Abigail Hubbell Rosen McGrath, the founder of the Renaissance House in Oak Bluffs, died on Dec. 20 after a battle with liver cancer. She was 84.

Friends and family say that McGrath was a colorful woman with many talents who lived a full life. Aside from teaching writing, she was an actress, writer, model, local columnist, producer, she played a role in an Andy Warhol film, and was the niece of acclaimed Harlem Renaissance novelist and story writer, Dorothy West and the daughter of poet of the same time period, Helene Johnson.

"We've lost a great light," her eldest son Jason Rosen shared over social media after her passing. "She was a force of nature, never stopped working until the end."

Her friends describe her as having a large and genuine personality.

"She was quirky. She was a free woman," Barbara Philips, who had known McGrath for three decades and was a guest at the Renaissance House writing retreat three times, told The Times. "She was totally, totally herself. And she was generous; not sappy kind, but real kind, in a real way."

"Her voice is so strong," Philips said.

The family is planning a ceremony on the Island to honor McGrath, which is expected to take place around July 4th when McGrath led an annual reading on Inkwell Beach of "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July," by Frederick Douglas.

McGrath's connection to the Island began in the early 1900s when her grandfather started visiting Oak Bluffs in the summers; the family stayed at a home in the Highlands, a popular destination for Black families. McGrath would eventually make a home for her own family originally owned by Dorothy West, which would become the Renaissance House.

McGrath is best known on the Island for creating the writing retreat that brought writers from far and wide -- some just starting careers while others more esteemed in the profession. The Renaissance House concluded its 24th season last summer and McGrath told The Times earlier this year that she was still in the planning stages for the 25th season, despite her illness. It is one of the few retreats explicitly designed for issue-oriented writers, writers of color, and writers of social justice.

McGrath was born in New York City in 1940 and would spend much of her life in the city. As she told Warholstars.org in a 2007 interview, her mother was raised in Boston alongside West. Her mother was enamored with Harlem when she visited and ended up moving to the city, while she was pregnant with Abigail, to be a part of the Harlem Renaissance.

McGrath seemed to have enjoyed the lifestyle as a youngster. "Living with a poet is a lot of fun because you never know that you are poor," McGrath said in the 2007 interview. "We went to the Broadway theatre, the opera -- we took advantage of everything the city had to offer on a salary that was lunch money for the parents of my schoolmates."

Aside from writing, McGrath was also the first "door person" at Max's Kansas City, a popular night club in New York that attracted musicians, poets and other artists in the 1960s and 1970s, including Warhol and the Velvet Underground; she also ran a coat-check business at the Village Vanguard, a popular jazz club in Greenwich Village.

One of her early claims to fame was her involvement in Warhol's "Tub Girls," an avant garde film that starred Susan Hoffman, a famous actress known as Viva who McGrath befriended. McGrath shares a tub with Viva in the film, which later in her life led to an awkward conversation with sitarist Ravi Shankar.

McGrath attended Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, before she ended up writing, producing, and acting in productions at Off Center Theatre in Manhattan. The off-Broadway theatre was originally based out of a basement of a church on 66th St. where they performed political satire. As McGrath described it, the productions were not about rich versus poor. "The government is lying to you and here are the facts," she said in the 2007 interview.

Her husband Tony McGrath had founded the Off Center Theatre company in the mid 1960s. The two had met earlier as residents in the Village, Jason Rosen said. McGrath joined the company a year after its founding, where she became the executive director. The company would expand and was active into the 1990s, Rosen said.

On the Island, McGrath created the Renaissance House in 2000 to honor the memory of her mother and aunt. She originally thought of creating a foundation to provide scholarship money, but she realized there were already those scholarships available. The idea grew into a vehicle of giving writers the time that they needed to write. As she put it to a reporter in 2017, the retreat was a place to put forth energy into works, which take the backseat in an everyday world:

"Our [writers] are working-class people with two or three jobs," she was quoted in the MV Times. "You come, relax, and don't do anything but write. We are trying to stay true to that."

Those that have been through the retreat say that its unique setup lends itself well to creativity. Philips, who attended three retreats, said that the idea was to put everyone in a room together to quietly write for hours on end.

"Something happened among the people in the room," Philips recalled. "She swore that the best writers, that having them in the room, somehow elevated the writing of others. And I swear to god, there is something to it. People like me became much better writers."

Phillips said that McGrath also had a way of recognizing and supporting the writer inside of people. As Philips said, who was an attorney, McGrath was the first one to recognize that she was a writer.

"I don't know how many hundreds of people that came through Renaissance House that were supported by her," Philips said. "She saw things in people they didn't know existed."

Before she died, McGrath was working on a project to turn a parcel of land across from the Renaissance House into a literary park and a place for poetry readings. She had been writing a grant for funding to help the project through before she died. Her son, Jason Rosen, said that they will be starting a fundraising campaign to help his mother's dream become a reality. The hope is to have a remembrance of McGrath on the Island around the Fourth of July, and then a christening ceremony or ground-breaking ceremony for the new park around the same time.