BRATTLEBORO — The day before the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center was set to unveil its current show on the age-old problem of homelessness, it vowed to offer a new perspective.
Then, as Covid-19 shuttered the official March opening, everything around it changed.
Last July, BMAC director Danny Lichtenfeld only had to look outside his downtown institution’s front door to see homeless people sleeping in an adjacent park as advocates protested their plight.
“If there’s any hope of making progress with this,” Lichtenfeld remembers thinking, “step one surely has to be that we at least literally see these people, and see them as human beings.”
And so the museum, which has organized past exhibits on addiction and guns, decided to fill its main gallery with a collection of portraits and programs focusing on homelessness, only to close just hours before the scheduled debut because of the pandemic.
The exhibit, sitting behind locked doors all spring, finally is open to the public. But while the show remains the same, the surrounding background has shifted.
Last summer, Brattleboro reported so many people sleeping, panhandling and drug dealing in public places that municipal government spent $1,000 a month for portable downtown restrooms after residents complained about homeless people relying on trees.
But this year, the pandemic has spurred the state to pay for lodging for Vermonters without shelter — an estimated 100 locally and 1,000 statewide. People who once complained about homelessness have moved on to champion masks and Black Lives Matter, even though the town still lacks enough permanent housing.
“There is always a need,” says Joshua Davis, executive director of Brattleboro’s Groundworks Collaborative, which provides food and housing. “There is always a need to show people experiencing homelessness, and there is always a need to show people experiencing homelessness as people.”
Enter New York artist Steven Kinder, who has painted two dozen larger-than-life portraits of homeless people that accompany information from the collaborative.
“We know what we need to do to end homelessness — what is lacking is the will to do it,” the museum curator writes in an essay in the exhibition catalogue. “And that stems in part from our ongoing failure to see people experiencing homelessness as our fellow human beings, our neighbors. In fact, we go out of our way not to see them at all.”
The show aims to change that. Curator Katherine Gass Stowe says while the history of portraiture tends to capture the politically and socially powerful, masters such as Rembrandt, Goya and Toulouse-Lautrec also have turned their attention to marginalized people.
“In the end, if we haven’t experienced being unsheltered ourselves, what do we truly understand about it?” Stowe asks in the catalogue. “Can art help build a bridge?”
The exhibit starts with 8-foot-tall paintings hung from the ceiling.
“Those who are homeless usually live down low, so most people stare straight ahead and try not to engage,” Lichtenfeld says. “We’ve suspended the images so you won’t be able to avoid them.”
The show also features a 12-foot-tall cross made of cardboard signs once held by people seeking help, photos and videos of Vermonters in conversation with locals without shelter, and an online series of speakers.
Stowe, for example, will offer a curator’s Zoom tour on Aug. 27, while Brattleboro Retreat therapist Kurt White will discuss the topic “In Sight: What the Unseen are Holding for Society” on Sept. 10, with more information available at the museum’s website.
Groundworks Collaborative, for its part, is building a $3.3 million downtown homeless shelter to provide daytime support services year-round and nighttime accommodations starting this winter. Working with the Windham and Windsor Housing Trust, it also has turned the town’s former Lamplighter motel into affordable apartments and has similar plans for the local Dalem’s Chalet lodge.
“I’m cautiously optimistic about what we’ve been able to do,” Davis says. “It won’t end homelessness, but it’s a big step forward.”
The museum, in the meantime, hopes to change the public’s view.
“These are people,” Lichtenfeld says, “who deserve to be seen.”
