a boy at 1:30 in the morning.”
“That’s the first time we knew that she was giving birth again,” Fry said.
Voices from the past
Reading her great-great-grandmother’s words revealed an entire world to Fry. She wanted others to experience this immediacy as well. With the help of a high-resolution book scanner at IU Indianapolis University Library and archival printers at Aurora Photo Center, she made enlarged reproductions of some diary pages.
Fry also recruited 12 women artists to record themselves reading from the diary, with each woman reading one month of entries. The recordings are online, and will be available to listen to in the exhibition.
Freelance grantwriter Anne Laker read the month of June.
“There was a lot of potato harvesting,” Laker said, describing the entries. “There was a lot of waiting for neighbours to come and assist.”
One of Laker’s favourite things about the diary entries is how Kelso commented on the weather.
“She was searching for beauty, probably in a somewhat bleak and challenging situation. And I feel like the weather is its own entertainment, its own drama, its own determinant,” Laker said. “It determines how your day goes, or how your harvest goes, or how your outdoor work project goes, and so might determine your mood. That always resonates with me as a diary keeper myself.”
Giving shape to history
As a sculptor and painter, Fry felt inspired to bring Kelso’s experiences into the present day in a more tangible way. She created a number of pieces for the exhibition, interpreting passages from the diary that stuck with her.
One of her assemblages includes antique pitchforks with their business ends facing each other. Into this pocket, she nestled a pair of ceramic hands in a bed of kale and vegetables.
The untitled assemblage was inspired by this diary entry from Friday, May 21, 1875: “Pa worked up town. It rained some, cloudy all day. I worked in the garden with my heart and mind full of trouble. Feel so weak that I can’t hardly hold the hoe. Had greens for supper.”
The exhibition also features a free-standing painting installed on vintage casters. Fry said the display is a reference to the Victorian fascination with mechanical things and follies.
One of the entries that inspired the painting, clues the viewer in on the living conditions behind its bittersweet tone: “Saturday July 17: Pa worked uptown. I whitewashed and cleaned my house. It was a pretty day all day. But it rained after dark. Pa come home late and drunk.”
Perhaps the most interactive piece in the exhibit is a Victorian chair that Fry reupholstered with fabric printed with images from the diary. The chair is a listening station where you can hear the diary entries being read.
“The diary is read by these women in different ages, different walks of life,” Fry said, “and what they bring to it: their sensibility.”
https://mirrorindy.org/art-opening-1875-journal-midwest-history-storage-space-gallery-janet-fry/
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