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

 

 

Photos Into Kiddie Books at the Eric Caryle Museum

 

 

 

PHOTOS TO PICTURES (and random stuff)

Eric Caryle Museum

Amherst MA

It’s been a long time since I was a kid. Back then, children’s book choices were much more limited. I’m sure there were others, but I only recall Mother Goose rhymes, expurgated Grimm’s fairytales, Little Golden Storry Books, and Dr. Seuss. Today’s kids have many things that tickle their imaginations, a gamut that runs from the magical stories of Jane Yolen and Mo Willems to Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl. In my working-class family we didn’t even have A. A. Milne, C. S. Lewis, or Beatrix Potter; they were too “limey” (English) for my 1950s-early 1960s family. The closest we got to a Harry Potter-like stories were greatly fictionalized Knights of the Round-table stories. Nor did we have anything from the pen of Eric Caryle.

I only learned about any of these when my nieces were small and former students started having kids. By then, I was a bit long in the tooth to put myself on an extended reading diet of present-day kids’ writers., though a former colleague specialized in children’s books and tried to tell me it was serious literature that was miles beyond Little Golden Story Books, My deeper education came from exploring Western Massachusetts and learning more about Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) who was from Springfield. Then, in 2002, the Eric Caryle Museum of Picture Book Art opened in Amherst. Caryle lived much of his life across the Connecticut River in my town of Northampton. Even I had heard of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but it was the word “art” that grabbed me.

I loved comic books once I got out of toddlerdom, but until the Teenage Ninja Turtle creators opened a now-closed (sigh!) museum in Northampton, I never thought of storybooks or comics as real “art.” But when Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird dumped the “comics” label for the Ninjas and called them “sequential art,” a lightbulb went on in my head. I went there often and to other museums spotlighting the art involved in my favorite childhood Loony Tunes and Hanna Barbera cartoons. I still haven’t read many recent children’s books, but I absolutely love the art work. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I’m ready to be four-years-old again!

Trips to the Eric Caryle Museum doesn’t make me physically younger, but it does allow me to set free my inner four-year-old. I knew from an artist friend that he and his colleagues often work from photographs and a current exhibition at the Caryle Museum highlights how pictures and set ups are (and have been) the basis for the illustrations in children’s lit.

I don’t know the books associated with the following, but I’m fascinated by how photographs and playing with fruit made their way into books. 

 

The above two are from Peter Buckley's Cesare of Italy (1954). They bespeak the poverty but vivid thoughts of Cesare's mind. 

The above two are from Nina Crews setup shots of a young Black child. the top is, of course, "Jack and the "Candle Stick," the bottom is the poem that begins "to market to market..." 
 

Saxton Freyman 

 

This and the header shot are from Children of the Tsaatan Reindeer Herders, a book for kids in Inner Mongolia. Tsaatan means "he who has reindeer." 

 

 

 

The Caryle also has original illustrations that now hang on the wall and are often as detailed as much of the so-called “fine art” that adorns major metropolitan art museums.

 

Robert Lawson, "Little Prince Toofat" 

 

Trina Hyman 

 

 

 

And here are a few others that I simply found endearing and brought a smile to my face.

 

Edward Gorey

 

Eric Caryle

 

 

Rob Weir

 

Class, Gender, and Race in the Roaring Twenties at the Rockwell Museum

John Held Jr. "They Went to the Silver Slipper"

JAZZ AGE ILLUSTRATIONS

NORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM

STOCKBRIDGE, MA

THROUGH APRIL 5, 2026

 

The “Jazz Age” is synonymous with the “Roaring Twenties.” In the popular mind it was a time of cultural rebellion: short skirts, baggy trousers, raccoon coats, bathtub gin, sexual exploration, votes for women, exuberant dancing, and wild parties. Coming on the heels of World War I, the Jazz Age is often viewed as the death of Victorianism. It even had its own soundtrack: hot jazz.

 

Like many historical labels, the Jazz Age is an oversimplification. Was Victorianism dead? It depends on where you lived. Rural Americans and older ones saw the Jazz Age as a time of immorality, promiscuity, bad music, obscene dancing, and law-breaking. Alcohol had been banned under the18th Amendment (1919), but bootleg and homemade liquor was rampant and enforcement was lax. Some rural Americans embraced the assault on Victorian mores, but on a whole it was rural America that pushed for Prohibition, cheered the persecution of Tennessee teacher John Scopes (1925) for teaching blasphemous theories of human evolution. Unlike today in which just 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas, during the height of the Jazz Age (1920s/30s) 56 percent of Americans lived in places with fewer than 2,500 people. Black Americans invented jazz, but eight of ten African Americans lived the Jim Crow South. Even those living in the urbanized North faced discrimination. Moreover, White Women were only partially liberated. A flapper who got “caught” (pregnant) in the Jazz Age faced shame and a legal system inclined to judge her as immoral rather than demand that fathers support their offspring.

 All of this is to say that Jazz Age flapperdom was largely a Northern, urban phenomenon whose existence was invented, named, and exaggerated by a small number of elites, newspapers, magazines, and advertisers. In over 100 images, Jazz Age Illustrations at the Norman Rockwell Museum explores the period from 1912-42 in all of its excitement, ballyhoo, and excess.

 

Held, "Vacation Time in the Berkshires"

 

Held, "Tattooed Man Goes Collegiate"

 

Gibson, "Have You a Book Innocent Enough for Grandpa and Grandma to Read?" 

 

Among the Jazz Age illustrators, two names often come to the fore: John Held Jr. and Charles Dana Gibson. Held was prolific and, if anything, he is under-represented in the Rockwell exhibition. Gibson made his name a bit earlier. If you’ve heard the phrase “Gibson girl,” he’s the illustrator who depicted working women in high-collared shirtwaists and elegant long flowing skirts. Before the Jazz Age launched, a number of young women entered the workforce. Gibson emphasized their independence and wholesome beauty. His was a subtle form of propaganda as his women were generally of the upper class and actual shop girls worked long hours for little pay. Nonetheless, he wasn’t wrong to notice that it took a degree of wealth to live a bohemian life. Dana is a bit more fun in that he often drew eccentric images–especially of collegiate life– and had an eye for satire.  

 

 

Preston, Miss America pageant 1921, dressing room 

 

Preston, "Without Thinking, Without Caring, He Walked Two Steps Out on the Floor" 

Patterson, "Ballyhoo"

Hosiery Ad

Duer, "Danger Calling"

 

Leyendecker
 

 

Several other illustrators focused on social class, including May Wilson Watkins Preston and Douglas Duer. The latter captured the very essence of a vamp, slinky and salacious in an open-necked green dress that accentuated her bosom. Jazz Age advertisers knew that sex sells. Russell Patterson did a soap add with an obviously naked woman demurely tucked behind an umbrella. Phillips Hosiery advertised its “hole proof” nylons, though most eyes were likely on the thin model in her sheer petticoat looking down at her long legs. Patterson combined suggestive nudity and hosiery for the cover of Ballyhoo of a strike by cabaret women. Joseph Leyendecker illustrated for menswear clothier Kuppenheimer, though ironically, some of his well-clad men blur the line between fashion and conman.    

Jackson

Harlem: Even it was segregated! 

 

African Americans also jumped onto the Jazz Age ballyhoo train.  Jay Jackson at least dressed singer Etta Moten (Porgy and Bess)  in a thin top, though her sexuality is spotlighted more than her considerable acting and singing chops. A map of Harlem nightclub venues makes it seem exciting, though it should be noted that one of them is the famed Cotton Club in which the only Blacks in evidence were the musicians. Only White patrons were admitted to Cotton Club shows.  

 

Lois Jones

I suspect Loïs Mailou Jones was making a backdoor critique when she drew “A Lawyer” as an arrogant-looking child.

 Don’t misinterpret this review as a complaint that I didn’t care for the exhibit. Quite the opposite, though I do mean the suggest that there are different ways of seeing art. The Roaring Twenties are so… well.. ballyhooed that it doesn’t need more from me. But we do learn new things when we change the lenses through which it is viewed.

 

 

Rob Weir

 

Group of Seven on Display in Ottawa

 

 

 

 

Lawren Harris, Winter Morning, 1924

Art is an inherently creative act, but it tends to thrive when others gravitate to the same styles and genres. When a particular style is new, it’s not uncommon for it to get bad or ho-hum reviews. But when it attracts a critical mass of the like-minded, a veritable "school" of art is born.

 

Canada gained the right to self-governance in 1867, but it remained in Great Britain’s shadow until the passage of the Canada Act in 1982. Think upon that; you could make the case that Canada has only been fully independent for 43 years. No wonder the Canadian “identity” has been much discussed for much longer. What does this have to do with art?

 

It would be ethnocentric to say there was no Canadian art before (take your pick) 1867 or 1982–First Nations people such as the Inuit and other northern peoples, Indians, and the Métis had rich traditions–but insofar as formal painting went, much of what was considered “fine” art was European, especially British, in style and content.

 

The first important school of painters to paint in a distinctly Canadian style was the Group of Seven: Frank Carmichael (1890-1945), Lawren Harris (1885-1970), A. Y. Jackson (1882-1974), Frank Johnston (1888-1949), Arthur Lismer (1885-1969), J.E.H. MacDonald (1881-1969), and Frederick Varley (1881-1969). But what defined a Euro-Canadian? No one could quite agree, hence the Group of Seven got tepid reviews from the first exhibitions of their work. World War One didn’t help matters as Canadians fought under the Union Jack.

 

 

 

Tom Thompson, The Pool, 1915

 

 

Nevertheless, the Group of Seven came together shortly after the war.  They took their cue from Tom Thompson (1877-1917) who died just before the Seven formed but he was friends with several of the painters. Several of Thompson’s  canvases inspired the Seven to the degree that Thompson is often cited as the eighth member of the Group of Seven. In particular, Thompson suggested that geography defined Canadians. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Group of Seven explored how Canadians were shaped by its vastness. It is, after all, the world’s second largest nation (after Russia), yet a considerable majority of its land is Sub-Arctic, muskeg, and Arctic–filled with resources such as fresh water, oil, animals, and minerals, but relatively inhospitable. That’s why approximately 90 percent of its population lives within 100 miles of the U.S. border.

 

The Group of Seven were mainly considered landscape painters. They seldom painted people because of the remoteness of its northern reaches. I will offer a few samples of the artists below, but two final codicils. Seven didn’t always mean seven literally. Thompson is one example of that, but at least four other painters were invited into the group. If I tell you that Jackson’s first name is Alexander and MacDonald’s was James, you’ll also see that it was a fraternity. Yet the wonderful British Columbia painter Emily Carr (1871-1941) was considered a peer.   

 

Let’s take a look. If you get a chance to visit Ottawa, be sure to dip into its National Gallery of Art!

 

Frank Carmichael, The Hilltop 1921

Harris, Lake Superior North Shore, 1926. Steve Martin collects his work.

 

 

Harris, Sun on Lake Superior, 1924. Harris is also my favorite of the 7.

A. Y Jackson, 1924. Note the human figures in this one.

J. E. H. MacDonald, March Morning, Northland

 

F. H. Varley, Stormy Weather Georgian Bay 1921

 

Emily Carr, British Columbia Totems, 1930 (My 2nd favorite of the Seven)

 

 

 

Carr, Graveyard Entrance, 1912   

You might notice that some of the landscapes are similar. I like Harris because he went to the Arctic North and captured spectacular landscapes, and Carr because she worked in British Columbia and likewise recorded different subjects. 

 

The Group of Seven (sort of) disbanded upon MacDonald's death in 1931. However, several of the Seven took part in the Canadian Group that formed in 1933 and initially had 28 members with more to come. Here are a few other paintings and, I suspect, they simply "look" Canadian. Where else, except northern Maine or Wisconsin could they be with all semblance of human activity immersed and at the mercy of Mother Nature? Such was the impact of the Group of Seven. 

 

Clarence Gagnon Village in the Laurentians (PQ)

 

 

 

Kathleen Moir Morris, Byward Market, Ottawa

 

 

Marc Aurele Fortin, Saint Urban in Winter, 1942

 

 

Yvonne Housser Rossport Lake Superior, 1929

 

Harris, Halifax

 

 

 

 

Rob Weir