For a year, Vermont’s only public planetarium has sat unused.
Staff at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, which houses the planetarium, elected last March to shut down the facility. While the museum has kept other exhibits open during the Covid-19 pandemic, visitors to the planetarium would have had to squeeze into too tight a space to be deemed safe.
The steady stream of students, astronomers and other would-be stargazers who used to frequent the heavenly simulation have instead taken in the stars via more analog methods — from their backyards or farm fields.
That could soon change. As Gov. Phil Scott’s administration has begun to loosen pandemic rules — including a projection that gathering-size restrictions may return by late spring to where they were last August — the Fairbanks Museum is looking to a not-so-distant future date when the planetarium can reopen.
“We’ve penciled it in for the summer,” said Executive Director Adam Kane, whose museum offers exhibits on natural science, history and ethnology. “If we can have it open for June, we’d be pretty happy.”
All around Vermont, museums are envisioning a summer when they can cautiously emerge from various states of closure. Like restaurants and hotels, museum operations — which rely on in-person engagement between visitors and exhibits — have been sharply restricted during a year of pandemic.
Now, as Covid-19 vaccines are distributed, and the state gradually loosens those restrictions, museum directors feel more optimistic than they have in months.
“I was of the mindset that all of 2021 was going to be lost,” Kane said. “Now, while this summer might not equal the summer of 2019, I think it’s still going to be a pretty good summer for the museum. And it will only get better from there.”
A museum about the lake
A hundred miles southwest of Kane’s museum, in Vergennes, Lake Champlain Maritime Museum Director Susan Evans McClure is similarly upbeat about what the spring and summer have in store.
Save for a brief Labor Day weekend reopening stint, the maritime museum — which typically opens from May to October — remained shuttered for all of 2020 and shifted its programming online.
The museum plans to reopen this May, based on the state’s projection for safe gathering sizes, and says admission will be free for the entire season. In a big shift from past years, it will exclusively offer exhibits outdoors.
That decision promises the best opportunity for a Covid-19-safe reopening, McClure said, and also gives the staff a chance to adapt unwieldy demands of the pandemic to what the museum — whose focus is the history and ecology of Lake Champlain — seeks to teach visitors.
“We’re a museum about the lake,” McClure said, “so it’s perfect for us to be set up outside — on the lake.”
The state’s estimation that gatherings can again reach August 2020 levels — 150 people allowed to gather outdoors, and 75 indoors if there’s enough room — by late spring has been little more than that: an estimation.
Given that uncertainty, museum leaders understand that their plans this year may need to change quickly.
“The state is doing the absolute best they can in getting information to us, but we’re all still navigating without a clear road map for what the warmer months are going to mean,” said Thomas Denenberg, director of the Shelburne Museum.
Like the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, the Shelburne Museum was shut down for much of 2020. The museum reopened late last summer when things looked to be brightening but shut down again in the fall as Covid-19 cases rose.
Since then, its staff has focused on bringing arts programming to people in their homes: It has turned to webinars, online arts activities for families and analog arts-and-crafts kits mailed out to students to bring its art and history programming to patrons.
Now, the museum plans a June 1 reopening of its expansive Shelburne site. For a museum that typically draws half its attendance from the greater New England area, distribution of vaccines and loosening of travel rules provide plenty of reason for optimism.
“With people vaccinated, we hope we’ll be able to get a little tourist activity by the fall,” Denenberg said.
‘It’s going to take a while’
Denenberg has a hypothesis that the Shelburne Museum’s usual largest visitor demographic — people in their 50s and recent retirees — are among those who’ve been the most cautious about venturing into society during the pandemic.
He worries that the museum’s biggest fans may take a while to reacclimate to civic life.
“I personally think that’s the group that’s retrained themselves this year to not go to theaters, not go to concerts or to public events, and I think that group may be the last to come back,” Denenberg said. “It’s going to take a while to build audiences, build memberships, and get everyone comfortable with returning to arts organizations.”
McClure said her staff is confident in the state’s projections. Still, the maritime museum is awaiting more clarity and is ready to pivot.
“We’re really hopeful that people will be able to safely travel once they are vaccinated, and we hope they will then travel to the museum,” McClure said. “But we still know it may be a while before that’s reality, and we’re going to follow the rules that Vermont tells us to along the way.”
The Shelburne Museum’s staff, Denenberg said, is operating with an understanding that a return to pre-pandemic normalcy is likely to take a while.
“I think what we all need to be ready for is a little bit of a longer recovery than we expected, and an organic relationship with the data,” Denenberg said. “I’m planning on 2022 as being much more, in quotation marks, ‘normal.’ I think this year is going to remain a transition year.”