HANOVER — In January 1986, Georgina “Dinny” Forbes, an artist and therapist living in Thetford at the time, traveled to Esteli, Nicaragua to oppose the United States’ allegiance with the Contras, the right-wing rebel group that formed after the Nicaraguan Revolution, and to learn about the families afflicted by the conflict there.
For seven weeks, she stayed with a family in Esteli whose courage and hospitality inspired her to create “Peace Hunger Kitchen,” a large-scale art installation in which three paper mache figures congregate around crude furniture and signs pose questions such as “What am I full of when there is no room for peace?”
She exhibited the work around the Upper Valley, and even brought it to a rally in Washington, D.C.
When her friend Sandra Boston went to stay with the same family the next year, she recognized one of their faces from Forbes’ artwork, which she made with several artists from Bread and Puppet Theatre in Glover, Vt.
“That’s how accurate Dinny’s work was,” Boston said.
Forbes died of lung cancer on June 27 at the Jack Byrne Center in Hanover, 24 hours after receiving her diagnosis. She was 82.
Her trip to Nicaragua, and the installation that followed, reflect her sense of adventure, her creativity and her fierce belief in her progressive, feminist values, all of which governed how she led her life.
Forbes was born on Jan. 18, 1943 into a large family of artists. Her mother, Faith Fisher Forbes, was a keen landscape and portrait painter, and her father, G. Donald Forbes, was an engineer who took up goldsmithing later in life.
Her niece China Forbes is the lead vocalist in the experimental band, Pink Martini, and her other niece, Maya Forbes, is a screenwriter, whose 2014 feature “Infinitely Polar Bear” was based on childhood memories of her and China’s father and Forbes’ older brother, Donald Cameron Forbes, who had bipolar disorder. She had a second older brother, Richard Forbes.
Forbes grew up in Sudbury, Mass. and in the summer, she and her family stayed on their island off the coast of Cape Cod. Forbes is descended from the railroad tycoon John Murray Forbes, who purchased the island in the 1840s.
In those summer days, Forbes would ride her horse across the island, marveling at the landscape.
She loved “the feeling of being able to wander off into the woods…and get lost in looking at everything,” Wendy Forbes, her younger sister by 15 years, said.
Life changed suddenly for Forbes when she discovered she was pregnant as an 18-year-old high school student. Her father wanted her to get an abortion, but Forbes ultimately refused. Her parents sent her to live with an aunt in Spain for most of her pregnancy, and when Forbes finally returned to the U.S. and gave birth, she put the baby in foster care while she decided what to do.
After a month, she decided to keep her daughter, whom she named Angelisse.
Forbes’ parents embraced Angelisse with open arms. “Donald and Faith…were very much like my own parents,” Angelisse Karol said.
In 1963, Forbes married John Karol, an attorney, who adopted Angelisse. A year later, the couple moved to east Africa with Angelisse and their newborn son, Christopher, after John Karol was hired by the Nyasaland colonial government to draft the constitution for the fledgling nation of Malawi.
It was a big move for someone so young, but Forbes embraced the adventure with zeal.
Her grandfather had spent time in Africa hunting big game, and Forbes’ grandmother would often show her photos from their travels.
“I think going to Africa was sort of in her soul somehow,” Wendy Forbes said.
John Karol was often busy working, and Forbes soon bonded with the men and women who they hired to help look after the home and children.
She passed the days painting landscapes of the terrain near her home. “The light and the color really inspired her,” Wendy Forbes said.
Witnessing the people of Malawi fight for their independence from British rule sparked a political awakening in Forbes that would fuel her activism in the coming years, including her trip to Nicaragua.
When the family eventually returned to the U.S., they spent several years in Adamant, Vt., before moving to a farm in Orford where the couple embraced the back-to-the-land movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
While John Karol dove into his career as a documentary filmmaker, Forbes set to work raising sheep and cultivating a large vegetable garden.
She’d trade cuts of lamb for more expensive proteins such as beef and pork, and stitched dolls for Angelisse Karol that were dressed in mink coats using scraps from vendors traveling north from New York.
From clothes to candles and soap, “we made everything, which was very informative,” Angelisse Karol said. “I think it wasn’t until my 30s that I actually bought paper towels. That’s how ingrained it was in me.”
Forbes never shied away from thorny conversations with her children, a trait that would come in handy when she eventually started her own therapy practice.
“You could put everything on the table. She wasn’t afraid of the messiness,” Angelisse Karol said.
But as a young mother, Forbes was still, in many ways, a child herself. At times she would confide in Angelisse Karol as if she were a contemporary, rather than a daughter in need of boundaries and guidance of her own.
“She wouldn’t jeopardize being my friend to be my mother,” Angelisse Karol said.
Growing up in a family of “basically hippies” in conservative Orford, especially after living in Malawi, wasn’t always easy for Angelisse Karol, who was 7 or 8 when the family moved to the farm. She would often get picked on at school for her parents’ unconventional lifestyle, something her dad was “oblivious” to and that her mom didn’t always have the tools to help her with.
Still, she preferred her mother’s free-spiritedness to rigid conventions of the upper class world that Forbes’ had grown up in.
Life on the farm was a “reaction to the pretenses” of that environment, Angelisse Karol said.
Forbes continued to make art while living in Orford. In the early ’70s she studied under abstract expressionist James Gahagan, who was based in Woodbury, Vt.
Gahagan inspired her to start painting colorful abstract works on large canvases that she’d roll out on the floor. After the apprenticeship, she felt moved to commit more time to her art. “I asked myself if I was going to be an artist or not. My decision was to devote more time to my painting,” she told the Valley News in 1993.
She began exhibiting in galleries in the Upper Valley and New England such as the Vermont Artisans’ Gallery in Strafford, Vt., where in 1977 she showed “Landscape Transformations,” a series of non-figurative paintings that used swaths of color to evoke the natural world.
After eight years on the Orford farm, John Karol and Forbes parted ways in what Angelisse Karol described as an “ugly” divorce sprouting from irreconcilable differences in their personalities.
Around the same time, Forbes took a job as a nurse’s aid at Hanover Terrace Health and Rehabilitation Center, a senior living facility. Working with people on the brink of death inspired her to pursue a master’s degree in counseling psychology from Antioch University in Keene, N.H. in 1978, and she soon moved to Boston to start her own therapy practice.
A few years later, she returned to the Upper Valley, where she bought a house in Thetford along the Connecticut River.
It was soon after that move that she traveled to Nicaragua to stay with the family in Esteli.
After her trip, she attended protests in the Upper Valley and worked as a therapist counseling women who had been sexually abused.
Counseling victims of abuse took a toll on Forbes, who never had “a lot of shields,” Wendy Forbes said. Making art served as a kind of counterweight that connected her to her spiritual side, and to nature.
In the early 2000s, she rented a studio in the Tip Top Media Building that she would keep late into her 70s.
Throughout her years in the Upper Valley, she remained close with her extended family, and her parents, who relocated to Vermont in the ’70s.
She functioned as a surrogate grandparent for Maya Forbes’ children after their grandfather died 1998. She would bring the kids to her studio and let “them go wild with paint,” or take them swimming, Maya Forbes, her niece, said.
“She embraced a kind of freedom that I aspire to,” she added.
Forbes accumulated a large number of friends in arts and activism, with whom she’d often get into long debates about her political views.
“She was motivating intellectually and politically, and she would challenge me,” activist and puppeteer, Pati Hernandez, Forbes’ close friend, said.
Articulate and passionate about language, Forbes could “paint with words,” Angelisse Karol said.
Forbes moved several times during her Upper Valley years, during which she had several long-term relationships with women.
In the early 2000s, she bought a house in Norwich where she grew a large garden, rode her horse, and kept several dogs, the last of which was a German Shepherd named Psyche.
In 2016, Forbes suffered multiple strokes that caused her to lose mobility in her right arm and leg. She also developed aphasia, which caused her speech to slow as she searched for a desired word.
She worked hard in physical therapy, but even the smallest movements required a Herculean effort, and she never fully regained her speech or mobility.
After giving away her horse, Angelisse Karol converted the barn of her mother’s Norwich home into an art studio to encourage her to keep painting, but using her non-dominant hand was frustrating and the studio went largely unused.
In 2022, Forbes moved into assisted living at Kendal at Hanover, where she spent her remaining years.
Still on an artist’s schedule, she would often stay up watching TV or reading, and sleep in late. Even though she’d lost some mobility, her mind was as active as ever, and she filled her days attending concerts and lectures, catching up with old friends, and playing cut-throat games of gin rummy.
“She was a competitive, incredible rummy player,” said Patti Morgan, a lifelong friend. “She taught me to play rummy and oh, we had some fights.”
After Forbes’ stroke, Hernandez would visit Forbes every week until she moved out of the area in 2022.
During some visits, the two friends would dance together. From a seated position, Forbes would relax against Hernandez’s chest and the two of them would sway together to Otis Redding. Or they would stand, with Forbes leaning on Hernandez’s back. Sometimes their balance wavered and they’d laugh.
“She never tried to control our movement. She wanted to go with the movement, and she trusted me that she wasn’t going to fall,” Hernandez said. The dances were “just so intimate, so beautiful.”
Even when all her usual modes of expression had left her, Forbes found a way to connect.
One day, Hernandez returned from a trip to Nepal and for some reason Forbes no longer wanted to dance. “And it felt totally fine,” she said.
Perhaps Forbes was ready for the next adventure.