The Sketchbook: Art as a Necessity
Part 3 of 5: Time Is Running Out
Here is part 3, The Sketchbook: Art as a Necessity, the second of four essays from the booklet published on the occasion of my exhibition, Time is Running Out. The last two essays, The Metal Object, and The Protégé with the short conclusion, will be published before the end of the year. A bit of background is that I came across Charlotte Partridge’s sketchbook by chance the first time I visited the collection in 2017. At the time, and the reason I ended up in this archive to begin with, I was working as an assistant curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI. I had been assigned to do research for an upcoming exhibition, The Tale of Two, with artist Iris Häussler, who as a part of her practice weaves together fact and fiction (to say it as simply as possible). It’s still wild to think this was how I ended up with the last 7 years of my work finding me.
I selected the sketchbook with other ephemera to have on loan from the Wisconsin Historical Society for the exhibition (see the open pages of two figures wearing hats on the top left in the display case). When I began returning to the archive on my own time to do my research, I took every chance to flip through it. In order to share this experience and inspiring object in the gallery, I created two stamped exhibition facsimiles (see my awesome video below). I took my phone pictures and had them digitally printed a bit larger into a perfect bound, softcover book.
The sketchbook also influenced the series of five unique prints I created for the exhibition. These prints are my response to the archive, created by selecting images gathered during my research and overlaying them on a lightbox to form new combinations and stores. I used pages from the sketchbook in a few prints in this series titled Archival Collage Synthesis #1-5. In Archival Collage Synthesis #2 (second from the left) a sketch of birds is overlayed with a list made by Partridge and Frink of birds they saw in their yard, found in box 13, folder 10.
This writing is an expansion of archival research around life partners, Charlotte Partridge and Miriam Frink that resulted my book As Ever, Miriam. The booklet is small and comfortable to hold, Risograph printed by Bearbear on a navy blue cardstock cover that folds out in the back, with yellow interior paper. It was printed in an edition 100, available for purchase in the gallery and as of this week, online [scroll down the page for purchase] until sold out. The exhibition runs through March 14, 2026.
The Sketchbook: Art as a Necessity
I happen to be one of those people who look upon the Arts as necessities. I don’t for a minute think that the cultivation of the aesthetic side of our lives should be relegated to the frills. -Charlotte Partridge, c. 19361
In addition to her dedication to arts education Charlotte Partridge, was a trained painter and practicing artist. All that remains of her talent in the archive are brief mentions of her painting on various trips and some examples of her work. The September 1928 announcement in Palette Scrapings, the Layton School of Art newsletter, for her “one-man” exhibition of watercolors at the College Women’s Club tells us she exhibited work painted in Ireland the previous summer. There is a small collection of sketches from her childhood; a beautiful portrait she painted of Miriam Frink in 1925; and a series of over fifty miniature landscape watercolor studies from a trip west to Glacier Park with Frink. There is also one surviving, barely-still-bound sketchbook, which is unlike anything else in their collection.
The sketchbook content, in ink, pencil, and paint, is playful. Subjects come from both directions on both sides of the paper, with overlapping designs that play with perspective, domestic labor, home interiors and exteriors, industry, animals, landscapes, portraits, monograms, and alphabets. There are also endless notes of numbers, accounting for mileage or something I’ve yet to figure out. Perhaps the most unusual and contemporary entries are a series of eight abstract portraits of a person in a hat that resemble multicolored inkblots.
Nearly every surface of the sketchbook is covered. The front cover is dotted with small splotches of colored paint. The name of the trademarked brand, “The Scribble-In Book,” is embossed in faded gold bold cursive on the top. The back is filled by a stern oil portrait of an unknown woman, dark hair pulled back, vacantly looking outward. The book is on the small side, comfortable in my small hands, about 6 x 5 inches covered in soft, well-worn, dark blue canvas with brittle and browning pages. The binding is threadbare and fragile, falling apart along the spine. It lives in Box 13, Folder 10, with a single piece of old, lined notebook paper. On the paper, there are notes in two different inks. The first, in an inky blue cursive, says Early Design & Sketch book of Charlotte’s circa 1912, Church School Days, Chicago, SAVE. Under that, in different handwriting, and in a lighter black ink, “S. 1975.”
If working in archives has taught me one thing, it’s to question everything, or at the very least, not to take information at face value. I am confident about several aspects of this sketchbook, most notably that it has been dated incorrectly, or at least not entirely correctly. The date it was given, circa 1912, was likely given at an early stage of processing the couple’s papers, and probably not by Partridge herself. As the pair became older, they would return to their research notes, adding or crossing out dates and information. They also collaborated with various researchers over the years who assisted in preserving their legacy. They often made their notations directly on documents without initiating or adding a date. Because of this, there are many conflicting dates and times within the archive, adding to the confusion. The “S. 1975” was perhaps the final confirmation from a third party, perhaps someone working with their papers, but there’s no way of knowing that this sketchbook was meant to be included with the donation to the Wisconsin Historical Society. Notably, 1975 was the year that Partridge passed away, and it was just two years before Frink’s death.
It is, of course, possible that Partridge started using this sketchbook in 1912 during her time at the Church School in Chicago. Personally, I have started and stopped using a sketchbook, and sometimes I will come back to it years later. A Monday-through-Friday class schedule in pencil is partially visible on the inside cover which could have been from her school days. It could also refer to her years of scheduling at the Layton School of Art. Regardless, there are clear indicators, such as the 1934 inked above the class schedule on the inside cover, suggesting it was used into the 1930s, along with various visual cues that lead me to believe it was utilized over several decades.
What is notable about the sketchbook is that it gives the viewer an intimate perspective on Partridge’s evolving ideas. It shows her away from her administrative and civic duties, creatively working through her daily life outside of the traditional framework society found acceptable during this period. It supports the idea that art should be in every part of our lives. Partridge’s radically expansive view of arts pedagogy, now common in higher education, may have reflected this approach. In “New Teaching Style Achieves Recognition” in the Wisconsin News (1933), Francis Butler Ayer, a Milwaukee society woman and suffragette who shared many club memberships with Partridge, quoted her saying that there should be “courses of appreciation in all the arts, such as music, the dance, creative writing and the drama, and the course [at the Layton School of Art] on appreciation of literature is the only one in any art school in the country.” The students impacted by Partridge’s philosophy were receiving a wider scope of education, and well ahead of its time.
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Part 4: The Metal Object will be published on Saturday, December 20 2025. Find Part 1: Introduction here, and Part 2: The Fox Point Studio here.
The epigraph is from a National Art Week lecture that Charlotte Partridge delivered c. 1936. If you are interested in seeing the sketchbook described in this section yourself—one of the most unique pieces in the Partridge-Frink archival collection— you can do so by appointment with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee librarian.