When art historian Rachael Arauz ’91 began searching through library archives and attics full of dusty bankers boxers to mount a major museum exhibition about the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, she was hoping to uncover the origins of the school, unique in North America for bringing together artists and amateurs from a variety of media—fiber, ceramics, metal, wood, glass—for an intense summer experience of art-making, experimentation, and community in rural Maine. What she hadn’t expected to discover was a Wellesley connection. But there in a 1951 newspaper profile of one of the school’s founders, Elizabeth Crawford 1921, was a reference to her attending Wellesley College. “Beth Crawford had really just been lost to history,” says Rachael.

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