Current Exhibits at Brattleboro Museum

 

Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

Current Exhibitions Summer/Fall 2024

Closing October 19, 2024

 

Leave it to the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) to launch exhibits that allow you to explore your politically correct soul without feeling like you’re being beaten over the head. I’ve recently criticized a few (overly) sanctimonious exhibits that merely draw attention to how obvious and dull the art is. That’s not in play at BMAC.

 

The In Between spotlights the work of Susan Brearey and Duane Slick some of it realistic and some abstract. Aspects of their work could be interpreted as echoes of the end of the Anthropocene ideology. Yet, one could just as easily see it as a celebration of the wild accentuated by placing woodland critters in places you wouldn’t anticipate. This is especially the case for animals that some cultures revere as totemic. Anybody who saw Peter Irvine and Tim Eriksen’s Pumpkintown musical/magic lantern show have seen some of Brearey’s paintings as backdrops for mythic town reminiscent of a New England version of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. 

 

 

 

Let’s turn to smaller exhibits. Ilana Manolson’s The River Between fills a cozy space with large landscape paintings that celebrate water. As she put it,  “it holds the power to heal and destroy.” Thus Manolson poignantly reminds us that water is necessary for life, yet can wash it away. I was mesmerized by her works on Yupo, an artificial paper. 

 

 

Jessica Straus makes a different watery statement with Stemming the Tide. Eastern Massachusetts has been whimsically dubbed “the home of the bean and the cod.” These days there are more beans than cod. Straus places a curling giant map behind a handtied net to spotlight the sprawling Gulf of Maine. Smaller watercolors behind nets adorn the sidewalls, but it’s the floor feature that most catches the eye: carved swimming cod. Instead of speckled brown and white, her cod are ghostly white. If that metaphor eludes you, let’s just say that there’s a reason why the United States, Canada, and Greenland (owned by Denmark) quarrel over where the oceanic boundaries lie. No one cares much when fish are plentiful, but sadly they are not.  

 

 

Lee Williams has larger pieces of The Wounding in the outdoor lawn, but his smaller pieces in a narrow inside space make the point much better. Williams takes pieces of wood–usually scavenged broken branches–drives colored pegs into them, and uses media such as wire to hold the assemblages together. At a glance they seem like a madcap Tinker toy, but The Wounding suggests something else. Let’s see, decaying or cut natural wood with human-made colored dowels piercing them… Gee, what could he be suggesting? 

 

 

 

Mishel Valenton and Benedict Scheuer’s Personal Nature is aptly named. It explores themes such as desire, frozen moments in time, gardens, and nature through gouache paperwork, silk panels, and paintings. I found it a mixed bag that was perhaps too personal at times. I confess being drawn to the brightly colored works far more than minimalist washes and abstractions. 

 

 

 

 

SpaceMosque by Saks Afridi grabs attention in the way that most things that turn familiar beliefs upside down can do. In the Western world we are inundated with Christian evangelists who speak of the Second Coming of Jesus and the Rapture, and religious Jews who await the coming of a savior. What if a message from on high did come, but it was Sufi/Islamic? SpaceMosque is part sculpture, part futuristic science fiction, part graphic novel freed from the page, and part Meow Wolf. Heavenly objects appear in the sky above Karachi, Pakistan, and prayer–not money–becomes the “ultimate currency,” one that can even power vessels. But Afridi likes to mess with our heads. There are strange past artifacts but, more puzzling, when the objects appear, not everyone sees the same thing! “News” stories report that the sightings cause many to become pious, but are also denounced as frauds (usually by those with money and/or power). Messages of peace, or of chaos? A lot to consider.

 

After all of that, you can cool down with a gallery of puppets from Putney’s creative Sandglass Theater. Many of them are small agitprop pieces, but others lampoon Vermont’s agricultural tradition and those who engage in ice fishing, an activity for the hardy, the foolhardy, and both.

 

 

 

Rob Weir

The Frozen River an Imaginative Look at Martha Ballard

 

 The Frozen River (2023)

By Ariel Lawhon

Doubleday, 433 pages

★★★★★

 

What do we really know about the everyday lives of 18^th century settlers in remote areas New England? Most recorded history is about the high and the mighty. We know a bit more about everyday life in Hallowell, Maine because Martha Ballard, a midwife and healer, was taught to write by her husband Ephraim. She kept a journal that remained obscure until historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich uncovered that journal and wrote the Bancroft- and Pulitzer Prize-wining A Midwife’s Tale in 1990.

 

Novelist Ariel Lawhon draws upon Ulrich, but only as the springboard for an imaginative novel that takes us inside 18^th- century Hallowell, a close-to-the-margins village of sawyers, shopkeepers, farmers, mill workers, and tradespeople. The Frozen River of her book's title is the Kennebec, which does indeed freeze in the winter. If you know anything about northern New England you know that winters are long and deep. Lawhon parses parts of Ballard’s journal, including a rape accusation against high officials. Lawhon’s intent is not to dramatize actual history, though she's amazingly accurate and  illustrates the subordinate role of women before and just after the American Revolution. Martha Ballard, her heroine, is opinionated, assertive, and outspoken to a fault.

 

If you wonder how that’s possible, remember that Martha Ballard lived many decades after the Salem witch trials, hence midwives such as she and a mysterious free woman of color called Doctor (for her healing powers) were no longer in danger of being prosecuted as witches. Still, they remained part of a deeply gendered social system.

 

Martha and Ephraim have a rare companionate marriage that produced nine children, five of whom survived to adulthood. Big trouble begins in 1789, when the body of Joshua Burgess is pulled from the icy Kennebec. Judge Joshua North is quick to rule it an accidental drowning. How convenient for him who, along with Burgess stood accused of ravishing Rebecca Foster. Martha notes that wounds to the head and rope burns around Burgess’ neck indicate that he was murdered before being dumped into the river.

 

The Frozen River takes a hard look at those of standing versus plebeian society. North calls upon Doctor Benjamin Page, an arrogant young Harvard grad whose opinions exceed his skill. He sides with North, as do other men of substance. Does it matter if they are autocrats or liars? Will they prevail, or will they pay for their iniquities?

 

The Frozen River becomes a cat-and-mouse drama in the dead of winter. Lawhon immerses us so deeply that we come to know the personalities and sentiments of everyone in Hallowell. We quaff an ale at the local tavern, listen to gossip, buy luxuries such as cakes of ink, chop ice from the mill wheel, form alliances, weigh the economic dangers of said alliances, and learn quite a bit about the often gruesome yet heroic practice of midwifery. Martha's journal plays an important part in the story, but not always in the ways that you might expect. Through strategic departures from Ulrich’s scholarly work Lawhon fashions a drama that feels like a dress rehearsal for Peyton Place.

 

We are also cognizant of how religion and morality are woven into the social fabric. For example, when Lydia North begs Martha for a tonic to relieve her debilitating headaches, should Martha practice Christian charity, or allow the wife of a crooked judge to suffer the fate her husband inflicts upon others? Should men who impregnate their conquests wed them even if they have no interest in doing so?

 

Lawhon uses a lot of very clever metaphors throughout the book to focus her themes. Knowledge and gender versus male meddling is symbolized via Martha and Dr. Page.  Reminders that the world her characters inhabit remains (at best) half wild shines through sightings of a rare silver fox, a disobedient horse, and a "pet" falcon. Even comeuppances–as satisfying as they might or might not be–are as unforgiving as the weather and river that encircles Hallowell. 

 

I adored this book, but I again emphasize that much of what we read is fictional. Among other things, that’s why Paul Revere gets a cameo. This is, however, a rare novel in which both the fictional re-imagination of Martha Ballard and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s prize-winning non-fictional take on her are equally magnificent.

 

Rob Weir