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

 

 

Time and Again a Journey Through the Past

 

TIME AND AGAIN (1970)

By Jack Finney

Simon and Schuster, 398 pages.

★★★

 

I’ve long been a fan of time travel books. Back in 1970, I read Time and Again by Jack Finney. I had forgotten about it until it reappeared from the deep recesses of a closet. It’s not science fiction per se. In a little-discussed aspect of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, the present, the future, and the past exist in the same time block. Don’t push me any further as my physics and mathematics are not up to the task, but it’s connected to space-time theory. Apparently, Einstein also believed that traveling into the future would be easier than going back in time, which could violate causality principles. From what I gather, he didn’t think a machine could be built that could travel fast (or slowly) enough to allow time travel. 

 

Einstein’s name carries more gravitas than that of the average science fiction writer, which explains why Einstein is so often invoked in time travel novels. Finney’s Time and Again is one of them. Its 1970 publication date coincided with American trips to the moon, the Cold War, the first Earth Day, and bookstands selling non-fiction books such as Future Shock, The Population Bomb, and The Year of the Quiet Sun. Logician/mathematician Kurt Gödel’s 1949 “rotating universes” theorem allowed for travel to the past, as would later quantum physics (though not for people).

 

Is it possible? That’s way above my pay grade, but novelists have found it irresistible. Finney’s fictional character Si(las) Morely is the central figure of a government-funded program in Time After Time. His handler Dr. Danzinger believed that a properly trained candidate could literally walk from the present into the past after a regimen of familiarization, self-hypnosis, and pre-preparation, a novel (ahem!) way of changing the position of the observer. New Yorker Si Morely is housed in the Dakota Hotel, grows a beard, wears 19^th century clothing, and reads period newspapers as a prelude for a stroll into the New York City of 1882. His task is to watch a man who is enigmatically linked to Kate, Si’s 1970 girlfriend, mail a letter at the post office. Si is a professional illustrator also asked to keep notes and make sketches of things he observes. Si has his doubts until the day he gazes across 72^nd Street at snowy Central Park and indeed walks into the past. He is naturally astonished.

 

Thinking back to 1970, New York was not then a nice place. Like many U.S. cities of 1970s, the air and water were polluted and the streets were crowded, noisy, filthy, and crime-riven. Racial tension, garbage strikes, abandoned buildings, and homelessness were prevalent. Hippies commandeered Washington Square, the Bowery was a repository of alcoholics, and the city was close to insolvency. Imagine Morely’s astonishment of watching families joyously riding sleighs, farmsteads within sight of the Dakota, boarding horse-drawn trolleys or steam-driven trains on the Ninth Avenue El, being able to see the Museum of Natural History sitting alone, viewing the arm and torch of the future Statue of Liberty in Madison Square Park, or climbing the stairs of the Trinity Church steeple, then the city’s tallest structure!

 

Si makes several trips back and forth to 1970 and 1882–once with Kate–and each time immerses himself deeper in the world of 1882. In good Victorian style, a melodramatic side story develops. Si was supposed to be careful not to alter history, though he finds himself falling in love with Julia, a woman at his boarding house. She is betrothed to Jake Pickering, whom Si suspects is a rogue. To say more would be a spoiler. Finney does a good job of ratcheting the tension of a wild chase, a discovery, and a fire. If that’s not melodrama, I don’t know what is.

 

A final way in which Time and Again is very much tied to 1970 is that today we would label parts of the book sexist, not in a physically abusive way but certainly in its gender assumptions. Finney’s book is called “An Illustrated Novel” for its use of period photos and sketches, some of which are invented and others pulled from archival sources. Its greatest virtue is taking us inside the worldview of 1882. Sit down, take a chaw of tobacco, and try to hit the spittoon! If you could journey to the past, where would you go and would you stay?

 

 Rob Weir