Top-notch museums fill New England
From my above-the-tree-tops apartment, I had a clear view of the steeply pitched, glassy roof of the Harvard Art Museums, an addition designed by architect Renzo Piano. Illuminated like a beacon at night, the museum complex beckoned me.
It became a haunt during a yearlong journalism fellowship, a place to attend classes, eat overpriced couscous salads, fall into long conversations and peruse the galleries.
By the time my stint in New England was up, I had haunted dozens of museums across the region. From Maine to Connecticut, from the rolling Berkshires to the rocky Atlantic coastline, the region is rich with grand art palaces, academic institutions and idiosyncratic, history-asserting museums, too. Here are some of my favorites and some exhibits worth seeing, too.
Arrowhead
Pittsfield, Mass.
An upstairs room here has a telling view of Mount Greylock, which, when snow covered in winter, resembles the arching back of a great, white whale. This is the 18th-century farmhouse where Herman Melville retreated to write his masterpiece, “Moby Dick.” The whole place lists and creaks like an old ship, however landlocked it may be within the swells of hills in western Massachusetts. On a lively and not-atall precious tour, a docent explained how Melville struggled to write and how his wife Elizabeth, often described in biographies (mostly by men) as cold and unforgiving, was an important defender of his work. Also: best museum sticker ever.
Clark Art Institute Williamstown, Mass.
The Clark, as it’s called, is a museum-cum-research institute surrounded by 140 acres of lush countryside. The close-to-the-ground buildings designed by architect Tadao Ando hint at what’s essential here by artfully framing it: the landscape. In fact, you’ll have to hike up a forested path (or take a bus) to get to one of the galleries. The buffer of solitude, sweat and landscape is an apt preparation for art. In the main buildings, resist the urge to dart directly to The Clark’s much sought-after stash of Impressionists. The Monets and Renoirs, in their pretty lilac gallery, can wait. Give some time over to the quiet Americans on the way, including Winslow Homer’s elegiac painting of a sleigh disappearing over a hill. Show to see: “Women Artists in Paris, 1850 to 1900” (through Sept. 3).
Emily Dickinson Museum Amherst, Mass.
I’m not a big believer in turning a writer’s home into a shrine, but there was something undeniably poignant about Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, with its slim bed with a dark wood headboard and the tiny desk near the window. “I dwell in Possibility .. .A fairer House than Prose ...,” she wrote. I visited with two friends, a political
editor from Sweden and a filmmaker from Nepal. I think we each held our breath a little. Our tour guide took us into an upstairs room where we got a lesson in the poet’s work and her manner of scribbling revisions, evidence of a confident but questioning mind. The desk and chair are actually reproductions, by the way, but the originals are owned by Harvard and part of a public tour at the Houghton Library there. Harvard Art Museums Cambridge, Mass.
The light-infused atrium is a glorious dose of serotonin and a great place for eavesdropping on brilliant students and professors. Make a pilgrimage to a display case up on the third floor, featuring a collection of sculptural objects, most ancient and tiny, celebrating the female form. A grounded Neolithic torso, for instance, or the Bronze Age “Schematic Figure,” which looks surprisingly modern. A gallery on the first floor is dedicated to contemporary artists and ideas about the changing nature of civic spaces. It’s where you’ll find photographs from LaToya Ruby Frazier’s poignant and deeply personal “The Notion of Home” series, which explores the legacy of racism and economic decline in small American towns. Shows to see: A focused exhibit of Nam June Paik’s work seems especially relevant for our screen-saturated times (through Aug. 5).
Mapparium
Boston, Mass.
This three-story, stained glass globe of the world was commissioned in 1930 for the headquarters of the Christian Science Publishing Society. I crossed a glass footbridge, entering somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Made from 608 jewel-toned glass panels, a material associated with sanctuaries and belief, the space is a meditation on how dramatically the world has changed. The political boundaries are based on a 1934 map, stuck in time between two world wars. I thought about all of the borders that have since shifted, all of the countries freed from foreign
rule, all of the ideas that have freely spread. Contributing to the Mapparium’s mystical effects is the curious acoustics of a glass globe. If you stand in the center, you can hear your own voice in surround sound.
Mass MoCA
North Adams, Mass. As contemporary art museums go, this is one of the very best in the U.S. A highlight, for me, was a tiny dose of what’s known to drive some people mad — sensory deprivation. Guided into a darkened space and through a series of switchbacks, I found myself in impenetrable darkness. I felt my pupils splay, straining to scoop up light. My peripheral vision hummed with activity. Were these echoes of spaces I’d seen? Some kind of afterimage? I was looking at myself looking, as artist James Turrell describes the effects on the senses of 15 minutes of blackness. “Hind Sight” is one of two by-appointment-only works by Turrell on view through 2019. The other, “Perfectly Clear,” is like walking into a cloud of pure white that pulses with electric color. Shows to see: Also on long-term view until next year is a collection of works by Laurie Anderson. The Mount
Lenox, Mass.
Edith Wharton was writing as soon as her eyes opened in the morning. She stayed in bed with her writing board until about noon, only then bathing and dressing for the day, a docent told me. Wharton’s estate and its meticulous Italianate gardens, which she designed, were considered modest among the area’s Gilded Age “cottages.” Wharton insisted on a modest sitting room and a small, round dining table because she believed in intimate conversation rather than grand fetes. There were just two guest rooms, including one where Henry James stayed during his visits, and a library modeled after her father’s study. The books are marked with underlines and checks in Wharton’s hand. I had a lemonade on the terrace, where James read Whitman after dinner, and walked the grounds, thinking about where I was when I first read “The Age of Innocence.”
New Bedford Whaling Museum New Bedford, Mass.
The whaling industry has touched the fates of families and communities around the globe, and this museum works diligently to get as much of that complex history into its labyrinth of galleries. Dense with objects — including five full whale skeletons and a half-scale whaling ship — it’s a museum that takes time to take in. I was drawn to the watercolor sketches made by whalemen at sea and the scrimshaw, decorated and carved bone and teeth. These depictions of sea life are meticulous and earnest, if unskilled. There is a lot of humanity in the humble images of heroic struggles where the sea turns crimson and dying whales spout blood in sweet, thought-balloon-like shapes. Wadsworth Athenaeum
Hartford, Conn.
This august museum is a collection of grand spaces, intimate nooks and unconventional, astute exhibition strategies. It lives up to its moniker, an athenaeum, a popular term in the 19th century for a museum with a library. This is especially true in a gallery dedicated to the precursors of the modern museum, cabinets of curiosities. Visitors can pull open drawers to explore natural specimens, scientific instruments and art objects. If I could direct you to a single work, it would be the strange and lovely portrait of Henriette Ferre by JeanFrancois Millet. With hints of greens and blues beneath her sallow flesh, the girl looks sickly. Her pale complexion seems to bleed onto her lips in a way that defies what bodies actually do. The tip of her nose is a bright red, as if from a hard cry. This sad girl is seared into me. Show to see: “Frederic Church: A Painter’s Pilgrimage” features landscapes from the Middle East and Mediterranean by this leading Hudson River School artist (through Aug. 26.) Walter Gropius House
Lincoln, Mass.
The eyeglasses, letters, ceramic pots and stones that belonged to Walter Gropius, founder of the German design school known as the Bauhaus, feel as if they are right where he left them. They are on his desk in the small, mindfully appointed home he designed for his family. Though he claimed to have made a nod to the surrounding farmhouses, the brick home with ribbon windows and glass block is bright white and decidedly modern. Design objects and furniture by Marcel Breuer feel like they’ve been witness to lives lived.