A Christmas Tale of My Local Museums

A winter wander through the Bennington Museum, the Clark Art Institute, and the Williams College Museum of Art, all on the cusp of change

C hristmas is a time for reminiscing, which has been my theme for the last couple of weeks, and for staying home in ye olde Arlington in rural Vermont. We’re cursed with loudmouth, throwback hippie socialists in high places, but Arlington’s a pretty, quiet town bracketed by mountains and made famous by Norman Rockwell, who lived and did his best work here from the 1930s into the ’50s. He used locals as models for the Four Freedoms, and he was much liked for organizing square dances. Grandma Moses lived a few miles away, as did Robert Frost, who wrote his best poetry here.

Staying put doesn’t mean going without art. A 30-minute drive from my house — there’s no traffic and few stoplights — takes me to the Bennington Museum, the Clark Art Institute, the college museum at Williams, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, called MASS MoCA. I skipped MASS MoCA this weekend. It’s the biggest art museum in the world, so it takes half a day to cover, and, in the Christmas spirit, I wanted to see old things. As a curator, Williams alumnus and trustee, and local yokel, I’ve followed each museum for decades. I’ve been visiting the Bennington Museum since I was a child.

The Bennington Museum never disappoints. It’s Vermont’s art and history museum, the keeper of heritage, modern in most ways but like an old-time general store in its variousness. Here and there are paintings, but nearly every gallery mixes art media along with the stuff of everyday life. A splendid 1925 Wasp touring car built in Bennington is in a gallery devoted to Vermont’s Gilded Age. Vermont’s not known for being cutting edge. Even the Gilded Age came here late, what small part of it there was to make it. Wasp made a total of 16 cars before the Depression killed it. Then — surprise — a very good gallery next to it features Bennington Modernist painting, most done by faculty at truly avant-garde Bennington College.

In the middle of the gallery is a recent gift of manuscripts, first editions, and an Edgar Allan Poe award owned by Shirley Jackson, the great horror story writer who lived in North Bennington. The museum received these objects last year. Jackson’s bizarre short story “The Lottery” and her novel “The Haunting of Hill House” are both set in small New England towns similar to a dozen or so places in Bennington County alone, including where I live.

Nearby are cases devoted to southwestern Vermont’s marble industry, Vermont silver, and, for a few weeks each fall, the Jane Stickle Quilt, made in 1863 and probably America’s most famous textile. Having 5,602 pieces making 169 blocks, each five square inches, and a scalloped border, it’s worshipped by quilters. There’s a gallery on the connoisseurship of Bennington’s old pottery industry, another on the Battle of Bennington, which set the stage for the Battle of Saratoga and the British surrender.

And then there’s a gallery of work by Grandma Moses that includes the one-room schoolhouse she attended. I spent most of my visit looking at her work, since it’s peak Christmas imagery. The museum just got a gift of Moses’s Mount Nebo in Winter from the family of Otto Kallir, the dealer who discovered the artist and made her famous. It’s a view from the Moses farm, still run by her family. When Moses and her husband bought the farm in 1905, they named the hill Mount Nebo after the mountain in the Old Testament from which Moses saw the Promised Land before he died.

Though her quaint style and subjects link her to Vermont, Moses lived just across Bennington’s border, in tiny Eagle Bridge in New York. We claim her, as we do Frost — who lived briefly in Vermont but is buried in the cemetery next to the museum — and Rockwell, who moved from Vermont to Stockbridge in Massachusetts in 1953.

I visit the museum often, concentrating on different parts of the collection. This past week, I saw a lovely, nostalgic show on old circus posters advertising the Big Top’s arrival in Bennington between 1896 and 1903. Then, before radio, TV, highways, and the internet, a circus visit was a huge deal and the peak of exoticism. Much of the art’s fragments, found in a local barn, are nicely restored and packed with color and energy. Memories are fragments, so a few elephants here, a few acrobats there suggest a once vibrant world gone by.

The museum does wonderful, smart exhibitions. Last year, Haunted Vermont considered our history of monsters, ghosts, seances, unsolved disappearances, and one witch trial, in neighboring Pownal, in 1785. The defendant, Margaret Krieger, was acquitted after she was tossed down a hole cut in the icy Hoosic River and, rather than float, sank to the bottom: a sign she was indeed not a witch. Recovered with a hook before she drowned, she smartly moved to Massachusetts.

At the museum, I’ve seen exhibitions on Vermont in the 1960s — when hippies started invading the place — the New Deal in Vermont, love and marriage over 250 years, and lots of work by living, local artists.

Vermonters are a quirky set, laconic, frugal, practical, kind, and unusually ready volunteers. The museum captures this spirit, which still exists. And Vermont’s a poor state, its bustling, early economy clobbered by the Erie Canal, which opened 200 years ago. We never had lots of rich people, and high taxes have chased many away. Vermont’s in a demographic crunch, too, having the country’s second-oldest population, after from West Virginia. So, the museum doesn’t have the Clark’s or Williams’s money, but its staff has imagination and resilience I rarely see in museums.

In anticipation of its 100th birthday in 2028, the museum has been slowly but surely fixing deferred maintenance problems, finding donors to fund new windows, new roofs, better security, and museum climate control. It’s raising money now for better landscaping and for remodeling the Grandma Moses schoolhouse into a modern classroom and art-making space for children. At some point the museum will need an addition. Nothing succeeds like success, and the museum’s much loved. It has kept the public focused on Vermont’s history at a time when, nationally, history has been sidelined or twisted.

I haven’t visited the Williams College Museum of Art in a few years. I’m fond of it and worked there when I was a student, but I never think about it. In the 1980s, before MASS MoCA opened, and when the Clark was moribund, the college museum was a happening place. Tom Krens was the director — before he went to the Guggenheim — and did electrifying exhibitions in an idiosyncratic old building repurposed as a museum by the postmodern architect Charles Moore. Then, Williams architecture had a heritage of boring, derivative gentility. The Moore redo was a jolt. Krens was a jolt. The college art department, along with Yale’s, the most distinguished and edgy in America, produced dozens of museum directors and curators.

In the mid ’90s, when MASS MoCA opened and the Clark got not only a pulse but a high octane transfusion of ideas and energy, WCMA slid into quiescence. It has had years when it has done more and sleepy years, too. During the Covid mass hysteria and hypnosis, Williams was ruthless in enforcing a police state on its robust students for a year and half, long after it was clear that the risks of Covid to them were nil. The college museum was closed during most of that time. Out of sight, out of mind. The museum’s still offering masks on a table by the front door. They’re the cheap blue ones that not only don’t work but, made from microplastic, are unhealthy and, once tossed in the trash, take decades to degrade if they degrade at all.

The introductory wall panel in the main permanent collection gallery refers to “the continuing Covid 19 panic” as well as “demands for social reckoning.” I think the gallery was redone last year, long after the Covid vacation from reality had ended, even at Williams, as had the “demands for social reckoning,” which I think refers to the mostly peaceful riots and arson rampage engineered by the hate group Black Lives Matter. Some topics are evergreen at places like Williams. They’re said to inform the selection of objects on display, along with “colonialism” and the lie that the college museum “was built on Mohican land.” It was, of course, built on Williams College land.

Anyone wondering why enrollment in art history classes has, nationally, cratered over the last few years only needs to read this introductory text. Young people, or at least young people who aren’t neurotic, don’t want to study art history as a way to indulge grievances and grudges.

I thought the museum’s Teddy Sandoval and Butch Gardens School of Art exhibition, organized by the museum and the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles, was very good. Sandoval (1949–1995) was a gay and Chicano artist, not well known but buoyant and playful. It’s not a retrospective but, rather, a group show of gay, Chicano, and Latino artists with Sandoval’s sensibilities.

I enjoyed my visit since I think it’s the last time I’ll see the college museum’s lovely, inviting, and beautifully paced galleries. Most of the museum is closing in a few weeks as it’s getting a new building. It doesn’t need one. The current space isn’t perfect. Parking is limited to a few spaces. It’s fine, though, for what this college museum is. It’s a teaching museum focused on students. The college has a net-zero psychosis and believes it needs a more sustainable building, which, aside from being a false value, is a luxury belief. With a multibillion-dollar endowment and a board packed with millionaires and a billionaire or two, it is building a new museum because it has money to blow.

Is the current one too small? If it is, that’s because the college lopped 20 feet off the back of the original plan when the building was renovated in 1981. Money was the issue then, and Williams, in a fit of bad judgment, built it with no room for growth in the collection, staff, or ambitions. Then, even elite colleges and universities had recurring financial crunches. That’s a thing of the past. They all have too much money now. This, the entitlement that comes with tenure culture, and administrative bloat have left them blinkered, lazy, and vain and the students badly served.

Besides, most of the museum’s gallery space is badly used. It has a nice teaching collection with limited strengths, but among them are 400 works by Maurice Prendergast and his brother, Charles, only one of which is on view. It’s got an important Hopper painting, good Hudson River School things, including a smashing view of Niagara Falls by William Morris Hunt, none on view. It owns lots of good photographs and prints. The entire first floor is reserved to art, mostly photographs, used by classes held this past semester. At four or five works of art covering each of a dozen or so classes, the concept lacks depth, and it takes too much space. And it’s the only part of the museum that will stay open. The new building won’t be ready until 2027. Basically, the college museum will be closed except for a few works of art made available for classes.

Since the place is closing, I would have packed the galleries with the high points in the permanent collection, ditched colonialism, reckonings, Covid, and Mohican woes as curatorial motivators, and closed with a blast of splendor. What made it on the walls from the permanent collection seemed haphazard.

The issue is decided, alas, as construction has started on a new building on a high-visibility spot on the campus’s main drag. SO–IL, a New York architectural firm, has designed what looks like a beautiful building with an indoor/outdoor feeling, lots of wood, and gathering spaces for students. It’s certainly going to be spacious. It’ll be very now, which is good for Williams. It will raise the bar for college architecture.

At $175 million, it’s very pricy indeed. Is it economically efficient? Of course not. Is there a demand in northwestern Massachusetts for another big art museum along with the Clark and MASS MoCA? Of course not. This little corner is rural. Tourists come during the summer, mostly in August. Williams students aren’t around then. Whom will the museum target for the best programming? Will it be the small student population or well-heeled art tourists? Will a lovely new building mean more gifts of art? Who knows? The Clark, elegant and prestigious, will always be a magnet.

I know we can’t completely fathom who’s rich and who’s poor. Still, the Bennington Museum, a scant few miles north and focused on essential renovations, has to push hard to raise 1 percent of what Williams is spending for a new — and, let’s face it, boutique — museum. I can’t say which of the two — the Bennington Museum or the college museum — is the better since they’re so different. The Bennington Museum is certainly more gratifying as well as more dynamic and creative. Living hand to mouth will do this.

I think the new Williams building will be stellar. We can only hope for the best.

After my visit to the college museum, I went to the Clark, which is on a roll. It just received a gift of hundreds of works of art, mostly old master portraits, and $45 million for a new wing to display them. I’ll write more about Wall Power, its new exhibition on modern French tapestries. The exhibition just opened this weekend, and I haven’t read the book yet, so I’ll do a proper story in a couple of weeks. The art comes from the Mobilier National, the French agency that runs the Gobelins Manufactory, which made tapestries and furniture for the French kings.

The Clark’s exhibitions are a mixed bag, some better than others, but Wall Power’s superb. I haven’t written much about tapestry except for an object here and there I’ve seen at art fairs, but those are medieval and early Renaissance. These are by Miro, Matisse, Le Corbusier, and many artists I didn’t know. The art combines ancient, painstaking techniques with contemporary vision.

The exhibition’s a feast of color and modern design, geared toward a mid-century look but with a handful of contemporary things. These aren’t paintings masquerading as tapestries but objects drawing from the unique character of wool, silk, and the loom, of warp and weft. The French want to keep old traditions like tapestry-making alive, but new techniques make for new art. I think it’s the most beautiful, joyous exhibition at the Clark in a long time and ranks with its Nikolai Astrup retrospective and its show about Renoir’s late nudes. What a Christmas gift to art lovers!