Echoes of Seema

Seema Weatherwax spent the last ten years of her life tirelessly collecting, organizing and presenting parts of her history. Having dealt with the mess of materials left by her husband Jack Weatherwax's unexpected death and seeing the ways biographers of friends like Ansel Adams could misrepresent the people she knew, she was inspired to tell her own story. The 80+ hours of interviews between Sara Halprin, who would go on to write  Seema's Show: A Life on the Left , and Seema Weatherwax represent the unedited form of Seema telling her story.

As a  CART fellow UC Santa Cruz , I had the privilege of listening to the majority of these eighty hours and, in the process, came to feel a closeness to this woman I will never meet. But perhaps  this collection  and what one might possibly gain from it require a definition of 'meeting' that emphasizes encounter and influence rather than temporal and spatial closeness. After all, in many ways I did meet this incredible woman as our lives intersected and a relationship, albeit an unconventional one, formed. This relationship is one I can only compare to the relationship I have and would hope to have with my grandparents. While Seema never gave birth to any children, she was a mother and a grandmother to more than most. It is my hope that through the preservation, processing and presentation of  Sara Halprin's interviews with Seema , Seema's role as a motherly teacher can continue.

As I considered how I might present this collection as a digital exhibit, I reflected on how Seema might want her words represented. Seema believed in the historical value of every life and, beyond the ways her life intersected with certain historically relevant figures and happenings, wanted to tell her story to inspire others to tell theirs. Sara Halprin, a writer, documentary filmmaker, academic and therapist was certainly sensitive to these wishes and beliefs in the way she went about writing Seema's Show. While Halprin's book represents a more complete and conventional biographical picture of Seema's life, the audio collages and images that follow offer a segmented and improvised encounter with Seema that reflects my archival experience.

The six audio collages each outline a broad theme Sara and Seema continually return to throughout the interviews: aging, politics, her husband Jack, life, photography, change. Rather than define Seema's life with a collection of nouns and roles, I hope to allow her to present herself through these selections. The segments of the interviews are ones I earmarked as being particularly relevant or personally moving as I processed the collection. The music and field recordings are from my collection of unreleased compositions and recordings that I selected to accompany the text. In a similar fashion, I selected photographs from the  Seema Weatherwax photographs and papers  collection to provide visual accompaniment to Seema's words. Thus, as much as this exhibit represents Seema, I recognize it also reflects my personal encounter with Seema. In doing so, I hope to not only offer my unique encounter with Seema, but to show how archival practice, and by this I mean the whole totality of activity surrounding an archive, necessarily includes the personal. In thinking about who this collection is for, I think about who Seema would want her words to be for. They are for everyone.

May these echoes of Seema inspire others to listen to this great teacher tell her story.

Brock Stuessi, December 2020

These photographs and interviews have been reproduced from the collections of  Seema Weatherwax Photographs and Papers , and the  Sara Halprin Interviews of Seema Weatherwax , held at Special Collections & Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The material in this exhibit is provided for personal study, scholarship, or research. Transmission or reproduction of any material protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. The authors or their heirs retain their copyrights to the material.  Contact UCSC Special Collections & Archives  for more information.