Carol Huebner Venezia

From Ragnarokr
Revision as of 11:41, 23 March 2007 by Philip (Talk | contribs)

(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to: navigation, search

“Carol Huebner Venezia was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1947. Her parents were both politically left, especially her father who was a Conscientious Objector during WWII and protested the Vietnam War weekly in silent vigil at the University of Minnesota until he was the last man standing by the end of the war. Carol became a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) while a high school senior and continued to be politically active when she entered Antioch College in 1965. She took part in political actions in Dayton and Columbus, Ohio. In November 1965 she traveled with an SDS contingent from Antioch to a mass protest against the Viet Nam war in Washington DC. At that protest she met David Woodward, through her Antioch friend Susan Hill, who was a high school girlfriend of David's. Carol and David fell in love and began a long distance correspondence. He was a student at Haverford College, outside of Philadelphia and she was attending Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

In the winter of 1966 David traveled to Chicago to visit Carol where she was working as a nurse's aid at Wesley Memorial Hospital through the Antioch College co-op work program. David spent the next summer with her in Yellow Springs and in Fall 1966 Carol took a co-op job at Nicetown Boys Club in Philadelphia so she could be near David who had returned to school at Haverford. David was not happy at the school and talked of dropping out even though he knew that would mean he would be drafted.

In the spring of 1967 David left Haverford and he and Carol went to San Francisco to be part of the hippie movement there. They rented an apartment with other Antioch Students and both got jobs. The vitality of the peace movement and the hippie lifestyle in San Francisco only deepened David's resolve to refuse to serve in the Vietnam War. He researched various options such as declaring C.O. status however when he received his draft notice and passed his physical he decided to go to Canada. In the fall of 1967 he crossed into Canada through Vancouver without asking for immigrant status. His parents disowned him and he was very much on his own and living illegally in Canada. He and Carol decided that she should return to school since his future was so unsure.

By the winter of 1967 David had moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba and Carol traveled up by train from Minneapolis to visit him over the Christmas holidays. At first his living conditions were rough. The place were he was living had no heat and at one point the water in the toilet froze. David survived by working part-time for a communist bookstore and taught as a substitute teacher. One day when answering a knock on his door, he opened it to find a six-foot Canadian Mountie wearing a tall beaver hat. The Mountie just wanted to confirm that he was in fact David Woodward. The Mountie did not ask him to leave Canada. He only wanted to verify that David was living at that address. David never understood how the RCMP found him. Carol's father sent him a small amount of money so he could buy a winter coat. Even though his situation improved, in March 1968 David decided to move to Toronto where he had heard the draft resister community was more organized. That part of the story is covered in other accounts.

Carol came up to Toronto that spring and stayed with David at 224 McCaul Street. She spent her junior year 1968-69 in Beirut, Lebanon. David wrote many letters to her documenting how the community was growing and changing in Canada. When Carol returned in the summer of 1969 Dave was a member of the leather shop commune. They both worked in the leather shop that summer and in the fall moved up to the Stoney Lake Hotel with Mary Rauton, Susan Woolaver and others. Carol and David almost died one night when, to keep warm, they closed themselves in their room with a burning hibachi and woke up aching from carbon dioxide poisoning. It was soon clear David wanted to end their relationship and Carol returned to Yellow Springs to finish her student teaching. Dave convinced her to come back up in the spring of 1969 to try again. Carol worked two jobs, mornings at a coffee shop under the name of Mary Rauton and nights as a cocktail waitress at a disco. Dave began his career as a musician in Downchild Blues Band. Their relationship ended for good and Carol stayed on in Toronto to work in the leather shop and write her senior thesis on a design for an alternative school. Carol left in June 1970 to graduate from Antioch College.

After graduation, Carol drove cross-country with Michael Malan, two other friends from Antioch College and her childhood friend, Mugs. Carol and Michael, who had been close friends for years, became lovers and moved into a commune near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. With her first paycheck from Macy's Department Store Carol bought a used camera and began to pursue her interest in photography. When she was fired by Macy's for asking to work part-time, she found work in a hippie sweat shop, East-West Musical Instrument Company, sewing leather clothes. The aftermath of the Sixties had left San Francisco with a bad situation with street people who were now on hard drugs. Michael and Carol would often go to visit Colleen Anderson who was living in Auburn, California in a communal house called Big Pink with her son Seth, Steven Watson, and Mary Halstedler. In 1971, Michael Malan and CarolHuebner decided to move to Auburn and found a small house in Applegate. That summer Michael, Carol, and Colleen, 2-year-old Seth and a friend, Joel drove cross-country to visit Toronto, stopping in Chicago to visit Don Holman and Judy who were living there.

Carol and Michael spent the next ten years in Auburn working for local newspapers as an editorial team, and became part of a wonderfully creative and diverse alternative community there. In 1977 Carol was accepted into the MFA photography program at Rochester Institute of Technology. She and Fred Knox (a friend from Auburn) drove across Canada to visit Colleen and George Mullins at Frost pocket. During graduate school in Rochester, her marriage to Michael Malan ended and she met and fell in love with the painter, Michael Venezia.

After graduation in 1979 Carol moved to New York to live in the loft Michael had recently acquired in the artist quarter of Manhattan called Tribeca. They married Sept 29, 1979 in Bridgehampton, Long Island at the home of the artist, Dan Flavin. While on a two-month honeymoon traveling through Europe, a friend of Michael's, Sol Lewitt suggested they visit him in Spoleto, Italy, where he had just bought a house. They did, fell in love with the area and in 1982 bought their own house/ruin in Trevi, Italy. Their son, Luca was born in November 1981 and is an electronic music artist in a band called Drop the Lime, who tours the world. In September 2006, Carol had a one person show of her boxer portraits at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, Germany that will travel to Vienna, Berlin and Spoleto. She currently divides her time between their home in Umbria, Italy and a studio apartment at 20 North Moore Street in Manhattan, New York. She is Professor of Art at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University-Brookville in Brookville, NY.”

Personal tools