The Museum of Catherine Hennessey

My longtime friend Catherine Hennessey died in March at the age of 92. Catherine was an inveterate collector of things: books, scissors, art, bells, building materials for a house she planned to build herself.As she aged, contracted, downsized, she moved this archive of interesting things from place to place, home to home, storage locker to storage locker. At one point she occupied 13 lockers in the parking garage at Harbourside, despite being only entitled to one.In an effort to consolidate, Catherine held a series of sales, starting on her 80th birthday with a silent auction (I ran the online part of this), and continuing on through to a sale that took up most of the old Campbell Lea building.On Sunday was the posthumous final sale, and Catherine’s friends and familiars gathered on a farm in Emyvale to see what was left. It was an eerie experience seeing things I knew so well—paintings, furniture, photos, bins of scissors—out of their home context. It was made less eerie by the…