BRATTLEBORO-Eight new exhibitions open at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) Saturday, July 11. All are welcome to a 5 p.m. opening party celebrating the artists and curators, featuring food from Guilford Country Store and Puerto Rican Bakery II, a cash bar by Stone Church, and music by DJ Prismatic. Doors open to BMAC members at 4:30 p.m.
According to BMAC Director of Exhibitions Sarah Freeman, the new exhibits — which include sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, and textiles — take the opportunity of America’s 250th birthday to explore ideas of cultural citizenship, overlooked histories, and the importance of community and belonging.
In “Learning to See,” artist Richard Haynes, who was born in the segregated South, transforms a history of division into a vision of unity and love, celebrating the beauty of togetherness through depictions of everyday moments.
Curated by Alison Crites, the exhibition features acrylic paintings, more than 50 black-and-white drawings, the artist’s preparatory sketches for a series based on quilt patterns believed to have conveyed messages along the Underground Railroad, previously unseen images from his “Burning of the Bronx” series, and more.
Taken together, organizers say, Haynes’s drawings, paintings, and photographs “assert the artist’s belief that art has the power to shift perceptions, to heal, and to unite.” Haynes and Crites will give a public talk about the exhibition Saturday, Aug 29, at 5:30 p.m.
In “Magos de la Tierra (Magicians of the Land),” Orlando Estrada and Jacoub Reyes present sculptures, assemblages, paintings, and wood carvings that examine the generational impacts of migration and cultural disintegration, reimagining ideas presented in the landmark 1989 Centre Pompidou exhibition, “Magiciens de la Terre.”
Drawing upon their Puerto Rican heritage, “the artists probe diasporic consciousness and the experience of otherness within one’s own psyche, uncovering universal patterns within buried histories,” organizers say. The exhibition was curated by frequent BMAC collaborator David Rios Ferreira, who will lead a walkthrough, along with the artists, Sunday, July 12, at 1 p.m.
Also curated by Rios Ferreira, “Formas Feroces y Tiernas (Fierce and Tender Forms)” features the work of Boricuan artist Juanita Lanzo. Lanzo’s partially translucent, layered paintings and drawings of biomorphic forms “draw upon human anatomy and the microscopic world,” said organizers.
The paintings “reference intimacy and reproduction, death and decay, pain and pleasure, and the complex process of healing from trauma.” A longtime educator, Lanzo will lead a workshop titled “Exploring Your Inner Landscape” at Brattleboro’s River Gallery School Saturday, Sept. 26, at 2 p.m.
Both “Magos de la Tierra” and “Formas Feroces y Tiernas” are supported in part by a grant from the Onda Foundation.
Linda Sok’s “Warped Archive,” curated by Emily Alesandrini, consists of jewel-toned weavings that honor lost or destroyed Cambodian textiles. Based in Rhode Island and Australia, Sok collaborates with her Cambodian family to reinterpret written histories from such sources as French colonial archives at the National Museum of Cambodia, family records, and other museum collections.
Her work “explores the tenderness and tension that exist between memory and imagination, posing the question of what might be gleaned or remade from a warped archive,” said organizers. Sok will discuss her work in a public talk Saturday, Aug. 15, at 5:30 p.m.
The museum’s Ticket Gallery is the site of an exhibition of graphite portraits and narratives depicting Vermonters who have died from drug addiction.
“Drug Addiction: Real People, Real Stories” is part of the national Into Light Project, which uses the power of art and storytelling to address the stigma and shame experienced by those who struggle with substance use disorder and to honor the lives of those depicted. Each portrait and narrative was created from photographs and biographical information provided by surviving loved ones.
A panel discussion with representatives of the Into Light Project and local experts in substance use disorder will take place at the museum Thursday, Aug. 13, at 7:30 p.m.
Brattleboro-based artist Madeline Fan is a first-generation Chinese American whose birthday is just after the Fourth of July. “I grew up feeling very patriotic,” says Fan. “My mom even called me her Yankee Doodle.”
In an interactive installation fittingly titled “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Fan looks anew at the well-known song and nursery rhyme, offering viewers an opportunity to consider, “As we celebrate our semiquincentennial, are we yankee doodles? Macaronis? Both? Neither?”
Opening alongside the six new indoor exhibitions are two new outdoor installations: “Migration/Home” was conceived and organized by Brattleboro artist Jonathan Gitelson as a way of marking America’s 250th birthday.
It fills the museum’s seven large, outward-facing window bays with reproductions of original artworks created for the occasion by members of Brattleboro’s resettled refugee community — Marwa Safa Azimi, Butunga Bibimba, Abdullah Elhan, Sean Kiziltan, and Zuhra Nadem.
The installation is supported in part by the Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College and the Vermont Community Foundation.
“Big Choices,” which consists of two large sculptures by Peter Dellert on the museum’s front lawn — a wrench and a partially buried, vintage extension cord — pays homage to hand tools.
The new exhibitions will remain on view through Nov. 1, with the exception of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which closes Sept. 7.
BMAC is open Wednesday–Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is ”pay as you wish.” Located in historic Union Station in downtown Brattleboro, at the intersection of Main Street and Routes 119 and 142, the museum is wheelchair accessible. For more information and accessibility requests, contact brattleboromuseum.org, 802-257-0124, or office@brattleboromuseum.org.
This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.