Elisabeth Howe Colt

After 93 years of emotionally expansive, intellectually curious, and contagiously creative life, Elisabeth "Lisa" Colt-artist, poet, musician, teacher, and lifelong learner-died peacefully on December 6, 2023, four days after suffering a fall, in Brunswick, Maine.

Lisa was born in 1930 in Providence, Rhode Island, the second of four children of George Howe, an architect and author, and Elisabeth Howe, a horse breeder. She was an observant, eager-to-please, self-conscious child. (Years later, in a poem, she would describe herself as "a shy potato of a girl.") The family would move seven times in twelve years before settling on a farm in rural Maryland. After graduating from St. Timothy's School, Lisa enrolled in nursing school in Boston. Shortly thereafter, she met a handsome young World War II veteran named Harry Colt. In 1951, at age 20, she dropped out of nursing school to marry him. (Married nursing students were not permitted at the time.) Over the next decade, as they moved from Pittsburgh to El Paso to Philadelphia to Boston to Connecticut and back to Boston, Harry climbed the corporate ladder and Lisa gave birth to four sons. She was a supportive and, for a time, conventional wife (chicken a la king for office dinner parties, diet pills for her figure) and a loving and imaginative mother (though four boys could be a handful). Why, she wondered, wasn't she happy?

In 1963, Lisa read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and her life was irrevocably changed. Absorbing the questing, questioning spirit of the era, she began to teach neighborhood teens how to strum "If I Had a Hammer" and "Blowin' in the Wind." She grew passionately interested in the civil rights movement and marched against the Vietnam War. Having never gone to college, she became an autodidact, filling her bookshelves with Germaine Greer, Eldridge Cleaver, Abbie Hoffman, and Adrienne Rich and strewing her coffee table with Avatar, The Phoenix, and Boston After Dark. She wrote poem after poem, painted picture after picture. Visitors to the Colt house were surprised to find the kitchen and hallway walls covered by a Rousseau-ish jungle mural. When her youngest son started kindergarten, she found her calling as an art teacher.

And what an art teacher! At Noble and Greenough, the independent secondary school in Dedham where she spent most of her teaching career, studio art had consisted largely of traditional still lifes and landscapes; art history all but ended with the Impressionists. In Lisa's classes, students not only drew and painted but made collages, mobiles, mosaics, silkscreens, sculptures, weavings, wood-block prints, kites, and life-sized puppets. They were introduced to Oldenberg, Rauschenberg, O'Keefe, Warhol, and Duchamp. They learned that art wasn't just about drawing a realistic-looking pear but about how to look at the world, that art wasn't found just on the walls of a museum but everywhere around them. "Be bold," Lisa urged them. They were. In one memorable project, inspired by Christo, a student persuaded the Dedham Fire Department to train a hose on an enormous stone dormitory one frigid winter night, "wrapping" the building in ice. The first iteration of Lisa's legendary "Art Without Boundaries" course ended with a multi-media performance piece in which the students, wearing huge papier-maché headpieces and burlap-bag muumuus, shimmied to the recorded songs of humpback whales.

In her sixteen years at Nobles, Lisa would also teach English literature, philosophy, Growth Education (a.k.a. "Sex Ed"), and the Holocaust and Human Behavior. During "February Week," in which teachers taught mini-courses of their choosing, Lisa, to the raised eyebrows of faculty members and the alarm of parents, taught thanatology. Students read The Sorrows of Young Werther, wrote essays imagining their own deaths, visited a funeral parlor, and ended the week with a sleepover in a graveyard, where they read aloud Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night."

Lisa-who invited students to call her by her first name, to the chagrin but eventual acceptance of the headmaster-may have had an even greater impact on the school outside the classroom. When she arrived in 1973, Nobles was an all-male prep school where the athletes were campus gods, and the shy, artistic loners-the ones faculty members called "square pegs in round holes"-were often ignored and sometimes bullied. (The school went co-ed the year after Lisa arrived; she was instrumental in the transition.) Having felt like one when she was growing up, Lisa was a champion of square pegs. She challenged students and teachers alike to question stereotypes and value difference. In letters to the school paper and impassioned speeches in morning assembly, Lisa called out sexist and homophobic behavior. As one alumnus recalled, "Lisa was the conscience of the school."

Even as Lisa taught art, she continued to create it herself. Her paintings were exhibited in galleries; one show consisted of thirty watercolor self-portraits ("each morning for a month I searched the mirror and painted the face that peered back at me"). Her poems were published in journals and anthologies (her "Green Sestina" won the 1977 Harvard Summer School Poetry Prize). All the while, she led folk singalongs at a local nursing home, gave writing workshops, organized meditation groups, marched for women's rights and against war (the Gulf War in 1990 and, a decade later, the Iraq War), and kept a wildly idiosyncratic illustrated journal. In 1979, she earned a Master's in Education from Antioch College. During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, she served as a volunteer "AIDS Buddy" to a dying young man. When friends-or strangers-bumped into Lisa on the sidewalk, they often ended up in long, intimate conversations: what Lisa called "heart to hearts." Cabbies invariably ended up telling her their life stories.

In 2003, Lisa and Harry moved to the Lathrop Retirement Community in Easthampton, where they enjoyed some of the happiest years of their 61-year marriage: taking courses at Smith College, tutoring middle school students, watching art-house movies at Amherst Cinema, weeding Lisa's Buddha garden, or just reading side by side in the den (Harry the latest David McCullough, Lisa the latest Patti Smith). Over the decades, these two very different people had settled into an abiding love. After Harry's death in 2012, Lisa's grief eased a bit when she took in a sausage-shaped, jackrabbit-eared rescue dog, Lulu (another square peg). Lisa continued to create: taking poetry classes, leading painting workshops, and playing exuberant harmonica and spoons at Lathrop's "Friday Folkies" and family hootenannies. In 2021, her first book of poetry, Continuing Education, was privately printed. Though she reminded us (as she had reminded her students) that the process, not the product, was the most important thing, she was not displeased when the product won second prize in a nationwide contest for poets over 70. She was 91.

The following year, Lisa was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, a disease that would compel this devoted Buddhist truly to live in the moment. Though her mind and memory frayed, she continued to get pleasure from reading (Ocean Vuong, Natasha Trethewey); attending movies, lectures, and concerts; playing music; and having heart to hearts. In June, 2023, she moved to Avita, a memory care community in Brunswick, Maine, not far from two of her sons. Even after her once-prodigious store of words had vanished, Lisa remained her essential self, communicating with warm smiles and loving kisses. She continued to find beauty in the world around her; sitting outside, she'd identify six different shades of green in the landscape. Her creative spark persisted to the end. One afternoon, three weeks before her death, when she could no longer finish sentences, she surprised us by playing a harmonica solo: "Amazing Grace."

Lisa was predeceased by her husband, Harry; her son Ned; her sister Linda; and her brother, George. She is survived by her sister Disa McPherson; her brother-in-law Lloyd Lee McPherson; her sister-in-law, Angie Howe; her sons Harry, George, and Mark; her daughters-in-law, Sandy Colt, Anne Fadiman, Cathy Robinson, and Liz Collins; her grandchildren, Ian, Maya, Susannah, and Henry; and her great-grandson, Gavin; as well as many beloved nieces, nephews, friends, and former students.

A celebration of Lisa's remarkable life will be held in the spring.