Mary Adams Holmes (1910-2002) was a founding faculty member of Cowell College starting in 1965, its inaugural year. Her talks on the history and philosophy of art drew crowds of students and alumni well into the 1980s. She was also a prolific artist. The Mary Holmes Fireside Lounge carries on her legacy today by displaying her art work. It was dedicated to her memory at the Mary Holmes Festival and exhibit by Provost Faye Crosby and Chancellor George Blumenthal in October of 2014. If you look around the lounge, you will see, along with photos of Holmes, one of her numerous mythological paintings, The Return of Aquarius, and a portrait which she painted of Cowell’s founding provost, Page Smith.
This is Mary Holmes, dressed as the White Queen to participate in a student/faculty enactment of the chess game in Through the Looking Glass
Mary In Conversation
Page Smith and Mary Holmes at Cowell construction site ca. 1966
Portrait of Page Smith
In 1970, Cowell students commissioned Mary Holmes to paint the portrait of, Page Smith, which now hangs beside the entrance to the lounge. Before UCSC was conceived, Page Smith and his wife, Eloise Pickard Smith, the namesake of the gallery next door, knew Holmes in Los Angeles when Mary and Page taught at UCLA. In the early 1960s, Page was charged with assembling UCSC’s founding faculty. He insisted that Holmes join him in the great experiment which characterized the first years of UCSC history. Smith and Holmes went on to connect with the greater Santa Cruz community through The William James Association and Penny University. To learn more about the early days of Cowell and Mary Holmes’ influence on the university, read Smith’s oral history.
Return of Aquarius
More information about the subjects of the paintings can be found here.
In 1974 Mary Holmes painted the panels which can be seen in the gable above the lounge today. They depicts The Return of Aquarius, a theme related to the counterculture movement of the 60s and 70s which was associated with the astrological “Age of Aquarius”, often characterized by liberation, enlightenment, and technological advancement. According to Holmes, her installation, meant to be read from right to left, used mythic imagery to capture a spiritual dimension of human history and our place within it. She drew imagery from astrology, tarot, alchemy, mythology, and the bible.
Key:
- Latin translates: “O most blessed light, fill the inmost heart of your faithful.”
- Age of Taurus & Aries: Man at Home in Nature
- Age of Pisces: Despair (waters of the spirit poured onto dry ground)
- Age of Aquarius Begins: Sacrifice of the Virgin & Rebirth
- Aquarius as Water-bearer: Transformation (pouring waters of the spirit)
- Virgin and Unicorn
- Three aspects of woman (Mother, Virgin, and Prophetess) raise the water of the spirit
- World Reborn: New Adam and New Eve in the Tree of Knowledge
- Latin translates: “Without your divine spirit, nothing is in man, nothing is innocent.”
Mary describes the work in her lecture below.