Page 4 Edith Dale Monson Exhibit — George Lechner On September 26th, the Mortensen Library Board of Visitors presented an exhibition and opening reception in the 1877 Club entitled Edith Dale Monson: Hartford’s American Realist. The show displayed 22 drawings and   the poor and working class. Edith Monson, armed with a satchel filled with pastels, sketch pads, and assorted paints and brushes, sought to record life as she found it from the Lower East Side to Central Park, from Chinatown to the Hudson River and its Palisades. Ever socially active, Henri and Monson paintings by Hartford artist Edith Dale Monson, the aunt of Mortensen Board member Shepherd Holcombe. The exhibition featured an outstanding array of art from the collection of the Holcombe family, many of whom were present at the opening. Edith Dale Monson was born in New Haven in 1875 and educated at Smith College. She moved to New York to work as a free-lance illustrator and eventually entered the Art Students League, where she became a devoted pupil of Robert Henri. He was the co-founder of the avant-garde group called “The Eight”, a precursor to the fabled “Ashcan School” of urban realist painters. Henri was a charismatic and highly influencial teacher, and his students (and Edith Monson’s fellow classmates) included Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davis, and George Bellows. Henri’s goal was to have his students faithfully record the bustle and energy of the streets of New York and its people, with special attention paid to were in the forefront of the fight for women’s suffrage,unions and fair labor practices. Upon her return to Connecticut, Edith Monson settled in Hartford and established a studio on Asylum Street. She devoted the rest of her life to painting and teaching in the Hartford area. She was a founding member of Women Artists of Connecticut, and exhibited at the New Britain Museum of American Art and the Town and County Club in Hartford. The exhibit was selected and curated by Zina Davis, the director of the Joseloff Gallery. At the opening, adjunct faculty and Mortensen staff member George Lechner gave a presentation on Monson’s work and its relation to American realist art. To commemorate the event, Barbara Dessureau designed a series on note cards to sell for the benefit the Paul R. and Grace Parks Mitchell Endowment for Women’s Studies. Grant to Assess Freshman Information Literacy Skill – Jean Prescott The libraries of the University of Hartford, together with those of Saint Joseph College and Capital Community College, recently received a small grant from the Hartford Consortium for Higher Education to develop a joint online information literacy test for incoming freshmen. Reference librarians from the three schools will provide the questions that Diane Goldsmith of the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium will turn into a testing instrument during the 2006/2007 academic year.   Beginning in the Fall of 2007, the test will be administered to entering students and then, again, to the same students after completion of a library instruction session. Accreditation officials are increasingly emphasizing the importance of being able to quantify the success of academic coursework and other educational initiatives of the university. This grant will enable the bibliographic instruction programs of three schools to do so. You Otta be in Pictures The University’ 2006 Annual Report features photographs of a number of University students. We were pleased to spot two of our long-time student employees among them. Garleen St. Germain (photo on left), a senior biology-chemistry major who works in Circulation, was on the cover! Junior theatre division student Karina Maestre (photo on right) appears on page two. She works in the Reference Services department. Congratulations to both Karina and Garleen.