Suzanne Bassett Riess

With a degree from Goucher College, experience as a news and feature reporter, and graduate work in Art History at Berkeley, Suzanne Bassett Riess began her career in the Bancroft Library’s Regional Cultural History Program—later Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) and now Oral History Center—in 1959. She conducted 137 oral histories and is recognized as the interviewer who built the oral history cultural arts portfolio, with the early support of University Librarian Donald Coney, and Bancroft Library’s James D. Hart, and Willa Klug Baum, the always encouraging pioneering director. Riess widened the office’s original scope with interviews in photography, journalism, publishing, social history, anthropology, architecture, landscape architecture, horticulture, art making, music, and religion and the arts.

The first interview in 1960 by then 24-year old Suzanne was with the retiring San Francisco Museum of Modern Art founding director Grace McCann Morley. Later that year she began interviews with photographer Dorothea Lange, who was ill and viewing the end of life. What she learned from that frequently cited Lange interview about doing oral history, and the importance of trust and access, were essential early lessons. From the beginning her interviews were rich life stories, well-researched and also keenly intuitive, always introduced by her essential scene-setting interview histories and often illustrated with her photographic portraits. The range in length of Riess’s many oral histories was determined by whether they were designed as part of a multi-interviewee structure or were to be a stand-alone biographical history. It is the researched one to one engagement with an interviewee that sets all oral history aside as a discipline. Interviews could be 20 hours of tape-recorded meetings on a weekly basis, but all were followed by close work verifying the transcript, light editing, and reviewing with the interviewee.

It had long been felt that the Regional Oral History Office needed a catalogue that would reflect and showcase its work and would also encourage acquisition and use of a resource which was up until then primarily in the collection of the Bancroft Library. This challenge, which became a major organizational effort, was undertaken by Riess. Acknowledging the Bancroft Library’s commitment to fine printing she worked with a local press to publish two successive catalogues covering 1954-1998. Quaint now in a time of search engines, those catalogues parallel the changing spectrum of technologies of oral history. From early reel-to-reel tape recordings made on massive machines, to the 2003 virtuosic videographed oral history of conceptual artist David Ireland, Riess documented for the Bancroft Library the richness of Bay Area arts and academics. Since retirement she has completed individual commissions in art, urban planning, the performing arts, and family history, all of which have been donated to the collection.