Art Road Trip Bennington, Vermont I

Performative Acts

Dona Ann McAdams

Through August 15, 2021

 

Robert Frost in Vermont

Through November 7, 2021

 

Selections from the Permanent Collection

Bennington Museum of Art

 

A few weeks ago, we decided to get out of the Pioneer Valley to visit one of our favorite small art museums in Bennington, Vermont. One of the shows there–alas, closing soon–are the photos of Dona Ann McAdams. Her work is often compared to that of Dorothea Lange and Henri Cartier-Bresson in that she is fond of candid photography, though her work is more overtly feminist than that of Lange, the images less soft focus-wise than those of Cartier-Bresson, and ARE more confrontationally political than either of them. The Bennington exhibit samples work from past McAdams retrospectives and is heavy on wit and irony, but also touches upon her deep commitment to social justice.

 

The gallery has harsh lighting, but here are several images that say more than I can about them. You will notice, though, that McAdams (b. 1954) likes ironic juxtapositions.

 

  

 

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

The leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sunk to grief.

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

 

Few 20^th century poets were as celebrated as Robert Frost (1874-1963). His poetic reputation has faded a bit in our jaded age. To some critics, Frost’s works seem antiquated, his rhymes straightforward, his subjects naively apolitical, and his tone homiletic. Yeah, yeah. His are still among the most memorable lines in the English language. Frost’s fame remains such that three New England states–Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont–try to claim him and each has a case, as he lived in all three. There’s a bust of him at Amherst College, where he once taught, and its library is named for him. New Hampshire is one of the places where he failed as a farmer. But given that his physical remains lie in a Bennington churchyard, he taught at Middlebury College, and lived in Shaftsbury part of the year from 1920 on, Vermont has maybe the best claim.

 

 

Bennington has a show linked to Frost’s time in Vermont. How, you might wonder, does an art museum display a poet? A few objects are obvious, such as his chair and portable writing desk. That assemblage looks all the world like an outtake from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

 

For much of the rest, though, curators chose paintings and graphics that evoke Frost’s favorite subjects: the New England landscape, weather, its beauty, and the precariousness of existence in what can be an unforgiving region. The images come with snippets of his poetry and there are several sound files of him reading his works. Here are several evocative images. 

 

 

 

Above: Top to Bottom--Rockwell Kent "Puritan Church;" Arthur Burton, "Putney Melting;" Lucius Lankes, "Vermont Farmhouse"

 

 

I’ll be frank, though. The show is too text heavy for an art museum, so if you’re the impatient sort, take a notebook with you, jot down titles of the mentioned poems, find them later, and savor them at your leisure. Here’s a famous one–“Fire and Ice”– that’s  distressingly appropriate for both the flinty hardness of the New England landscape and a nod to our time of plague and climate change.    

 

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

 

No pictures are allowed in the Grandma Moses exhibit which is housed in the refurbished schoolhouse wing. So instead, here’s an eclectic sample of images from the rest of the permanent collection–just for the heck of it.

 

From the Vermont Modernists: Francis Colburn, “Family Group” (1939); John Atherton, “The Ore Pit” (1947).

 

 

 

Ever wonder what happens to displays at a World’s Fair when the gates close for the last time. Sometimes they end up in museums. This over-the-top ceramic was first seen at the 1853 Crystal Palace fair in London, which is often said to be the first modern world’s fair. Bennington was once a center of ceramics manufacturing, but now this piece looks like a harbinger of Gilded Age excess. 

 

 

 

Speaking of the Gilded Age, Brattleboro is at the other end Molly Stark Trail, but Bennington holds a fine example of an Estey organ such as a Gilded Age family seeking instant cred might have plopped in the parlor, even if no one could actually play it.

 

 

 

Finally, when did the ideal of American democracy disappear? I’d have to cogitate upon that, but it was alive in 1927, when Harriet Miller titled this sculpture “Democracy.”