Black Refractions

Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem

History of Application: Talking to You, 1977, McArthur Binion (detail below)

One reason we look at art is to see ourselves reflected; I know that place, we say, that light, that joy or pain, that’s part of who I am. It’s reassuring, that affirmation that we’re not alone. Art is also revelation, showing us what we don’t know about ourselves and the lives of others.

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Give Us a Poem, 2007, Glenn Ligon

Since the murder of George Floyd and the international protests, I’ve been thinking about Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, a traveling exhibition I saw at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) in Northampton, Massachusetts, this winter, and its power to reflect and provoke reflection, as in “consideration,” as in “light returned from a surface.”

Nwantinti, 2012, Njideka Akkunyili Crosby

Black Refractions spans a near century of art-making by nearly 100 artists of African descent, with Bill Traylor, born in 1853, at one end of the spectrum and Jordan Casteel, born in 1989, at the other. It has a star-studded lineup: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Aboud Bey, Mark Bradford, Juliana Huxtable, Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Chris Ofili, Faith Ringgold, Bettye Saar, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Ann Weems, Kehinde Wiley, Fred Wilson …

Spirit of the Elements, 1979, Betye Saar

Echoes of Harlem, (detail) 1980, Faith Ringgold

… And one international in scope, featuring artists from or working in Africa, China, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean as well as the United States.

Untitled, diptych from Afro Muses series, 1995-2005, Chris Ofili, living in Trinidad and Tobago

Previously hosted by The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, and the Kalamazoo Institute of Art, it was scheduled to make two more stops after leaving SCMA in April. The show closed early because of the pandemic and is scheduled to open in May 2021 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle.

Festive Vista, 1980, Hughie Lee-Smith

Beautiful, inspiring, stimulating, it’s not the kind of show where you kick off your critical faculties and take everything in from the aesthetic equivalent of an overstuffed chair.

With some exhibitions, you can dive deep or drift. That might mean taking a show of Constable’s admittedly superb, revelatory landscapes, for instance, at face value, treating it as a day at the beach, a vacation from your own troubles and what the poet Matthew Arnold called “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” It might even deliver a dose of hope that the world is better than it seems, a “land of dreams,” to quote Arnold again.

Space, 1966, Alma Thomas

Beauty, nourishment, hope, an escape route to dreamland: All that can be found in Black Refractions, but also sorrow, struggle, pain, and dislocation. It’s not easy being face to face with harsh realities, but more than ever, it feels essential. And because the show presents the sensibilities of so many artists, it also manifests resilience, strength, assertion, courage, resistance, and transcendence.

Black Wall Street, 2008, Noah Davis

Lawdy Mama, 1969, Barkley L. Hendricks (next to two Betye Saar works)

Purists might argue that art should be viewed and have an impact without the viewer knowing the artist’s life story. I’m not a purist. I was moved by the stories of people who, against seemingly overwhelming odds, made extraordinary art, Clementine Hunter and Bill Traylor, for example. I wanted to know more about Elizabeth Catlett, James VanDerZee, and others (See the brief bios and links to more information at the end of this post.) I’m not immune to star power, either, as exemplified by 33-year-old Juliana Huxtable, who already has exhibited at MoMA, New Museum, and the Whitney.

Untitled (Man Dying), 1940-45, Clementine Hunter

Untitled (Dog), tempera on cardboard, n.d., Bill Traylor

The Midnight Ramblers, 1925, James VanDerZee

Mother and Child, 1993, Elizabeth Catlett

Anyone who skipped reading the wall labels would still feel the strong narrative pull of, among others, River, Maren Hassinger’s snaking sculpture of chain and rope, Mickalene Thomas’s rhinestone-encrusted Panthera, and Kehinde Wiley’s Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence), a portrait of a man standing amid the floating clouds of his hair.

These and other works can be seen as investigations into history, stereotypes, and social constructs and values but also into the natural world, the nature of painting, and the nature of portraiture.

Portrait of a Young Musician, 1970 Beauford Delaney

In other works, formal considerations seem to be what interested the artist, but that generalization may or may not hold when you take a closer look.

Number 74, Leonardo Drew

If there is a generalization to be made about Black Refractions, (and I know I’ve made some and will make a few more before I’m through), it might be that generalizations don’t do it justice. Quite the contrary, in fact. Take the idea of “black art,” for instance.

In the exhibition catalog, Studio Museum Director Thelma Golden states, “For me, to approach a conversation about ‘black art’ ultimately meant embracing and rejecting the notion of such a thing at the very same time.”

Khee I, 1978, Jack Whitten

So many of the artists represented in the show have come up against institutionalized ideas about what Art is and who can make it.

A related question: What should art do? To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, should it be a mirror held up to reality or a hammer to shape it? (Brecht came down on the side of “hammer.”)

The Room, 1949, Eldzier Cortor, the first painting in the museum collection

The Studio Museum in Harlem started out as a hammer, or maybe an artist’s mallet, an instrument to carve a new vision out of obdurate materials. As Columbia art history professor Dr. Kellie Jones explains in the catalog, the museum was founded as “a place to support artists of the African diaspora, who, throughout history had been largely shut out of exhibition and commercial opportunities … during a time of unbridled protest in the world of culture.”

That would be 1968, a time fraught with protest. The civil rights, antiwar, women’s, and environmental movements were all taking to the streets. Activism and advocacy, a desire to alter present reality and rewrite art history, have shaped The Studio Museum’s development over the past 50 years.

The museum wasn’t conceived as a repository of art, but it now has more than 2,500 works in its collection, reflections of myriad perceptions of reality, social, political, personal: Art as a hammer and a mirror.

Silence is Golden, 1986, Kerry James Marshall

Besides the imagination, complexity, and nuance evinced by the works in Black Refractions, there is wit. Wry, ironic, sometimes sardonic, it denotes the disconnect between an individual’s dead-on perceptions of reality and society’s assertions of what is.

Steam’n Hot, 1999, Willie Cole

The primary definition of refraction is the phenomenon of a ray of light being deflected from a straight path as it moves from one medium into another. It’s diversion; it’s distortion. It’s also what makes a mirage and a rainbow.

This show presents creativity refracted: passing through painting, sculpture, photography, video or another art form, informed by intellectual inquiry, honed by artistic rigor, sometimes forced by the artists’ experiences in the world to take a harder, longer path but not broken. Given form, substance, life.

This post is my attempt to convey my appreciation of the exhibition and show a sampling of the art in it. For those who want to know more about it, the museum website is a great resource and so is the exhibition catalog. The museum itself is closed but has online offerings.

Clementine Hunter (1886-87-1988), the granddaughter of an enslaved woman, began painting in her fifties, using supplies left behind by a guest of her wealthy employer, and went on painting for nearly another 50 years, on whatever material she could find: paper, roof shingles, window shades.

Born into slavery and a sharecropper most of his life, rendered jobless and homeless by crippling rheumatism in his seventies, Bill Traylor started making art in his late eighties, when he was sleeping nights in the backroom of a funeral home in Montgomery, Alabama. He made more than a thousand drawings and paintings using materials he found or was given.

Elizabeth Catlett merged activism with art-making. Born in Washington in 1915, she was denied admission to Carnegie Institute of Technology after the school learned she was “colored.” She went on to study with Grant Wood and Ossip Zadkine, made stylized, sensuous sculptures, such as Mother and Child, designed posters for Malcolm X and Angela Davis. In 1959, the State Department declared her an “undesirable alien” because of her leftist politics (she was living in Mexico at the time) and denied her a visa to return to the United States throughout the following decade.

The photographs of James VanDerZee (1886-1983) captured many of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as middle-class blacks and street scenes—the essence of a time and place. The arc of his career was wide, too: in 1925, he did the portrait of the Midnight Ramblers. A year before his death, he photographed artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Hunter for a Cure

 

Objects in Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum remind us that the fight against disease has been going on for centuries.

 

 

 

The term “wet specimens” alone could put you right off, I know.

That’s the technical term for the body parts on display at the Hunterian Museum. Last spring, I visited this Victorian neo-Gothic pile, part of the University of Glasgow.

The museum is named for William Hunter (1718-1783), the anatomist, surgeon, and teacher who bequeathed thousands of objects, including shells, fossils, minerals, coins, paintings, antiquities, and an extensive library, to the university.

But now that the coronavirus has put us all in storage, I wanted to focus on the jars of preserved medical specimens on display there. I admit, in my weirdness, I was drawn to them even before the current plague made them seem newly relevant.

They might seem unappealing oddities or at best quaint curiosities, antiquated tools compared to the sophisticated equipment now being used to investigate and treat COVID-19. (Despite having that technology at their disposal, researchers and medical staff feel the frustration of knowing they can’t get answers fast enough.)

Yet these jars hold history. They remind us that the history of medicine is a story of a long slog, of getting down to the nitty-gritty, getting close to the body, in all its stages and states. And of researchers handing on what they learned generation to generation to build a body of knowledge.

Preserving these specimens—a lymphatic vessel, the reproductive organs of sparrows—required patience, precision, and expertise. So does developing a body of knowledge, devising a cure.

 

For Hunter, specimens were vital to his medical practice, research, and teaching. He is variously credited with contributing to our understanding of the lymphatic system, obstetrics, cardiovascular disease, rheumatic disease, and bone and joint disease. Written more than two centuries after his death, a 1990 article about his contribution to dental science noted “Hunter’s teaching methods are still influential today, and his specimen collection is one of the most comprehensive in existence.”

Much has been written about the man as well as the scientist; the accounts sometimes contradict each other. He was generous, he was parsimonious; a gentleman, a social climber. By all accounts, he was an interesting person.

According to a 1968 JAMA article, “Of a contrary temperament, [Hunter] was born in Lanarkshire in the environs of Glasgow on the family estate, Long Calderwood. The family was large, some were tubercular, others were gouty, but the stock was outstanding, and means were available for proper education of each of the children. At the age of 14, William began his studies at the University of Glasgow, where he remained five years and acquired the reputation of a good scholar.”

C. Helen Brock, a Glaswegian physician who devoted 30 years of her life to the study of the man, presented a different perspective on Hunter’s early years, stating that because the farm’s soil was “unsuitable,” his father “lay awake at night” worrying about meeting family expenses—he sold off land to pay for William’s college education—and Hunter grew up in “an atmosphere of financial anxiety.”

Sent to university to prepare for a career as a Presbyterian clergyman, William chose science over religion and went on to study medicine in Paris and London. In his “darling London,” he seems to have proceeded from one success to another, among them being made Physician Extraordinary to Queen Charlotte. He delivered 14 of  her 15 children.

Thanks to his labors, Hunter became well-known and wealthy. (One admirer said Hunter “worked till he dropped.”) His circle include leading painters and writers, such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Tobias Smollett, and Benjamin Franklin, when Franklin was living in London.

In 1767, Hunter moved into his new, expensive Great Windmill Street residence, which also housed his school of anatomy and museum. “Anatomy is the only solid foundation of medicine,” Hunter wrote. “It is to the physician and surgeon what geometry is to the astronomer. It discovers and ascertains the truth, overturns superstition and vulgar error …”

“William Hunter,” by Johann Zoffany, collection of the Royal College of Physicians, London

He commissioned an architect to design his house but was frugal in other ways, dining out, a friend recalled, on a couple of eggs and a glass of claret. Instead of pouring drink down his gullet, he poured his fortune (£20,000 on coins alone) into acquiring “the trappings of civilisation,” in social historian Roy Porter’s words.

In 1768, Hunter wrote a friend, “My affairs go well. I am, I believe, the happiest of all men. I am sinking money so fast that I am rather embarrassed. I am now collecting in the largest sense of the word.”

Acquiring examples of nature’s astounding diversity and man’s innovativeness. Amassing knowledge. Indulging a soft spot for the lowly violin beetle? A Collector Extraordinary.

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Since arriving at the University of Glasgow in 1807, the collection has grown. In the 1940s, for example, the museum purchased fossils collected by pioneering paleobotanist Emily Dix. (Hers is a tragic tale.)

Also on display are medical and scientific instruments of a later date, such as the 19th-century lithotrite, above. Their looks, so spare, so machined, so carefully crafted for a specific purpose, attracted me more than their significance. I took their pictures but am a little ashamed to admit I didn’t get their names or note their purpose.

Still, you don’t have to study them long to see they have their stories to tell—and some of the narratives might, well, make your skin crawl. You might not really want to think about how that lithotrite operated (the movie Dead Ringers comes to mind…). Yet, for their time, they were advanced technology.

 

The specimens, like the instruments, are beautiful, delicate, mysterious, elegant and, yes, often grotesque. In a way, we’re like them.

Removed from the outside world, suspended, isolated behind glass. Objects to be studied, tested, and traced, and containers of bits and pieces of data that build a body of medical knowledge. What will our own bodies yield up to examination? Will we test positive for the COVID-19 virus? How will we respond to its presence? Will antibodies show up in our systems? And will the accumulation of all the data ultimately lead to a vaccine and a cure?

The lymphatics of the intestine. Lacteals. Porpoise

We may look with alienation at these “preparations,” at what is normally interior and concealed, just as we suddenly see our fellow humans in a new, unsettling light. We are as unfamiliar, complex, mysterious, survival-intent, and even repellent right now. Understandable; still, how strange it is.

We conceal ourselves, cover our faces with masks, our hands in gloves, dressed for moving through a storm, as if we were guilty of something. How quickly our former ways seem archaic. How quickly we have been transformed.

 

 

 

 

Assorted postscripts and links:

My post doesn’t do justice to the wonders of an institution that also includes the Hunterian Art Gallery (beautiful Whistlers!), an anatomy museum, a zoology museum, and the exquisite reassembled McIntosh House. More: Hunterian, 

You might find this article heartening: It profiles researchers at just one institution—Stanford University—applying their various and impressive kinds of expertise to the task of fighting COVID-19.

I’m all for that: Hunter’s library contains texts about a terrible plague in 1721, one of which touted coffee as a possible means of warding off disease-ridden pests.

Last fall, I wrote about another collector, not in Hunter’s league, yet interesting all the same: William Skinner. His collection lives on in a former Congregational meeting house in South Hadley, Massachusetts (owned and overseen by Mount Holyoke College).

The end: The 1782 engraving below shows William Hunter in his museum on Resurrection Day, among searchers of their missing parts. Credit: Wellcome Collection.

In the Hood

Visiting Dartmouth College’s art museum in Hanover, New Hampshire.

A leaping, frilly Hiroshige wave on an expansive felt panel looms before you as you enter the two-story atrium of the Hood Museum. Reopened last January after three years of renovation and expansion, the Hood makes a strong first impression, with lofty spaces and subtle effects. I was impressed by the textures and attention to detail: glazed bricks with a porcelain sheen, satiny concrete walls, burnt-orange piping along the edge of a tweedy charcoal-gray carpet.  

The Hood can be proud of its collection, 65,000 works of art from all over the world and across millennia, but rather than being simply a rich repository, it focuses first and foremost on its role as a teaching museum.

The highly regarded firm Tod Williams Billy Tsien Architects reconceptualized the original museum, by noted postmodern architect Charles Moore, which opened in 1985. Among the major changes Williams and Tsien made were to add five galleries and three classrooms and create a new entrance and the atrium.

According to the firm’s website, they sought to bolster the Hood’s teaching capabilities and “encourage a sense of curiosity by as much direct contact as possible.” I didn’t know the Moore building, but the new Hood is an airy, lucid structure. The galleries’ dimensions are gracious, and the lighting is excellent, with natural light introduced as much as possible. 

Nonetheless, at some point, my excitement about being there began to fade. As I wandered, I wondered: Can a museum be too perfect?

My first bump in the road came down a hall on the ground floor, when I spotted Mara Superior’s “Angelo Da Vendemmia—Castle Vase.” I was thrilled to see something in a museum by someone I know (at least to say hello to). An unforgiving medium, porcelain in Superior’s hands and sensibility becomes a witty, lyrical vehicle of expression, and this was a finely wrought piece of decorative art. 

Maybe it was the sight of the angel looking out with downcast wings, hands meekly folded in front of her. Maybe it was the vessel’s tucked-in-a-corner location, or the fact that it was sealed in a glass box… but, not for the first time in my museum-going, I felt a sense of dislocation. Not mine, the objects’. Seeing a Navajo rug high on a white wall, silver serving spoons supine within a vitrine, African ceremonial masks untouchable on rigid stands, I’m struck by how removed they are from their original homes, context, life.

Would their makers be dismayed or gratified to see them in these neutral spaces? 

It’s not possible, I know, for the vase to be filled with bachelor buttons, poppies, and Queen Anne’s lace and displayed on a scrubbed wooden table by a sunny window. Any museum would exhibit it as the Hood does. Still, my heart went out to it, and my mood clouded up a little, à la the overcast October sky outside. 

 

 

As I went on, the restrained design of this newly recast museum was having an untoward effect on me. Was the setting too understated, too neutral? Were the surfaces too bland, was there too much white space?  Instead of clearing the way for an energetic exploration, the cool atmosphere seemed to tamp down my enthusiasm, and the art’s vitality.

Seeking an antidote, I homed in on the many spectacular works on exhibit, such as the gorgeous Assyrian reliefs. Showcased on the ground floor, the massive slabs originally decorated the palace of a monstrous king, Ashurnasirpal II. They are a fascinating study in contrasts: larger-than-life scale/fine work, ancientness/realism. Wings/sandals.

 

In one, a divine bodyguard of sorts stands behind the king, a bracelet on his wrist (I had to resist reading it as a Swatch) and a pail in his hand. I was struck by how the anonymous artists from the ninth century BCE emphasized the arm, leg, and hand muscles and in so doing, conveyed the might of this genie, and the king and his empire.

 

 

In the Melanesian gallery, I met a crowd of personalities. Elaborate carving distinguished some objects; many of the suspension hooks, for instance, which served as both talismans and as a means of securing food and other valuables. Others, such as the fish (bottom row), were stylized, wonderfully simple. Whether there was a wealth of detail or the merest suggestion, the objects had mojo.

“Global Contemporary: A Focus on Africa,” an exhibition up through December 1, includes large-scale works that dominate the gallery they are in. My favorite was a dazzling textile sculpture by El Anatsui, an artist whose work I’d first seen at the Yale University Art Gallery. A massive piece (20 by 18 feet), “Hovor” had the awe-inspiring effect of the Assyrian reliefs. El Anatsui achieves a kind of alchemy, art conjured from aluminum bottle tops and copper wire. The title, derived from the Ewe words ho and vor, can be translated as “valuable cloth.”

 

 

In conversation with “Hovor” were the elegant, fantastical engine “V12 Laraki” by Eric Hove and Elias Sime’s “Tightrope: Infatuation,” in which castoff circuit boards have been combined to suggest an intricate aerial view of a city.

 

I gravitated to a variety of paintings that had in common color and energy.

Black Enigma, Adolph Gottlieb, 1946

In the gallery dedicated to Australian aboriginal art, the vivid orange tones and complex patterns of George Tjungurrayi’s “Karrukwarra,” left, and Naata Nungurrayi’s “Marapinti”  heated up the room (both photos are details).

 

 

“Floyd Dell,” John Sloan, 1914

 

Toward the end of my visit, I saw the meteorological mood had lifted. The clouds had broken up; sunlight was breaking through. The dramatic window wall that forms part of the Hood’s facade framed a classic New England vista: a town green, a spectrum of fall foliage, a sharp blue sky.

My own frame of mind had improved. Good intentions are not always enough when it comes to fruitfully spending time in a museum. Sometimes it all clicks, other times, not so much. That’s not necessarily the fault of the place. Is the Hood too perfect? Maybe. Maybe on another day, I’d have been more receptive to its atmosphere.

And since my visit, it’s dawned on me how terrific it is that in a small town in the wilds of northern New England, there’s a museum where you can see a 2,000-year-old Celtic bronze pitcher and a sculpture by Yayoi Kusama—for free, no less.

 

In any case, I would be a sorry thing if I weren’t touched by the many outstanding artworks I saw and—here’s the happy ending—the best came last.

Call me sentimental, I found Paul Sample‘s “The Return” really moving, with its powerful sense of place, its narrative strength, and its warmth of feeling.

Right down the center of the painting, a young G.I., duffle on his shoulder, makes his way along a slippery road. His khaki uniform is at one with the dun tones of the palette. He’s the only living thing on the scene; the only other sign of life is a puff of smoke from a train in the background. Most likely, the town portrayed is in New Hampshire or Vermont; Sample was a Dartmouth grad and taught art there for many years.

 

 

“The Return” represents a deeply emotional and personal experience. Soldiers and sailors went through years of combat en masse, but after demobilization, the last leg of the journey for many of them was making their solitary way back to a small town. There was no band playing at the train station, maybe not even a dog barking. This soldier just puts one foot in front of the other, much as he had done on the march; I hope he found a warm welcome waiting for him when he got to where he was going.

 

 

Tell me, what is the perfect museum in your eyes?

And to read more about the Hood’s expansion and mission, click here.

The Skinner Museum and the Collector Behind It

What possesses someone to acquire thousands of possessions?

Joseph Allen Skinner (1862–1946) was an omnivorous collector. Over the course of a life that began during the Civil War and ended after World War II, he acquired thousands of things. Fossils, seashells, pewter, woodenware, suits of armor, carpentry tools, Native American artifacts, birds’ eggs, furniture, clocks, musical instruments, a blunderbuss, a carving of Father Time, a dugout canoe, a meteorite, and a coco de mer (an unusual coconut variety) all found their way to him, or, rather, he found his way to them.

He even saved a piece of his wedding cake from 1887, which, along with the articles mentioned above and hundreds more, is on display at the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

A lifetime resident of western Massachusetts, Skinner was a benefactor of Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, and the Skinner Museum, housed in a former church just down the street, is operated by the college’s art museum.

The church was collected, too. The classic 19th-century Congregational meeting house originally stood in Prescott, 20 miles away. Skinner had it taken down piece by piece and moved before the town was razed to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir in 1929.

The Skinner is a well-maintained, orderly place, but its high-ceilinged, open, unfinished interior and the seemingly miscellaneous contents reminded me of those mostly bygone businesses in coastal Maine and other parts of rural New England, barns stocked with antiques, almost antiques, and postcards, paintings, garden ornaments, old signs…

I like museums like the Skinner just because of the disparate, idiosyncratic nature of their contents. Cheek by jowl are the specimens of a treasure hunt, and aside from enjoying the treasures themselves, I wonder what quality—charm, grace, historical significance—deemed them collectable? And I wondered who Skinner was and what possessed him to acquire so many possessions; altogether the collection includes nearly 7,000 objects. So this story shifted from being about my fascination with cabinets of curiosity to being about the curiosity behind them.

Professor Google provided basic facts about Skinner. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in 1883, which suggests he had an inquiring intellect. Yet although that course of studies could be rigorous, it was also considered preparation for a commercial manufacturing career, which Skinner duly embarked upon as the son of an industrialist who made a fortune weaving silk into satin. (A Skinner fabric sample is in that monumental cabinet of curiosities, the Smithsonian.)

His older brother, William, served as company president and ran the New York sales headquarters. Joseph A. stayed close to home as “active manager of the mill at Holyoke,” according to a 1911 story in the trade publication Silk. The article stated the factory occupied more than five acres of floor space: “the largest silk mill in the world.”  Documentary photographer Lewis Hine, whose earlier, wrenching portraits of child workers led to labor-law reform, took the 1936 picture of the vast factory, above, for the WPA.

At age 24, Joseph married Martha Clement Hubbard, a Phi Beta Kappa Vassar graduate, and they had four children. He was superintendent of the Grace Church Sunday school for 20 years and donated land for a state park. With his daughter Elizabeth he traveled extensively—there are pictures of him astride an elephant in India and a camel in Egypt—collecting as he went.

In photographs of the Skinner factory, the workplace appears immaculate, the workers full-grown, well-dressed, well-fed. No doubt things were gussied up before the shoots, but these are not typical, poignant Lewis Hine pictures. (To get his damning shots, Hine often had to use subterfuge.)

According to the New England Travels blog, “During the Depression, Joseph Skinner donated fresh milk from his South Hadley dairy farm to the Holyoke center for welfare distribution, and produce from the farm was sold at cost to his employees. A worker would place his order at the mill, and on the next day a truck would deliver fresh milk and vegetables to his door.”

The profile that emerged was of a son of an emigrant Englishman and self-made man, a wealthy New England capitalist in his own right, a benevolent person from a family inclined to benevolent acts. (After World War I, his sister Belle, one of his six siblings, financed the rebuilding of a destroyed French village.)

After accumulating these bits and pieces, I still felt I was just skirting the edges of his personality. My search reminded me how difficult it is to know anyone’s motivations, much less those of somebody dead for nearly three quarters of a century. Then I looked once again at photographs of the Mill River flood and had a flash of insight.

On May 16, 1874, just a few days before Joseph Skinner’s 12th birthday, the Mill River dam broke, sending a raging, towering wave of water downstream, that in an hour destroyed the village of Skinnerville, including Skinner père’s first mill, in Haydenville, Massachusetts.

Detail, Knowlton Brothers, “Wm. Skinner’s House,” Forbes Library Digital Gallery

Detail, “Mill River Disaster, Haydenville,” Forbes Library Digital Gallery.

The flood killed 139 people. Skinner’s family escaped. Their house was damaged but salvagable. Joseph’s father relocated it, his business, and his family to Holyoke, Massachusetts.

I went looking for letters. I found them in the archives at Wistariahurst, in Holyoke, once the Skinner family home and now a museum. On May 10, six days before the flood, Joseph had written one in his careful, childish hand that talked about making a “prety may basket.” Although there were numerous manila folders holding more of his letters, none talked about the disaster that killed dozens, scattered houses like toy blocks, brought his father to near bankruptcy, sent his family fleeing to high ground, and tore apart his world.

But the next year, in two (rather sparsely punctuated) notes to William, he wrote: “Our class is studying mineralogy and I am getting a collection and I want to know if I can take yours that you got on Mount Holyoke.” And: “I don’t think I have ever told you how many minerals I have I have about 42 that is quite  good for just starting I think, don’t you?” He was “just starting” upon what would be his lifelong pursuit.

So he started, and so he went on. As a young man touring Europe with his brother, Joseph sent home scrupulous reports about what they saw: “a splendid collection of antiquities… Roman relics… old clocks and watches…” The brothers were dutifully following the well-trodden tourist route of the time, yet Joseph comes across as a thoughtful and enthusiastic observer.

His letters reveal a twenty-something training his eye, honing his taste (the paintings in the National Gallery in London didn’t interest him)­, expanding his store of knowledge—in short, collecting impressions, information, ideas.

Back home, he settled down to being a businessman, family man, pillar of his church. He continued growing his collection. (Just five years before his death, he wrote, “I bought some Aztec relics from Aaron Bagg who informs me they were brought out of Mexico, fifty of more years ago. There were eight pieces which look much like Indian pieces, bowls & pitchers.”)

In doing so, he was like many of his affluent contemporaries who filled their houses with paintings, antiquities, and ancient artifacts.* But I suspect his inner boy had something to do with it, too. He knew how the material world could be swept away like that. It’s tempting to think that the flood he witnessed as a boy was the source of his passion for preserving (including saving a church from inundation) and acquiring a storehouse of old, fragile, homely, elegant, offbeat, and splendid objects.

*Collecting in a Consumer Society, by Russell W. Belk, has fascinating information about the phenomenon of acquiring objects; preview here. It’s also essential to acknowledge that the trade in Indigenous artifacts and in ancient objects from other countries, as well as bird eggs and other natural history specimens, proceeded in Skinner’s time seemingly with little if any ethical reservations or legal restrictions. Today, while it’s impossible not to marvel at that dugout canoe, it’s also impossible to see it and similar objects among his collection in the same light as he probably saw them, simply as objects to which he was fully entitled, by virtue of his wealth, nationality, and status, to possess.

But it’s also important to mention that there can be nuance to a collector’s story. In the Skinner Museum collection is a Sara Fina Tafoya pot. According to the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum website, “Tafoya was one of the first living Puebloan potters to be celebrated by collectors, and she helped usher in a wave of ceramic revival and creativity in the region.”  Perhaps Skinner’s acquisition of the elegant blackware jar with a bear-claw motif had the very positive effect of contributing to the fame and fortune of a Native American.

The Joseph Allen Skinner Museum is open May through October, Wednesdays & Sundays, 2-5 p.m., and by appointment year-round. The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum on the main campus is small but wonderful, and open year-round. 

As part of its mission, Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke, Massachusetts, maintains the Archive, a storehouse of information about the family, the city, and the times. It has a wonderful collection of Joseph’s letters, some of which are shown and quoted  here. Wistariahurst also offers tours, lectures, and other activities.

Spring Flower Power

Sure cure for the winter blues: the Smith College Botanic Garden Bulb Show 

 

 

Every year for more than a century, the Smith College Botanic Garden has been forcing spring to come early, in the form of hundreds of bulbs bursting into florescence in the Victorian-era Lyman Conservatory right before the vernal equinox .

 

 

 

 

You can’t help marveling over the horticultural engineering behind the show, the timing and the cultivation involved, almost as impressive as the extravaganza itself.

 

Even before you focus on the visual splendor in front of you, you are welcomed by a heady, hothouse mix of floral perfumes suffusing the cool air in the two greenhouse rooms. There’s nothing demure about a hyacinth’s aromatic come-hither call to bees, who, despite snow cover and chill temperatures, find their way in through the open windows at the peak of the glass roof.

 

 

Your eyes go first to the primary colors, bright colors, kindergartner’s crayon colors.

There’s nothing demure, either, about the exhibition’s headliners—the Rembrandt tulips, the indigo cinerarias, the double daffodils, the flamboyant red anemones—in their showy party dresses.

 

But there’s drama among the chorus, something doughty and stout-hearted about even the smallest specimens. I’m always touched by the appearance of the first snowdrops in my garden.

And there’s nothing braver and more cheering to me than the sight of a bright gold crocus, quavering in the perilous icy spring air, valiantly waiting for the equally brave pollinators.

Multiply the effect of one crocus to the nth power and you have an inkling of the bulb show’s impact.

 

 

 

Then, the more you look, the more you see the subtlety of the plants’ arrangement, the skillful layering and contrasting of shape, color, scale, and texture.

 

You stoop down and lean in to admire the small bulbs, such as the grape hyacinths and  fritillaria uva vulpis (the latin name translates to “fox grape”). You stretch up to sniff the delicately scented freesia and the tiny, astringent fragrance of witch hazel.

There’s a whole narrative arc within this show, from the tightly furled buds to the tulips whose petals are hanging on by a breath. And a historical span, for before you are not just the results of months’ worth of coaxing potted-up bulbs into bloom, but also the products of hundreds of years of hybidization, the culminations of plant breeders’ painstaking efforts to elicit very particular genetic expressions: a frill, a streak, a shade of blue.

 

 

 

 

 

This year, I went to the Friday-night opening of the show. It felt as if every flower had opened just that minute, the curtain had just gone up.

Outside the world was black and white, snow on the ground, ebony velvet sky. Inside the pristine flowers waited, starkly beautiful in the artificial light.

And in the Church Exhibition Gallery off the main entry, tables set out with fresh-baked cider doughnuts and cookies the size of a sunflower head stood at the ready. Volunteers with warm smiles poured out glasses of cider.

Smith always knows how to throw a party.

 

Art Riches at Yale University

 

What’s the best setting for an art collection? At Yale University, you can experience answers architects have proposed over the past 100 years, as you move through a sweeping art survey. Three connected buildings, one of them designed by noted twentieth-century architect Louis Kahn, form the oldest United States college art museum: the Yale University Art Gallery. The word gallery hardly conveys the scope of its enormous collection. Just across the street, is another treasure house, in another Kahn masterpiece, the Yale Center for British Art (a subject for another time).

To the right of the Gallery lobby is the 1928 neo-Gothic Old Yale Art Gallery, designed by a member of the Class of 1891, Egerton Swartwout (a name fit for a character in a Henry James novel). With no formal training in architecture, he gained entree into the field through a letter of introduction to the redoubtable Stanford White.

The first room you come to is the Sculpture Hall. “Be reverent, you are in the presence of Art” is the message of this nave-like place. And you comply.

 

Hard surfaces: marble and stone. Tough guys: warriors, rulers, statesmen, and the orator Demosthenes, reputed to have cured himself of stuttering by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. The softest thing in it may be the light falling through leaded glass.

Here and there, the unyielding substances’ vulnerability to hard knocks is revealed—noses lopped off, surfaces eroded. As is their capacity to freeze the ephemeral: a young girl’s stylish hairdo, the delicate folds of a boy’s tunic.

 

Date palms laden with fruit still sway in a wall-mounted Byzantine mosaic floor. (Mosaic photo courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.)

 

 

The seemingly ephemeral lingers, too, in the form of red pigment on a courtier’s sandals. If not for the museum’s enlightening captions, I might have overlooked the faint traces of paint on the platform wedge depicted on the Assyrian stone relief at one end of the hall.

The massive panel came from the palace of King Assurnasirpal II, in what is now Nimrud, Iraq. (One very nasty man, he reigned from 883 to 859 B.C. and had a penchant for lopping off the noses of those he conquered—while they were still alive.)  Touching, that touch of color having survived nearly 3,000 years. All the more touching, knowing that three years ago ISIS senselessly, deliberately destroyed reconstructed parts of the palace and other treasures in that city.

 

 

I also took a closer look at the Sumerian “Votive Statue of a Man” (ca. 2550-2250 B.C.) after reading its caption. The worshipper, it notes, wears his identity on his sleeve; an inscription there identifies him as the son of Ur-ur, “who seeks good health and long lives for his wife and children.”

His bare toes peek out beneath a “tufted skirt, with four layers of tassels resembling fleece,” a status item.

Such details bring us a breath closer to knowing humans separated from us by millennia.

 

 

 

And that’s just one room.

If you turn left from the gallery lobby, moving farther into the 1953 Louis Kahn building, you come to a big room full of extraordinary African art. The hall itself is subdued, neutral, its most noticeable architectural feature is the cast concrete tetrahedral ceiling. It’s a wonderful, surprisingly warm setting for the art.

 

 

I couldn’t get over “Fragment of a Male Figure,” from the Sokoto culture of Nigeria. Who was he? Cartoonish and tragic, woeful or dyspeptic? Not much is known about this long-ago culture (the figure is dated circa 500 B.C.E.–200 C.E). His story is lost, but what a face. 

 

Maybe it was starting off with the African art and the ancient busts, mosaics, and artifacts from around the Mediterranean, but in making my way around the gallery, I was particularly drawn to the modern artworks and  newly sensitive to the affinities between the old and the new. African art’s profound influence on Modernism is well-known; touring this collection brings it home.

 

The museum deserves a shout-out for its smart juxtapositions, a Jackson Pollock painting by a pair of Giacometti statues, for instance, and the deft, dramatic placement of artwork, such as Brancusi’s “Yellow Bird” (1919) and the wall of works by Bonnard and Vuillard. (Below, Vuillard’s “The Child at the Door”)

 

      

 

As usually happens to me in museums, I fell in love with artworks I’d never seen before, for instance, Nick Cave’s wonderful, mysterious, totemic “Soundsuit” (2006), made of paint, paper, cotton, wood, and fabricated fiberglass; and Florine Stettheimer’s sublime oil portrait of critic, author, and photographer Carl Van Vechten (the purple socks!).

 

 

I met “in person” iconic paintings, including Van Gogh’s “Night Cafe,” Hopper’s “Rooms by the Sea” …

 

 

 

… and used up the last bits of my store of concentration in another vast space, the room dedicated to spectacular Indo-Pacific art, on the third floor of the Louis Kahn building.

 

 

There’s more I could talk about, whole categories skipped, Asian art, European art, American art, contemporary design, but I’ll circle back to African art, to a 2006 assemblage by El Anatsui, a sculptor who works in Ghana and Nigeria.

 

 

From a distance, his immense “Society Woman’s Cloth (Gold)” shimmers with the radiance of precious metals. Up close, you see it’s an illusion—or is it?—the “cloth of gold” is painstakingly fabricated from thousands of aluminum liquor bottle caps linked by copper wire.

My photograph doesn’t do it justice. This piece has it all, scale, detail, originality, depth, artistry, beauty.

A good note to end on.

 

 

 Do you have a college museum near you?

Located in downtown New Haven, the Yale University Art Gallery is free, and you can spend hours exploring its collection on its extensive website.