On Display at the BMAC

Brattleboro Museum and Art Center

Brattleboro, Vermont

Through July 5, 2026

 

  

By now you’ve heard my many praises for the BMAC (Brattleboro Museum and Art Center), the little Vermont museum that could. Here are a few of the exhibitions in progress. 

 

 

 

The biggest show is Elegy for the Consumed by Jude Griebel. He is a Canadian who now lives in Brooklyn. Griebel works in materials ranging from wood, clay, textiles, and ceramics to paper, acrylics, and resins. He begins with the observation that humans often anthropomorphize animals. You need but spend ten minutes with Facebook videos to see how we impose human characteristics on dogs, cats, bears, rabbits, birds, fish, and even a hamburger. The last of these is part of his point. 

 

 

 

How is it that we simultaneously buy into so many of Disney’s talking animals and then eat them? Why do we put designs of Nemo on the dinner plates upon which we serve fish and chips? Or call our dachshunds “wiener dogs?” I wasn’t able to determine if Griebel is a vegetarian–his PR material mentions only that he understands farm culture from having grown up in Alberta–but there is an implied critique of the human consumption of animals in his work. Numerous works are hyperrealist animals in table-ready poses. As satire, they provoke us emotionally. Does a broiled chicken in a human pose make us laugh or imply a form of cannibalism? As curator Sarah Freeman asserts, Griebel’s work “is not intended as a manifesto against meat eating, yet it calls us to question our unthinking acceptance of a world order that puts humans at the top of the pyramid, perhaps at our own peril.” What do you think or feel about this small sample of the exhibit? Pure whimsy, or something else?

 

 

 

Perhaps you, like I, grew up amazed by the variety of birdlife as seen in the plates of books from John James Audubon, the field guides of Roger Tory Peterson, Elizabth Gould, or Alexander Wilson. As a kid, I used to stare at them and wonder why I never saw such showy and exotic birds, blissfully unaware of the fact that maybe different parts of North America or countries across the oceans might have different birds. As you can infer from that last sentence, my fascination with ornithology developed before I knew what it meant and long before I ever heard of Charles Darwin! I still love birds, though I never became a devoted bird watcher who spent $5,000 on a lens longer than a Cadillac Esplanade ESV.

 

Illustrator Robin Crofut-Brittingham has done a series she calls Migrations that situates birds of a feather, as it were. She places birds in vaulted watercolor frames of vegetation. Each arch groups numerous birds from the same part of the world. These are tranquil and informative. They are also representative of a terrarium of the sort that old-style museums display (or used to display) taxidermal birds.  

 

But Crofut-Brittingham, who lives in Montreal, also has the imagination of a fabulist. She too anthropomorphizes. In her larger works, she imbues her fantastic birds with human characteristics, sometimes in jeopardy but also as naked, painted women with bird masks (or heads?) riding ruminants through lush vegetation, some holding hunting birds and others with the demeanor of forest Amazons.  

 

 

 

Deirdre Hyde grew up in London, but relocated to Costa Rica. Her Fragments of a Tropical Life is a reflection of her world in collage, painting, and fabric. I wish this exhibit had been a bit larger, but from what I saw I infer that Hyde prefers the rain forest to the wet streets of London!

 

 

 

Rob Weir