Sculptor Breon Dunigan, sitting at her kitchen table in Truro, remembers the Christmastime haircuts well. She and her siblings and cousins — the six granddaughters of Provincetown artist Barbara Haven Malicoat — would line up. Then, snip, snip, snip. Malicoat would give them identical ’dos.
“There may have been a bowl involved,” says Dunigan.
Malicoat, who died in 1987, had long, beautiful hair that she always wore in a bun, says Dunigan. She was a graphic artist, always in her studio working on something: illustrations for textbooks, block prints, walking maps of Provincetown.
“She brought in the money,” says Dunigan. It was common, she says, for artistic women to be the breadwinners in their families. “My theory is that women artists had lower price points on their work, and they sold it all. They weren’t as concerned with their ‘legacy’ and just wanted to make something beautiful and put food on the table.”
Laid out on Dunigan’s kitchen table is a collection of Malicoat’s Christmas cards: wood-block prints in scarlet and crimson, dusky blue, and soft spruce green. Beginning in 1959, with the birth of Orin Dunigan, Breon’s older sister and Malicoat’s daughter Martha’s first child, Malicoat recorded the arrivals of her six granddaughters. In each card, the little girls appear as angels, or geometric figures holding sprigs of holly, or carolers in a winter forest. They wear elaborate crowns and carry candles. First one child, then two, then three. By 1965, there were six. With these small works, Malicoat mapped her family legacy.
Later in Malicoat’s life, after her husband, artist Philip Malicoat, died in 1981, Dunigan says she lived with her grandmother a few different times and listened to her stories with a fresh ear.
“It was different from when I was a kid, when it was like, ‘Oh, god, she’s telling that one again,’ ” Dunigan says. As an adult, she found new meaning in the tales.
“She was the best grandmother ever,” says Dunigan. “She made six of everything.” She made her grandchildren’s felt Christmas stockings and dispensed dresses and knit vests, all decorated with her signature designs. Dunigan says she still has one of those vests.
Her home is full of art made by members of her family: her great-aunt, Beatrice Bradshaw Brown, and Dunigan’s great-grandparents, Harold Haven Brown and Florence Bradshaw. Leaning over the array of Christmas cards on the table, Dunigan picks one up and reads her grandmother’s handwriting on the back: an acknowledgment of Christmas around the corner.
“I miss her all the time,” Dunigan says.
