Bobbie Norfleet: Still trailblazing in her 90s

0
"Am I Pretty?" Art by Barbara Norfleet.

Bobbie (Barbara P.) Norfleet has always pushed the envelope. In addition to a storied academic career, the 90-year-old resident of Cambridge and Chilmark has an impressive photography portfolio, on display now at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital and the Gay Head Gallery (which re-opens by appointment Memorial Day weekend).

Ms. Norfleet received her Ph.D. in social relations in psychology from Harvard in 1951; she was one of only three women to earn a Ph.D. that year in any of the university’s departments.

After teaching for 10 years, Ms. Norfleet took an Intro to Photography course at age 45, which changed the direction of her life. Eventually, Ms. Norfleet became a photographer and curator at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. She can be credited with designing and teaching the first studio course mixing sociology, anthropology, and photography, which was a surprise hit after the politically turbulent late ’60s.

Ms. Norfleet has published six books of her own work, which include “All the Right People,” “The Illusion of Orderly Progress,” “Landscape of the Cold War,” and “Manscape with Beasts.” Her 13 other books utilize images from her curated collection, now housed at Harvard’s Fogg Museum.

Ms. Norfleet’s own photos were first exhibited in 1979, but they have proved timeless. Just last year, her work was included in three exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. She is represented in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. That’s just to name a few, not to mention over 250 private collections which house her work.

Ms. Norfleet first came to the Vineyard in 1954 with her husband and baby son, staying as weekend guests at the Barn House in Chilmark. The following summer they returned as guests of friends in Aquinnah. Eventually they built a house on Great Pond in West Tisbury, “with neither electricity or telephone,” where they lived for the next 20 years. When Ms. Norfleet’s husband passed away, she gave that house to her kids and bought her current home in Chilmark.

The nonagenarian’s accomplishments are social as well as academic and artistic. She and five other women broke the gender barrier at the Harvard Faculty Club, where wives and female faculty used a separate entrance and had their own dining room, but were not allowed to enter any other part of the club. There were no tenured women teaching at Harvard when Ms. Norfleet started there. After “publishing a few books,” she got tenure, though can no longer recall what year.

The gang of six women decided they would fight for tenure. They had to prove women were being discriminated against before Harvard would set up a committee to review female faculty for tenure. Ms. Norfleet interviewed female staff, mostly language teachers, “because the only people they could get to teach these obscure languages like Sanskrit were women, and the only way they could get them to leave their countries of origin was to say they wouldn’t fire them.” At that time, Ms. Norfleet said, there were only about 20 female faculty members, but they made inroads which forever changed Harvard.

These days, Ms. Norfleet is still pursuing her art. One of her current projects is “Swamps,” which she started “about five years ago” when one of her images of a swamp was featured in a book. She loved the book, and decided she wanted to focus on swamps when she retired. First, she went “down South where they have all these swamps with boardwalks through them, and they’re easy to photograph because they are very proud of them.” However, Ms. Norfleet was not happy with the pictures, so she “threw away those pictures and started to do it in New England.” Now she “had to muck through a mile of brambles and trees to get to them.” Ms. Norfleet used a topographical map to find swamps in New England. “I love the pictures,” she said. All are panoramas (which you can see at Gay Head Gallery when it reopens; a percentage of sales supports environmental causes). Ms. Norfleet’s photos are also on display at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.

The last project Ms. Norfleet completed was “Drink: The Pleasures and Perils of Alcohol,” which she exhibited at Hampshire College in 2014. The Boston Globe wrote of the show: “The technique Norfleet uses is early 20th century photographic collages, in the manner pioneered by John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch. In their condemnation of alcohol, the collages display the wisdom — and a tad of the sententiousness — of someone soon to enter her 10th decade. No less do they display a sass and spunk worthy of an artist just starting out and with many places still to go.”

Presently, Ms. Norfleet is focused on another project she calls “Giving Up,” about “the things you have given up when you are older — everything from martinis to men, to surfing, to sailing, to makeup, spike heels, bikinis; the things you no longer do when you get to be over 90.”

Between a book club, weekly dinner with girlfriends, and the Cambridge plant club (now called the Garden Club), where she is both the oldest member in age and membership (she joined in 1958), Ms. Norfleet fills her time with friends, her daily two-mile dog walks, family, and her work. Despite all that’s been given up, Ms. Norfleet remains an inspiration.