Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn President Bill Clendaniel Retires | Page 17

The Sculptor as an Archivist’s Best Friend
People and Happenings
By Stephen H. Anable, Communications Coordinator & Writer
Frances Pratt of Cambridge has found a way to use both
sides of her brain to the benefit of Mount Auburn Cem-
etery: “neatnick” (her own description) and artist. Frances
has volunteered at Mount Auburn on Tuesday mornings
since 2004, sorting historical letters and papers into chron-
ological order in our Archives. She was unbowed when,
upon arriving, she confronted 10,000 files to be tackled.
“And I am proud to say I have been through 6,000 of
them,” she reports. Squelching the temptation to read, she
works quickly, pushing through,
for example, the Hallowell fam-
ily correspondence—relatives of
her husband, Harry—so fast she
“didn’t even realize where I was.”
Frances recently completed
another substantial project: creat-
ing a photographic record of the
Cemetery’s sculpture, an intriguing
task since she herself is a sculptor
—and each photograph had to
capture its subject yet have its own
Frances helps repair a marble
aesthetic interest. Encountering
monument at Mount Auburn Edmonia Lewis’ statue, Hygeia—its
marble eroding due to age and the
environment—Frances and her husband, Harry, earmarked
part of their capital gift this past year toward conservation of
the statue, now in progress. In addition, Frances has begun
working in the Preservation Department under Chief of
Conservation David Gallagher, adding one afternoon a
week to her volunteer commitment.
Frances relishes her time at Mount Auburn, whether
volunteering or walking: “The employees are just a very
special group, and I enjoy my relationships with them. The
staff on the grounds wave to me. I’m a regular fixture walk-
ing around.”
Frances describes her own sculptures as “abstract organic,”
with lines influenced by the rhythms of nature and the lives
of plants and animals. She began working with wood and
then went on to use clay, plaster, stone, bronze, aluminum
and stainless steel. A Fine Arts major at Connecticut College,
she later studied at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln,
MA, the atelier of Peter Abate, and the School of the Mu-
seum of Fine Arts. Her career began on a high note: she
entered a competition sponsored by New England Telephone
and beat out six men to create a sculpture in front of its
new communications center in Framingham.
Frances and Harry both grew up on Long Island’s North
Shore, she in Woodbury and he in Oyster Bay. Theirs is a
love match dating from day school. Says Frances, “At age
Frances Pratt at home in Cambridge with her sculpture, Helix.
14 I sat on the radiator in my bedroom on a rainy day and
said ‘I’m going to marry Harry Pratt.’” They wed when
she graduated from college, and then moved to Cambridge
when Harry enrolled at Harvard Law School. As a young
mother, Frances discovered Mount Auburn as “a beautiful
place away from cars where I could walk with our children.”
Harry—a founding partner of Nichols & Pratt, a Boston
private trustee office, and Vice Chair of the Board of Trust-
ees of the New England Conservatory—donated funds for
concerts for Mount Auburn’s 175th Anniversary celebration.
The Pratts have three children—Franny of Alexandria, VA,
a staff attorney for the Federal Public Defender Program;
Hal of Dedham, MA, an artist who makes furniture and
teaches at Milton Academy; and Chuck of Jamaica Plain,
a computer support manager for Massachusetts Financial
Services. The Pratts have five grandchildren, four girls and
one boy, so those genes, right- and left-brained, thrive on. ^
Summer 2008 | 15