When Abbie Reese starts talking about the Poor Clare Colettines, it’s as if she were telling you stories about a group of her closest friends.
And, after nearly 10 years collaborating — she is quick to give the nuns credit for the work she’s done with them — she probably does think of them as friends.
It all started when she was working on an art degree in Chicago. She met a woman who was an artist and a blogger and who was thinking about becoming a cloistered nun.
Abbie Reese is an independent scholar and interdisciplinary artist, and the author of “Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns” (Oxford University Press, 2014). In Reese’s relationship- and research-based artistic practice, she uses a hybrid of oral history, documentary, and ethnographic methods to explore individual and cultural identity — the construction of new identities and the performance of social roles — in primary oral cultures and enclosed communities. She received an MFA in visual arts from the University of Chicago (2013) and she was a fellow at the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Summer Institute (2008). She received a research scholarship from the Swiss Embassy for a three-month residence in Switzerland, to work on her collaborative film project at the University of Bern’s Institute of Social Anthropology. Reese volunteered for one year in the communications department onboard the world’s largest non-governmental hospital ship in West Africa, and served as handler for a BBC news team creating radio and TV reports for the World Service and the Six O’clock News. (She drove them by Land Rover to the border of Liberia to report on women’s health.) Her oral history and photography exhibit, “Erased from the Landscape: The Hidden Lives of Cloistered Nuns,” has been shown in galleries and museums and she has presented her work at academic conferences internationally. She has traveled in approximately 40 countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. She has just received an oral grant from The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. She’ll be using for her project, “Young Nuns: Discerning Religious Life in the 21st Century.” |
For Reese, the prospect of cutting oneself off from the world seemed drastic, countercultural. Why, she wondered, would anyone make such a choice?
Over the years, she and “Heather” — the pseudonym the other woman selected for Reese’s project — continued to talk. And Reese, who is not a Catholic, began to ask around. Did anyone know of any cloistered nuns in the area?
The Lanark native was surprised to learn of the Poor Clares who live behind a wall on Rockford’s south side.
The corner of South Main and Marchesano Drive, where the monastery is located, is in an area that has always been home to immigrant groups. Rockford’s first Italian Catholics developed the neighborhood. St Anthony of Padua Parish is a few blocks away from the monastery.
But the Italians were joined, and in some areas, succeeded by Poles, African-Americans, Hispanics and others. The mix of cultures has sometimes created an uneasy neighborhood, but regardless of the beliefs of the neighbors, there has always been respect for the women behind the walls.
Reese, when she began talking to the nuns, developed her own respect for the women, their way of life, their dedication to God.
That, in fact, would inspire the title of her book, “Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns.”
Her friend, “Heather,” would eventually join the Poor Clares after several years of discernment and struggles with her family. Despite being Catholic, they were reluctant to have their daughter join such a strict order that would prohibit her leaving the cloister for family milestones — weddings, funerals, and the like.
Reese, though, had found a story she couldn’t help but record.
Her work with the sisters began with conversation, and observation. Eventually, the mother abbess, gave permission for Abbie to come behind the walls.
She tells of receiving permission to listen in on an interview with the mother … and a potential novice. “I’ll be a fly on the wall,” Reese promised. “I won’t say a word.”
But after listening quietly for a time, she had a question.
And she asked it.
“Fly on the wall, huh?” mother responded, with mock sternness.
Reese admits she was mortified at realizing how quickly she broke her own promise. But she also says the moment taught her both that nuns were not without a sense of humor, and that she needed to work a little harder on doing what she said she would do.
Along the way, Reese asked for and received permission to take photographs and make audio recordings inside the cloister, then to take video, and eventually to let the sisters borrow a video camera.
Reese had asked that “Heather,” by then Sister Amata, use the video camera. Later she realized it was not typical that someone so young be given that kind of “privilege.”
But when other sisters began to use the camera, too, the breadth of the record of life inside the monastery grew.
Learn more about the lives of the nuns in their own words by reading Reese’s “Dedicated to God.”
Then join others to meet Reese, hear her tell more stories of her work with the nuns Oct. 18 at the One Diocese, One Book gathering.