This story by Briana Brady was first published by the Shelburne News on May 1.
Shelburne Museum’s opening day is Saturday, but some of the six new exhibits the museum is hosting have been in the works for more than a year.
While the museum is known for its dedication to New England history, from quilting to the massive Ticonderoga steamboat, the new exhibitions each year draw in contemporary art that often stands in conversation with its more historical collection, according to Leslie Wright, the museum’s communication director.
“That’s what Electra Havermeyer Webb, the museum founder, was doing when she passed away in 1960,” Wright said. “She was starting to look at modern art, and she had a shopping list and she was definitely looking to connect the past and the present. And we continue that. It keeps us relevant.”
This year, the six new exhibitions run the gamut as far as medium and subject. The museum lawn is dotted by Karen Petersen’s large bronze horse statues, their rounded shapes and thick necks echoing the lines of cave drawings. The museum is also hosting an exhibit of Higher Ground gig posters throughout the years, a series of fiber and textile animal sculptures from Dahlov Ipcar, a series of Mara Superior’s porcelain creations, and a textile and sound exhibition focused on Indigenous artists.
The contemporary exhibit with the most direct link to the museum’s collection, however, might be the series of cyanotype photographs by David Sokosh. The blue-and-white photographs Sokosh developed using one of photography’s oldest methods feature the museum’s collection as their subject.
“I’ve been always interested in technology, technological objects, outdated technologies, typography and strange juxtapositions of different objects, either showing an object in a way that’s surprising or different, or showing it in a way that separates it from what it what it was used for,” Sokosh said.
Sokosh said he often visited the museum as a child. Now, he credits the collection as having been part of what spurred his interest in objects and old technology. A few years ago, he reached out to the museum, asking if he could photograph pieces from its collection for a personal project.
After he visited and started taking photographs, a curator from the museum, Carolyn Bauer, approached Sokosh and asked if he’d be interested in putting together an entire exhibit.
It took Sokosh months to shoot and put together the exhibit. Not only does he have photographs, but he also put together a cyanoanimation, a term he says he didn’t coin but is uncommon.
After shooting on his iPhone, Sokosh split the digital movie into traditional frames — 12 per second — printed negatives and developed them using traditional cyanotype processes, using ultraviolet rays to create the blue and white images. Sokosh estimates there are well over 6,000 frames in the 9-minute film.
In using such an old form of photography — cyanotype was first developed in 1842, only a few years after the advent of photography in general — and focusing on historical objects as his subjects, Sokosh creates that conversation between past and present that Wright said Shelburne Museum seeks out in its contemporary exhibits.
“I don’t think that people would necessarily mistake them for an image made in 1850 or 1900,” Sokosh said. “To me, they don’t look particularly old fashioned. They have a contemporary, kind of abstract, mysterious quality that wouldn’t necessarily remind you of something earlier.”
The progression of the exhibit moves through in a way that highlights this contemporary composition. Sokosh said that, throughout the exhibit, the photographs become increasingly abstract, often utilizing composite images or duplicating things to create a new image. However, it never loses site of the past.
Sokosh took some of his more geometric photos, such as a grid of bottles, and created a quilt out of fabric panels with the photos printed on them. With the museum’s own quilt collection nearby, the piece becomes almost a collection of a collection of a collection.
The other new exhibits this year often do this same kind of echoing. Superior’s porcelain creations often take the shape of plates, putting a contemporary artistic creation in the form of a centuries-old trade. The animal sculptures made by Ipcar look almost quilted themselves. The bronze horses stand in front of a replica of a historic barn. Even the Higher Ground gig posters, while seemingly the most starkly contemporary pieces, are still pieces of local history and the community’s connection to music.
Wright said the museum has a host of programming, from connections to children’s literature to ink print workshops to the museum’s summer concert series on the lawn planned for the season. David Sokosh will be back mid-July to give a talk on his work.
The museum’s opening day on Saturday will be free to the community.
