One of Vermont’s leading cultural institutions has just begun a new chapter.
The Shelburne Museum has opened the Pizzagalli Center For Art and Eduction, which features state-of-the-art galleries, classroom space and a 135-seat auditorium.
The Center will be open year-round, which is a major transition for the museum, which has operated seasonally since it’s founding by Electra Havermeyer Webb in 1947.
VPR's Neal Charnoff recently toured the new facilities with Shelburne museum director Tom Dennenberg.
They first talked about the new building, a 17,000 square foot structure that combines sleek 1960’s modernism with a rustic stone façade.
Compared with the relative visual obscurity of Shelburne Museum’s other buildings, the Pizzagalli Center is highly visible from Route 7, a busy north-south corridor.
Dennenberg says this placement was intentional.
"The building itself is very deferential to the campus, we wanted a structure that was about one story tall to the campus side of Shelburne Museum, but somewhat monumental as it faced Route 7. And there are about 20,000 cars a day that go by that fence right outside, so we wanted the public to see the museum, and this building is really the hub or the core of a long-range plan to re-present the museum to the community."
Dennenberg says that high visibility is symbolic of Shelburne Museum’s new presence as a year-round facility.
He believes that the different expectations between winter and summer visitors presents a challenge the museum is ready to live up to.
"Shelburne Museum has 150,000 objects in its collections, so the summer exhibitions will really be about showing off this place, this collection, and in the wintertime we will be bringing projects from other museums, other communities here, so it adds tremendous value to the texture of life in Vermont to have exhibitions throughout the year at Shelburne Museum."
Dennenberg says the new building fits into the original vision of founder Electra Havermeyer Webb.
"In 1948 Electra Havermeyer Webb was on the radio of all things, and laid out her vision for this very building, where she said she wanted to see a building with classrooms and exhibition space, temporary for traveling exhibitions. So the joke internally is a 66-year planning process is pretty good in Vermont but we pulled it off."
In fact, a $14 million capital campaign helped pay for the new building, as well as infrastructure upgrades, including a fiber-optic network connecting all of the buildings on the campus.
The Center is LEED certified, giving it high environmental credentials, and most of the materials were locally sourced.
Our tour begins in the upstairs Murphy Gallery, with the Center’s first temporary exhibition called “Color, Pattern, Whimsy, Scale”. It highlights what Dennenberg calls the museum's “collection of collections". The exhibit features what might be called “excerpts” from those collections, including a variety of paintings, folk art, decorative arts and costumes.
Dennenberg points to an exhibit of what look like hat boxes, also known as band boxes. He says the bright vibrant colors and patterns were part of everyday life in the early 19th century.
"You know we tend to think of previous generations as living in a sepia world, or black and white world, and we tend to forget that the early 19th century was an era when people were just fascinated by these bright neo-classical colors, so bright blues and yellow and reds. The interiors would have been really quite garish. "
Continuing through the gallery, Dennenberg is delighted when we come upon an oversize cast-iron stove, with four Greek columns holding up what looks like a classical terrace.
"I’m very taken with this stove we just passed, we have a large collection of material culture, sort of the tools of everyday life, and this is a cast-iron stove from the early 19th century, with four of these wonderful neo-classical columns on it, and all of this great sort of cast filigree, its very very elaborate, and one of the curators made the point in a gallery talk the other week that all of that extra surface area only increases the performance of that stove, so I think that’s another one of these examples that you can get a life lesson from the past, from the 19th century when looking at this piece."
"The room is filled with objects representing popular Shelburne museum themes, including circus posters and figures, sleighs and Tiffany chairs."
As we walk downstairs, Dennenberg points out a noted collection of weathervanes, and a number of photos of Electra Havemeyer Webb taken during the museum construction in the mid-1950’s.
"As we walk into the gallery downstairs we come into the section of the exhibition on scale, and there a number of these very large trade signs from the late 19th century, including this oversize boston rocker chair, which used sit in a glazed or glassed in cupola on the top of a chair factory up in the Northeast Kingdom. The sense of whimsy is immediate when you see this, Electra Webb purchased this oversize chair in the late 1940’s or 1950’s but she used to pose her friends and family for photographs in the chair, so there’s this wonderful photo blowup of the actress Zazu Pitts, who is a comedienne from the 1920’s through 40’s sitting in the great chair. "
Dennenberg believes that Webb’s fanciful imagination and vision really set the tone for the current exhibition.
"We actually think that Electra had this eye, this rubrik, Color, Pattern, Whimsy, Scale, that we used for this exhibition, each of these different categories, Electra Webb had an eye for color, she had an eye for scale, she didn’t just collect ship paintings, she collected a ship, and she collected toys of ships, so the sense of whimsy and her playful eye runs throughout this campus, and that’s something that we’re very mindful of when thinking about the exhibitions here."
We finally arrive at the Museum’s downstairs classroom space, which Dennenberg calls the heart of the Center for Art and Education. He says the classroom is not necessarily a place to learn how to paint or sculpt…it’s where students can expand how they see the world around them.
"What we want are kids to come in here and have an opportunity to think creatively about these collections. To see an exhibition, come back into this classroom, work with our education department, and just leave the museum seeing things in a different light. It’s a little bit like that cast-iron stove upstairs. I thought that was a purely decorative piece until someone pointed out that functionally it was really quite brilliant as well. And that’s what we want kids to come away from here, taking life lessons from the genius of the past, be it both artistic or mechanical, and really come away from their experience at Shelburne Museum with a broader way of looking at their world. "
In his two years as the Director of the Shelburne Museum, Dennenberg says he came to see how the institution had hit a plateau as what he calls a “seasonal roadside attraction”.
He believes the opening of the Pizzagalli Center For Art and Education now marks a turning point for the museum, and for Vermont.
"The fact that we are here year-round, now, this will be a resource for everyone, this will add value to the lives of everyone in this area, that is something that the board and the staff are committed to," Dennenberg says. "And all of the education program, the music programs, the film series, the jazz series, the shows in the galleries that will explore our collection or bring projects in from other museums, are going to really broaden the texture of everyday life."
