Barbara Rubin arrived at the cooperative as a fragile, silenced eighteen-year-old runaway

Evidence

Along with the Gramercy, Mekas inherited the owner Bill Rubin’s niece Barbara, just turned eighteen and newly released from the Silver Hills psychiatric hospital in Connecticut. Raised by progressive parents in Cambria Heights, a working-class neighborhood in Queens, Barbara Rubin was a high school dropout and a sometime runaway. She had been hopped up on diet pills, although it’s unclear whether she was committed to Silver Hills because of a drug problem or whether the facility served to accentuate it. “Thin, frail, very young, totally scared, and totally silent” is how Mekas remembered her. “She did everything I asked her to do, but she said practically no word. Maybe she thought she was sent to some extension of the Correction House [sic].” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 448

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth checking whether Rubin’s psychiatric history figures into her later radical filmmaking and whether the community’s tolerance of her was part of the scene’s welcoming of broken outsiders.
• XREF: Rubin as the silenced-then-articulate figure parallels the reader’s interest in who gets credibilized within avant-garde scenes.