Katharine S Cunningham

KATHARINE “KITTY” SPALDING CUNNINGHAM, librarian, dance critic, mother, and wife of artist, Francis Cunningham, died at age 88 of congestive heart failure on November 9, 2023. Born of American parents (Alice Burr and Hobart Ames Spalding) on January 16, 1935, in London, England, she grew up in New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lima, Peru (where her father was in the Foreign Service). She went to the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Miss Hall’s School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and continued her education at Radcliffe College for two years before transferring to Barnard College (B.A. 1957). In 1954, she married Dick Cunningham, as he is known. They raised two daughters: Sasha Anawalt and Katharine Rudbeck.

In 1962, Kitty arrived at the Brearley School as head librarian and the next year completed her Master’s of Library Science degree from Columbia University. She remained at Brearley for one long stint until 1983 and then again for a shorter period, 1992 to 2000.

She was beloved at Brearley, known by generations for her warmth. She took each student on their own terms. Pop culture was among her guilty pleasures, which would be whatever “everyone” was reading, watching, wearing, listening to and how they were moving and grooving. She was curious and felt compelled to know what made young people tick.

Her capacity to discern what is special in a person and match it with what might be a new book to them, or an obscure film, or a historical idea they might not have considered has meant that at her passing, a chorus of Brearley girls has been singing emails about how Mrs. Cunningham made them feel seen and heard and loved within the safe haven of her library.

In the years when not working at Brearley, she was head librarian at the Sacred Heart School and at Trinity School in Manhattan. She had missed working with boys.

Her professional career as a school librarian was balanced by dance. In 1963, she and Dick saw Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn of The Royal Ballet perform “Swan Lake” at the old Metropolitan Opera House. Their lives did a doubletake. They started going to every performance from City Center to Judson Church and the lofts, and most significantly, to Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshires, where they had built a summer home in Sheffield, Massachusetts, transporting and renovating an old barn with their own hands in conjunction with now-legendary builder and conservationist, Richard Babcock. The Barn was Babcock’s first complete reconstruction and it included an astonishing 47’ high stone chimney, laid stone by field stone, as if, but better than, Frank Lloyd Wright coming back as a Quaker. The place is Francis Cunningham’s Giverny. Kitty was in full support.

The dance boom was on in New York City and Europe in the 60s and 70s, and Kitty and Dick were in it, of it and with it. She started writing about dance, encouraged by Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times, who said, “you see as much dance as I do.” Inspired, Kitty’s articles and reviews appeared first in the Berkshire Courier and subsequently in the New York Times, Berkshire Eagle, Dance and Dancers, Ballet Review, Dance Magazine, Dance News and The Saturday Review.

In 1976, Kitty joined a South American tour with the Murray Louis Dance Company as an observer and friend. Kitty, being the wife of an artist and fully aware of how damaging criticism in print could be for artists, took full advantage of her position as a freelancer and became close personal friends with many artists, especially from the Murray Louis Dance Company and Alwin Nikolais Company (where she was on the Legacy Foundation board until her death). Questioning criticism, she helped herald in a new generation of critics, a counter-offensive as it were, to the critic as ultimate supreme voice.

Kitty’s writing put artists at the center. She earned their respect. She routinely threw unfussy parties, drawing a hive of performing and visual artists and athletes (John Curry, the Olympic skater to name one, and the corporeal mime, Daniel Stein, to name another). A wedding of two Dance Theatre of Harlem principals, Homer Bryant and Rhonda Sampson, took place in Kitty and Dick’s apartment; the legendary Royal Danish Ballet troupe of Soloists originated in Kitty and Dick’s Sheffield barn; and it was Kitty who alighted upon and pushed for Liz Thompson to be director of Jacob’s Pillow’s in 1979, while serving on its board (1978-1983) for then artistic director and friend, Norman Walker.

As many beloved neighbors from the upper west side building where she and Dick have lived for 60 years will attest: their apartment was rightly called “Hotel Denmark,” because they put up so many Royal Danish Ballet dancers and aspirants over the years.

Kitty interviewed George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, Edward Villella, Trisha Brown and the dancer who started it all for her, Rudolf Nureyev. Her proudest achievement, however, was the book she co-authored with Michael Ballard, “Conversations With A Dancer,” (St. Martin’s Press), about life in a major American modern dance company, the Murray Louis Dance Company.

Kitty’s daughters followed in her footsteps, working at educational institutions: Sasha at the University of Southern California, where she is a Professor Emerita in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Katharine as a history teacher of longstanding at the Horace Mann School in New York City. Sasha became a Los Angeles dance critic and authored the cultural biography of Robert Joffrey and his Joffrey Ballet. Katharine studied at the School of American Ballet and apprenticed at Pennsylvania Ballet; her son, Nathaniel Darst, was the first American student ever to attend the Royal Danish Ballet School, where he trained for five years.

Kitty is survived by her husband to whom she was “love at first sight” married for 69 years, as well as both daughters and their spouses, Bill Anawalt and Jens Rudbeck. She has five accomplished grandchildren (in order of age: Katie Anawalt, Theodore Darst, Thomas Cunningham Anawalt, Nathaniel Darst and Lucy Anawalt Bernstein). She also has three step-grandchildren (Clara, Carolina and Cecilia Rudbeck). And three great grandchildren (Ephraim Gish, Lilly Bernstein and Zosia Gish). Their fathers are Kitty's beloved sons-in-law, Harrison Gish and Nathan Bernstein. Her brother is Hobart Ames Spalding, married to Myrna Rodriguez, who has three of the kindest children on earth, Gualesca, Pedro and Juanita Rodriguez; Kitty’s younger sister is Joan E. Spalding.

Donations may be made in Kitty Cunningham’s name online to Jacob’s Pillow or by check to Jacob's Pillow, 358 George Carter Rd., Becket, MA 01223. Attn: In memory of Kitty Cunningham

A Celebration of Kitty’s Life will be held on Saturday, December 9, at 2:30 p.m., at St. Michael’s Church on the corner of Amsterdam and 99th Street.