Museum makeover
Revised curatorial strategy aims to revitalize Bennington Museum
The Bennington Museum isn’t just your Grandma Moses museum anymore.
During the past few years a quiet revolution has taken place at the 166-year-old institution. Although the work of the iconic artist still plays a vital role, you’re as likely to find edgy modernism, be invited to an art criticism festival, encounter a locally inspired tattoo demonstration or delve into deeply existential questions about contemporary issues.
For decades, the museum, about an hour’s drive from the Capital Region east along Route 7, relied on permanent exhibits based on historical artifacts, the Revolutionary War Battle of Bennington and folk and decorative arts that made it seem time had passed it by.
Not far from MASS MOCA, the Clark Art Institute and Williams College Museum of Art, all offering a slew of popular and often challenging exhibitions and related programing, its predictability was only magnified.
“It was moribund,” says Brian Allen, a former curator at the Clark and a member of Bennington’s collection committee.
Allen and others say while the museum has a strong collection and is in a region steeped in culture “there were … gaps in the interpretation,” says Robert Wolterstorff, the executive director who arrived in 2014 to turn things around.
For Wolterstorff, it’s all about reinterpretation, not major changes to the physical space or objects in the collection. He and his staff set out on a plan to “update” the museum with a sense of the unexpected while “not losing its sense of tradition” and dramatically changing the 40,000 objects in the collection stretching back to the Colonial era.
“We needed to rethink what we did largely with what we had,” Wolterstorff said recently as he was giving a tour of the galleries, which are much like rooms in a stately historic house. Or as marketing director Susan Strano puts it: “tweak content and presentation just enough to take a few risks but not wipe away a lot of good history.”
To achieve this, numerous small changes have been added incrementally through a process of experimentation, informal evaluation and selection in what is described as “creative collisions.” These come in a variety forms, but the underlying premise is to juxtapose seemingly unrelated objects and materials together and draw deeper connections beyond conventional practice.
This curatorial mission greets you at the front entrance. In the “Works on Paper” gallery carved out of the gift shop is the exhibit “Thinking About Extinction and Other Droll Things” featuring the prints of longtime New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren, who lives in Vermont.
His acerbic visions of wild biomorphic creatures, often based on poetry, aren’t remotely typical of the museum’s past. “It’s rather compelling, challenging and not what was happening,” Allen said. “I really do like what they are doing. It’s pushing it but with measured restraint and thoughtfulness.”
All of the galleries have been significantly altered, if ever-so subtly. In the Gilded Age gallery, you’ll find Frederick Macmonnies’ sumptuous portrait of
May Suydam Palmer, the Martin Wasp, a luxury automobile made in Bennington by Karl Martin between 1920 and 1924. Glass and metal works by Louis Comfort Tiffany are side by side with two patent models, photographs of old factories, and a wonderfully ornate birdcage.
Aside from expanding the Gilded Age well into the 20th century years beyond established historiography, the gallery surprises with its broad scope yet nuanced interrelations. It was the first gallery to undergo a transformation under the new curatorial strategy and is very much a laboratory for other ideas.
“It is about breaking down barriers in how you see objects and classify them,” says longtime curator Jaime Franklin. “Why can’t a 19th-century tool be next to a 20th-century painting, or a classic car next to a rare piece of furniture?”
Or comic books, snowboards and outboard motors together in a community-inspired series dubbed Bennington Collects. Why not Grandma Moses paired with Helen Frankenthaler, the wildly abstract painter from the mid-20th century as in a recent exhibit named “Grandma Moses: American Modern.”
Much of the curatorial thrust is driven by what is termed Bennington modernism. From the 1950s until the early 1970s, Bennington College was the intellectual hub for the so-called “Second New York School” following the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and 50s but was largely left alone by the museum for years.
The movement includes many wellknown artists like Anthony Caro, Frankenthaler, Jules Olitisky and Kenneth Noland but also other less-heralded artists such as Pat Adams and Paul Feeley. Its hallmark was its range of expression and ingenuity. A core idea of Bennington modernism is the restless challenging of accepted norms through diversity and open-mindedness.
From color field painting, minimalism, early conceptualism and elements of pop art it included an eclectic wellspring of creativity that mirrors the new curatorial strategy and Bennington’s innovative past in the industrial revolution into the 20th century.
“It is essentially about the maker and individual creativity first and foremost and less about genre, style, or time period,” Wolterstorff says. “Innovation isn’t always defined by these categories.”
So far, the curatorial shift is making an