Friends of Melrose Public Library will host the group’s annual meeting next month, and will be joined by guest speaker and sculptor Carolyn Wirth.

Wirth is the sculptor of library’s iconic “The Reader” sculpture, which has become beloved by Melrose residents.

A New Jersey native, Wirth, 60, now lives in Maynard. She fell in love with the arts and sculpting as a young girl and has fond memories of going to purchase art materials. She relocated to this area after attending Smith College in Northampton.

“I was lucky to take art classes at the Five Colleges,” Wirth recalled from her time at Smith, which along with Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts makes up the Five College Consortium in western Massachusetts’ Connecticut River Valley.

Wirth runs her studio/shop in the Gleasondale Industrial Park in Stow. Outside of her studio, she works at Pine Manor College, teaching art and serving as Acting Director for the college’s Hess Gallery.

When at home, she spends time with her son, an aspiring engineer, watching animated films that the two share as a common interest.

 

Speaking in Melrose

The Friends of Melrose Public Library annual meeting will be held Wednesday, Oct. 4 at 7 p.m. in the meeting room. While there, Wirth plans to discuss what it took for her to create the sculpture housed at the library. If weather permits, she would like to use the sculpture as a visual aide to explain the bronze casting process.

With the amount of love the city has for “The Reader,” she will also highlight and discuss works that she completed since, which comes from her time spent at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard.

In addition to hearing Wirth’s artistic insight, the Friends of the Melrose Public Library will discuss successes of the past year, goals for the upcoming year, and how to get involved with the non-profit organization.

Both the library and Wirth never expected “The Reader” to become such a fixture in the community.

“I think the children can relate to him,” said Diane Wall, the library’s Assistant Director, who noted that many people come just to sit next to the sculpture and have their photo taken with it.

For more information on Friends of Melrose Public Library, visit mplfriends.wixsite.com/mplfriends or melrosepubliclibrary.org. To find out more about Carolyn Wirth, visit cvw198.wordpress.com.

 
http://melrose.wickedlocal.com/news/20170927/reader-sculptor-carolyn-wirth-to-speak-at-annual-melrose-library-meeting
melrose.wickedlocal.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-09
49879
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:F7A5GBEJZFM7NYUMT5X2WOLUTNMIODJV
<urn:uuid:8cc02f85-2e93-4b87-a698-5d9e36bc52e4>
2018-02-21T22:55:25Z
199.83.132.90
text/html
sha1:YFHKC3O76INB7D54W3KIABFILMDGYT7U
<urn:uuid:c1d74170-9093-47b3-a2d9-7c1532bf0ed1>
http://melrose.wickedlocal.com/news/20170927/reader-sculptor-carolyn-wirth-to-speak-at-annual-melrose-library-meeting
response
<urn:uuid:7e06b003-657c-4bc5-9d48-4daf03e0c82e>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-186-155-51.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-09
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf