The New Directors
MEET THE NEW LEADERS OF THE PACK!
By Anastasia Stanmeyer // Photos By David Edgecomb
Our new directors stand on the front steps of Bellefontaine Mansion at Canyon Ranch. From left, Nathaniel Silver (Hancock Shaker Village), Kimberly Bush Tomio (Berkshire Museum), James Barry (Chester Theatre), Wendy Healey (Ventfort Hall), Tara Franklin (Chester Theatre), Kristy Edmunds (MASS MoCA), and Alan Paul (Barrington Stage Company).
It was the tail-end of a bluebird day, and all seven directors were looking forward to this get-together. Many had never met in person. They included Kimberly Bush Tomio of Berkshire Museum, Tara Franklin and James Barry of Chester Theatre, Wendy Healey of Ventfort Hall, Alan Paul of Barrington Stage Company, Kristy Edmunds of MASS MoCA, and Nathaniel Silver of Hancock Shaker Village. The reason for gathering the new directors is an upcoming summer course held by Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Berkshire Community College. On Mondays from 2:30–4 p.m., July 17–August 21, I will be in conversation with each of them, in person, many of the talks taking place at the host institutions. The course is by Zoom, but the public is invited to attend in person.
The directors gathered on the Great Lawn of Canyon Ranch on this picture-perfect late afternoon, quickly falling into conversation until they were guided into the historic Bellefontaine Mansion. First stop, the Mansion Library; we pause for photos. Then the front steps of the mansion; we pause again. Walk slowly across the Great Lawn and fan out in the Labyrinth. It was all in good fun and good picture-taking.
“It was a good group,” Edmunds later said. “It felt super collegial—we were really, truly, happy to meet one another.”
Before the OLLI conversations gets underway, each director gave me a taste of what they’d like to talk about. Portions of our discussions—as lively as the tour de Canyon Ranch—are right here.
Kristy Edmunds is the senior member of “The New Directors.” She has been around the longest of the group—just over a year and a half as director of MASS MoCA.
Her response? “That’s so weird.”
Kristy and I first met in October 2021, when she was just beginning at MASS MoCA after serving as the executive and artistic director for UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA). I was looking forward to finding out how she was faring.
When we first talked, you told me that you wanted to observe, take some time, take it all in. Has that happened? No matter how much experience I’ve had working in the arts and running organizations, to walk into a community full of all kinds of ideas and just start shoving them into place would be profoundly disrespectful to the extraordinary amount of knowledge that’s already gone into what is there. When you’re new to a place, and especially following a founder who had been here for 30 years, finding these relationships and different kinds of tributaries, learning what’s going on in the region and what’s going on locally, are what teach a new director how to envision holistically where an organization is going to go. That was what I meant about spending time.
What’s your outlook? The great thing about MASS MoCA is that it stays very close to artists. It always has. Sixty percent of what we do is creative development behind the scenes—the creation of new art, fabricating of new forms, building out new installations, new performances, choreographies, new music, new compositions, working with our team to help support artists in bringing their ideas forward. This is literally like working inside of a former factory for industrial use, that is now a factory for highly bespoke creative use. There are about nine different business models operating at any given time inside of MASS MoCA. It is a continuous practice of manifesting inclusion, which is really a beautiful and remarkable thing. MASS MoCA itself is 16 acres—that is 30 percent of the town of North Adams. There’s the North Adams downtown, and then there’s MASS MoCA. How do you create greater integration? Also, next spring, a year from now, will be MASS MoCA’s 25th anniversary of opening. It’s a great chance, before we head into a full-blown celebration and what the next 25 years will be, to look at some of the first renovated spaces. They’ve had 25 years of constant use. So there’s some things to be doing inside of those spaces before we start going off dreaming our dreams in bold, new directions.
Isaac Fitzgerald, who wrote Dirtbag Massachusetts, is coming to MASS MoCA on August 3 and speaking in the new Research & Development Store. Is that something new? We’ve had a really great education program at MASS MoCA. What are we doing for the lifelong pursuit of new knowledge and new experiences—not K through 12, or kids-only education, but public programs? Public programs give us a chance to add depth to the context and storytelling for “why.” People can meet the artists beyond the work that they’ve created and explore the ideas that they’re grappling with at different stages across the arc of a body of work. Public programs are a form of knowledge exchange and education. It’s also a way of making new inroads to sharing what people are thinking about. So, public programs are off to the races.
That’s a bit different than what you’ve done in the past? It’s kind of like having convenings and conferences, open forums and public talks. Artists read a lot. They listen to music, the soundtracks in their studio spaces, and on and on. So one of the things that we’re doing is converting one of the front areas of the entry section of MASS MoCA into a new, limited edition, fine art book and vinyl records store. It’s related to fine art print editions from artists who have exhibited with us, people who are doing artists books in new kinds of ways. It’s also a hangout space. We’ll do pop-ups and talks and signings in the Research & Development Store, too.
Which of the newest exhibitions would you like to highlight? I encourage everybody to come and see the Joseph Grigely exhibition. It’s really, really special. It was one of the projects that had come across my desk early when I was first here from colleagues over in Europe. It just made sense. Grigely is a Massachusetts artist originally who has gone on to do a variety of different kinds of things. He is exhibiting his project, In What Way Wham?, in an enormous pavilion. When you walk in, you’ll see a huge transformation in Building 4. I am also interested in bringing artists to MASS MoCA into North Adams for longer periods of time. There’s an artist in residence with us, and she came here last October. Her name is Alison Pebworth. She’s working on a giant cultural apothecary that community members are informing. It will be another year before that installation happens at MASS MoCA. She’s literally part of the fabric of our community now, and that’s wonderful.
For years, Alan Paul’s good friend, Tom Story, has been coming to Berkshire Theatre Group to act during the summer season. To learn what was so special about the Berkshires, Alan made a weekend trip in 2017 to watch Tom in Arsenic and Old Lace and caught some other performances, including Company at Barrington Stage. Alan was hooked and returned every summer since then.
“I even came up during the pandemic. I have a vivid memory of Julie Boyd handing me my tickets at the tent for Barrington Stage, just thinking how cool that was.”
In Alan’s first season as artistic director, Cabaret is the first musical he is directing. It runs through July 8—and Tom plays Ernst Ludvig!
Tell us a bit of your history. The first job I had out of school was at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, which was dedicated to new plays—my passion. I’ve got two on my desk right now, and five more out at the printer. Then I got hired by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., and I fell in love with that kind of material. As a director, it’s very different working on classic material, because you have to bring your own ideas to it. My other love is musical theater. What I did at the Shakespeare Theatre Company was reinterpret classic musicals, and those involved a lot of rewriting parts. For a long time, I wanted to take over a theater, and it was hard to find the right fit because the skills I had were so specialized. When I got called to see if I would be interested in applying for the position at Barrington Stage, I thought, that’s a no brainer, because Julie was doing all of those things. Barrington Stage has an incredible track record of sending new plays and musicals to New York.
Is there a thread that runs through your first season? There are two threads. One is that most of the shows are autobiographical. Cabaret was a fictionalized version of what happened to Isherwood, who wrote the book. Bill Finn’s musical, A New Brain, is a fictionalized account of his own dealing with a problem with his brain. Tiny Father is about a man named Daniel who has a baby born prematurely. Blues for an Alabama Sky and Cabaret both take place in 1929 and 1930. Abortion plays a big role in both of those. I’m opening with a play called The Happiest Man on Earth, which is the account of a man named Eddie Jaku, who survived two concentration camps and the Holocaust and lived to be 101. It’s a world premiere by Mark St. Germain based on the book. That’s going to be playing at the same time as Cabaret. So, you have on the smaller stage and the larger stage two perspectives on the war and on Jewish identity. There’s a synergy in those two pieces.
That’s exciting how it’s come together like that. It wasn’t on purpose. I have a very strong thesis about directing. Without knowing the director personally, if you see five minutes of their work, you can know everything you need to know about them. So much of putting together a play as a director is unconscious; you’re acting on an impulse. Putting together a season, no matter how much you intellectualize it or not, it becomes a very personal expression of your tastes and ambitions.
And what are your tastes? I am romantic. I want to laugh. I am musical, and I really want to put on a show for you. I want it to be a night where you have big emotional experience, and there’s integrity to the quality of the work. But I also think there’s nothing wrong with the WOW factor when putting on a show. Whether the costumes are great, or whether the performances are just so magical, or whether it’s the writing. It can be anything.
How have you helped to make your transition to Barrington Stage go smoothly? One of the things I did when I got up here is I had meals with Jenny Gersten, Allyn Burroughs, and Kate Maguire. I’ve known Kate for a long time, and I consider her a friend. Allyn, I consider him a new friend.
And Jenny is not only a new friend, but a new collaborator, because we’re going to do A New Brain in association with Williamstown Theatre Festival. We all have to work together to get a new audience up here, because the truth is, I didn’t come up here for one of the theaters.
How is Barrington Stage doing? My biggest fear that kept me up at night all year turned out not to be true, which is that no major funders have left, whether they be foundations or individual donors. Julie was such a prolific fundraiser, and so many people loved her. I thought maybe there was a chance that they would feel differently and leave when she left. What happened was people felt that the thing that they loved about the theater wasn’t going to go away with the change. When they got to know me, I think a lot of people got excited about where it could go in the future. It’s like we say in improv, “Yes, and …” It’s “yes” to everything that was before, and let’s add to it.
Who would you like to see on stage at Barrington Stage? I’m putting this out there now, if she reads it. I would love to have Kim Cattrall in a play. I think she is amazing. She loves theater; she’s done a lot in London and New York. Kim Cattrall, if there’s a play you want to do next summer, we will do it for you.
Kimberly Bush Tomio lives just a half-mile from her new job as director of Berkshire Museum. She started the new post almost a year ago. “It feels like I just started in a lot of ways, but at least I know how to get around the museum and find the right doors to go through. It’s an old building. There are a lot of little passageways, so that was the biggest challenge for me the first few weeks. I do love it here. It’s just wonderful.” We want to know more!
Can you share with me some of your background? My first job was working in a museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. I was the registrar. That’s really what started me out in this career. I ended up moving from there to the Whitney Museum in New York for almost three years as a collections registrar. My husband and I had our first child there, and it was just too expensive to both of us. We moved back to Texas, and I moved on to different positions at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the Dallas Museum of Art. Then I was a director of a small museum in East Texas, in Tyler. From there, I went to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco as a director of museum services, which oversees all of the logistical side of the museum. I always wanted to come back to being a director, so I went back to graduate school, online with Johns Hopkins University, and got a Master’s in Museum Studies and started applying for positions. My second husband and I always wanted to come back to the Northeast. I was so happy that this position opened up, because it was one of our topics in graduate school about this deaccession scandal. It was way before the position opened up, but we were all online talking about it in the course, and 80 percent were on the side of going ahead and letting these pieces get sold so that you don’t have to close an entire institution.
When the position became available, I thought really hard about it. I also tend to be someone who fights for the underdog.
What have you been busy doing? I’m meeting people individually. We’re looking at the first floor galleries and getting those done. The auditorium with the cinema has not attracted major audiences on a regular basis. So, the aquarium that’s been very popular will be moving to the space where the auditorium is now. I’d like to take the basement area that will open up with the aquarium moving out, and put in more storage for the art collection and the history collections. We have a lot of taxidermied animals. They’re downstairs now, and to get to the collections vault, you pass 19th century cases of birds and animals. They need to go out of the hallways and into an actual storage room. We’ve just got things shoehorned into places. We have over 40,000 items in the collection. That’s a lot.
How do you get people excited to come to the museum with the summer season? We have a great exhibition, it’s called Romance & Nature: Art of the Hudson River School. And then right after that will be the first of a series of three exhibitions highlighting the history of the museum. So the first one is called a Cabinet of Curiosities. I think that’s going to be really fun and interesting. We also have the summer camps that are super popular.
What makes the Berkshire Museum so special and unique? We’re not MASS MoCA, which is super experimental, contemporary, just a unique business model for museums. Then you have the Clark, which is extremely classy, beautiful, incredible.
And Williams College Museum of Art is a fantastic educational institution. Then you’ve got the Norman Rockwell Museum, which is really amazing and an important organization and institution for that artist. And there’s us. [laughs] Here we are, in the middle. We are accessible to everyone at all ages and at all levels of education.
We have a very, very prominent role in the community as being their museum. They feel as though it belongs to them. It’s like their old high school. What other museum would have a stegosaurus in the front yard? It kind of doesn’t make sense. But when you go in the building, it does make sense because we are almost like that movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once.
I heard you hired a new chief curator? His name is Jesse Kowalski. He was curator of exhibitions at the Norman Rockwell Museum. He started a few weeks ago, and he’s great. He’s the one who came up with the series of the 120-year exhibition in a series of three instead of cramming it all in one chunk of time. He said do it justice. He’s bringing a lot of energy and love of art and imagination.
Have you highlighted certain pieces in your collection to draw people in? When our collections manager rediscovered or discovered in the vault the broadside of the Declaration of Independence, we thought it had been just misidentified as a facsimile. For decades, no one paid attention to it. But we found an old article from 1903 about the opening of this museum, and they were talking about the things that were coming into the museum from the Athenaeum.
They mentioned that broadside. Even in 1903, they said it was such an amazing and a rare thing to have. What I’d like to do is have a series of pop-ups—one special piece goes up maybe every three months or every two months—and we say this is something really unusual that we want to show.
Would Zenas Crane, who founded the Berkshire Museum, be happy with where the museum is right now? Oh, yes. I think so.
I think this is what he wanted. He wanted it to be available for everyone. I’ve never worked at a place that’s so embedded in people’s identity and where they live and who they are. This sense of place is what this museum provides.
Wendy Healey’s office once was Sarah Morgan’s morning room. Sarah would do her correspondence there, perhaps some menu planning, draw up a guest list or two, and then meet with the staff to organize her parties. This wasn’t just a country cottage; it was a party house for Sarah, sister of J.P. Morgan.
Wendy adores this room with its 18-foot ceilings, a picturesque window, a fireplace, and hand-me-down furnishings. In good time, this room might get some needed TLC, but that’s not what has her attention right now.
Hanging out in the Mansion Library at Canyon Ranch, Barrington Stage Director Alan Paul couldn’t help but play a few bars on the piano while Ventfort Hall Director Wendy Healey read to the group. Also pictured from left, Nathaniel Silver, Kimberly Bush Tomio, James Barry, Kristy Edmunds, and Tara Franklin.
Wendy is Ventfort Hall’s first full-time executive director, and she had her work cut out for her. Not to mention that the month after she started work, Healey got into a serious accident that had her out for several months with 12 ribs and her collarbone broken. After two surgeries and working from home, she’s back.
“This is my best job ever. I feel like my whole entire life, everything that I have done up until now, is culminating in this job.”
How did this job come about? My career has been a little bit accidental and haphazard. I was an English literature major. After I went to college, I tried to figure out what to do next. I went into retail, which is what so many English majors do, right? I was working in a mall, managing a Pottery Barn, and a friend of mine was managing a Banana Republic. My friend said, “I’m being recruited to go work at People’s Bank in Connecticut because they want retail managers with sales and service experience and management experience. I said, ‘Well, if they can turn this English major into a banker, then good luck.’ And that’s what they did. I was always on the customer side—I ran branches, I ran the marketing, trust department, I was always building relationships. Also in the banking world, there’s always a lot of nonprofit work.
I always sat on boards. Most recently, I worked at Lee Bank, and that’s where I became involved with WAM Theatre. I was their board president. I also served as the board president for Berkshares, which is the local currency. I was laid off of Lee Bank. It was kind of a blow, and then the pandemic struck.
Then what happened? I did a lot of entrepreneurial things and envisioned what I wanted to do next. It’s mission-driven with a purpose. I was walking my dog one day with Liana Toscanini, executive director of the Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires, and she said, “Ventfort is looking for somebody.” That really captured my imagination. It is a wonderful fit for me because of my interest in history and literature and art and culture, mission-driven, and there’s so much to be done.
What did you find when you started the job? Ventfort Hall was rescued from the wrecking ball in 1995 by Tjasa Sprague and Marci Brown and the Venfort Hall Association. It was a Herculean effort. They got a lot of funding and did a lot of work, but that work is not complete. There was a master plan done in 2016 outlining about $6 million worth of work that still needs to be done in urgent restoration. So, restoration and continued saving of the building for future generations is absolutely paramount. We are aggressively applying for grant funding. The other thing is building a donor base and raising the profile of Ventfort Hall to help us to build that donor base.
How much are you looking to raise? Phase 1A was completed, which was what was needed to get us up to code. Now we’re on 1B, which involves the chimneys and the Flemish gables that are the signature of our Jacobean architecture. Shoring up the facade on the north side dormers requires a lot of masonry work. It’s $4 million in the plan, probably $6 million by the time all is said and done in today’s dollars. We’re applying for about $700,000 worth of grants. We’re hoping that will get the first of the project started. And then it’s just going to be rinse and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat—so that we can show donors and grantees that we have the capability to raise these funds, complete these projects, and then raise the funds and complete the projects and put a solid track record behind us.
What else does your job involve? I have been spending a lot of time having teas with various stakeholders, one-on-one. I’m also meeting with all different types of community members who are possible collaborators. I want people to come in to Ventfort Hall because the place captures the imagination. You can see that we’re a little bit of a work in progress. It kind of tugs at your heartstrings a little bit. I want people to see how much has been done and how much still needs to be done. And I want them to kind of fall in love with it. It’s not hard to do.
What’s your vision? There are other eras of history that I would like to lift up and tell the story. We are a gorgeous, gorgeous piece of Jacobean architecture, and the story of the cottagers and the Gilded Age are foundational to the story of the socio economic history of the Berkshires. It is because of these huge pieces of architecture that were dropped into the landscape of the Berkshires that we have the economy that we have. It dictated the arts and culture economy, it dictated the second home economy, it dictated so much about why we are what we are, which is such a special place. But not without its problems as well.
We have written about this, but please continue. In the ’50s, when Bruno Aron came to Pittsfield to run the Jewish Community Center, he realized that because of discrimination, accommodations could not be had. He bought Ventfort Hall and turned it into Festival House, and it became a cultural center and holiday house. Everyone was welcome.
There were artists in residence all summer long—Dizzy Gillespie, Odetta, Pete Seeger. That story is extremely relevant. My vision includes telling not just the story of the Gilded Age, but telling the story of what the legacy of the cottage era her eras in the house’s history.
Berkshire native Tara Franklin teaches acting at Smith College, and her husband, James Barry, recently completed his master’s degree in playwriting from the same institution with a goal to teach theater in a college or university. Both have worked for Berkshire Theatre Festival (now Berkshire Theatre Group) and have a long track record with Chester Theatre—James’s first performance there was Wittenberg in 2011, and Tara’s first was Sister Play in 2016. Together, they recently were appointed co-producing artistic directors of Chester Theatre.
Did you two have a seamless transition? Tara: We’ve never run a theater company before, but having been with Chester for four years up until that point, and I was associate artistic director and director of education,
I had a really good sense of how the theater worked, what things needed to be done to run it smoothly. When Daniel Elihu Kramer said that he was stepping down and they were probably going to do a national search, I said, “Well, why don’t we just put our names in the hat?” I think Daniel felt really comfortable about that. Then it was just convincing our board, and they were excited.
How does the co-directorship work? Tara: James and I, as a team, bring a lot to the table in terms of having been actors at the theater. We both do very different things as co-producing artistic directors. I’m still doing a lot of the things I was doing before. James is talking to a lot of the designers and is going to be directing the first show; I’m going to be acting in the last show. The shared responsibilities feel really doable. We picked the season together, which was really fun.
That was the most exciting thing, reading a bunch of plays together last fall and being, like, “Hey, take a look at this.” “Oh, who would be good for this?” That kind of collaboration feels excellent, and it’s so nice to be able to bounce stuff off each other.
How did picking out the season work? James: There are people we knew we wanted to work with, like Christina Franklin, who’s going to return to us this season for the third time. She directed The Niceties the season we were under the tent at Hancock Shaker Village, and she directed Pass Over last summer. We read a pile of plays. She was suggesting things; we were suggesting what might be a good fit for her, and that excited her as a director. We decided on The Light. It was a collaborative choice.
Daniel didn’t want to disappear from Chester, so he’s returning to direct the final show of the summer that Tara is going to be in, Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation. I saw Guards at the Taj when it was in previews at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles when I was rehearsing another show out there in 2015. I’m hard-pressed to think of a live theater experience that has haunted me and stayed with me so vividly as that show did. The more time that passes between our decisions, we sort of see patterns.
How about the other plays you selected?
James: We’re opening and closing with these book-end plays that are really love letters to theater. The first show, which I’m directing, The Making of a Great Moment, fell into our lap. One of our favorite actors and a great friend of ours, Bill Bowers, whom we’ve worked with many years ago at Berkshire Theatre Festival, said, “I found this play, it’s hysterical. It seems like it’s really in the spirit of what Chester is all about.” Tara and I read it and cry-laughed through the whole script. “Yes, we’re doing this, Bill. You’re in it.” The play is about two Canadian actors touring the United States by bicycle, performing this sort of preposterous epic piece of educational theater, in increasingly suboptimal conditions. It’s so funny, but it’s such a sweet gesture to the people who choose to make theater for a living and a way to embrace the audiences that return to something that’s vital to them. Circle Mirror Transformation, at the end of the season, is about nonprofessional adults who take an acting class in their local small town community center in the fictitious town of Shirley, Vermont. It amplifies the aspects of theater—how it brings us together, how it can offer us invaluable vantage points into our own lives and into the lives of others—another really useful lens through which to examine the world. So those feel like a nice beginning and end.
What are the middle shows this season? James: Jay Sefton, who was in the co-production What the Constitution Means to Me with WAM Theatre and Berkshire Theatre Group, co-wrote an autobiographical one-man show about his experience, his desire to be a performer, and his abuse at the hands of a Catholic priest in his youth, which is obviously incredibly heavy-duty stuff. But what I can’t stress enough about the play is how funny, how much empathy there is; it’s just this acting tour de force. So I’ve been rehearsing the play, Unreconciled, with him on the side, and we’re going to give him a week to rehearse in tech in the middle of the season. He’s going to do two public performances.
What does the theater do beyond the summer? Tara: We started this thing in January where we’re doing sort of a book club, but with plays. We send out a newsletter to our mailing list and say, “Okay, we’re going to read this play, and we’re going to discuss it on this date via Zoom.” We give people the options about where to buy the script. We read three amazing plays, we had fantastic discussions, and we welcomed some audience members that we didn’t know before.
How is Chester Theatre unique compared to other theater companies in the region? James: We have a very specific scope of plays we choose to produce. We only do contemporary, small cast dramas. The way our budget typically shakes out, we have a maximum of 12 actors we can hire for the season. However you want to divide that among four shows, we can make it happen. That scope and focus always feel right. There’s an intimacy to the performances. It’s really actor-driven storytelling. Another thing that makes us unique is the amount of post-show discussions panels and talkbacks we do. A lot of our audience members return to us again and again on the same performance date and time, because they know there’ll be a conversation following. Fifty percent of all of our performances are followed by an advertised talkback. That’s a huge part of what we do.
Nathaniel Silver’s previous position was the William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection and department head at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He oversaw the collections, conservation, and archives departments, in addition to curating exhibitions. It seems like a bit of a stretch to connect his Italian Renaissance art background to the art of the Shakers. But his knowledge and experience leading up to his appointment in September greatly inform how he hopes to direct Hancock Shaker Village into the future.
Is the job what you expected? Every day is a new adventure. We’re both a world-class collection of over 33,000 objects and the oldest working farm in the Berkshires. That is a completely unique union. Learning what it takes to operate a farm has been a big learning curve. Also, from the moment I stepped in the door, a major building project that was launched the week that I got here has been a focal point. And so these two are cornerstones of the strategic vision of the village and the things that very much occupy my time.
What’s so funny? The new directors take a break. From left, Wendy Healey (Ventfort Hall), Alan Paul (Barrington Stage Company), James Barry (Chester Theatre), Kristy Edmunds (MASS MoCA), Tara Franklin (Chester Theatre), Kimberly Bush Tomio (Berkshire Museum), and Nathaniel Silver (Hancock Shaker Village).
Tell me about the building project. The plan is to completely renovate and re-envision our existing Visitor Center. It will stay within the footprint of the existing building, but otherwise it will be completely transformed. It will include both permanent collection galleries, and rotating exhibition galleries; it’ll include a low-light drawing and textile gallery, a multipurpose space for lectures, the library space, an object examination and study space, a completely new lobby, displays within that, storage for our collection, and a vault space. The dual goal of that project is to improve the visitor experience and protect our collection.
How will it change a visitor’s experience? Right now, you’re sent out into the village with almost no introduction. Doing this building the way we have proposed to do it and the way the NIH has just awarded us a grant for $750,000, will allow us to transform this space to tell our story—who the Shakers were, why they came to Hancock, what was important about them—and we can tell that story in the most visually captivating and compelling way through the collection. My background is in Italian Renaissance art. I’ve done lots of temporary exhibitions in my career. I have done an altarpiece for a certain Italian church. I can do the whole exhibition in a single gallery; I can tell you about who paid for it, I can tell you about when it was made, the artists who made it, and why they’re important. When the visitor leaves that gallery, I can’t send them into the church for which it was made. Here, we can tell that story in a compelling and visually captivating way, and then send people out into the property to visit the buildings in which these objects were used that will inform their understanding of the spaces—and, by extension, our whole site.
Are there any milestones coming up for Hancock Shaker Village? Next year is the 250th anniversary of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers. She was a religious refugee from England, gathered her followers, arrived in New York, sailed up the Hudson, and founded her first Shaker community of Watervliet. The second community was just across the river here and up on the top of the mountain, Mount Lebanon. We were the third settlement. Each Shaker site will be doing different things, and we want to celebrate the women’s work in our Shaker community. We’re already making plans.
What’s been your biggest challenge? Oh, every day is a new challenge. We’re a very small institution, but we encompass a very large property, 750 acres. Our facility is vast—20 historic buildings, plus our modern buildings. Managing all of that on a daily basis, as well as providing for the upkeep and support, is an ongoing challenge. That’s not unique to me. That’s the challenge with every director here. Part of the solution is to create a more unified narrative about our whole site, and probably the most effective way to do that is to tell those stories through multiple platforms: enhancing the presence of our collection and the stories we can tell from it on our website, extending those tours throughout our historic building, and helping people to navigate their way through the site based on information that they’re looking to find out about based on their interests. Audio is a key part of navigating throughout the site. I think we can do more. We’re increasing our connectivity, both wired and wireless, so that people can continue to pull information on their personal devices as they move throughout our site. That’s all part of bringing everything together.
It sounds like you have a slightly different approach than your predecessor, Jennifer Trainer Thompson. It’s my impression that Jennifer envisioned, at least in part, Hancock Shaker Village as a platform, whereas you are emphasizing and expanding upon the site itself and its importance as a museum. I’d say that the two perspectives are complementary. You’re absolutely right that she saw the site as a kind of platform for different kinds of programming—whether that was contemporary art, whether that was concerts, whether that was performances—and we’re still doing that. This summer, we have not only Handled with Care, we also have John Mancia and his Stillness and Light photo exhibition. These kinds of projects with contemporary artists are just as essential because when they’re responding specifically to the collection, that allows us to help people understand another facet of the relevance of the Shaker legacy today. Beyond sustainability, beyond innovation, that’s artistic legacy. That was something Jennifer pioneered here in many ways, and certainly we’re continuing to do that. We’re absolutely continuing the concert series and the wonderful Food for Thought dinners this summer. Something I want to add to that conversation is the incorporation of our own natural resources—and one of our natural resources is the collection. Let’s make sure that it’s something that we also celebrate. It helps visitors to under- stand the “why.” Why do we have John Mancia doing a photography exhibition here? Why is Ilyon Woo doing a talk here this summer? There’s a specific connection to the Shakers.
Are you connecting with other institutions? I come from a museums background and collections background. I both have that experience in my past professional career, and I gravitate towards colleagues in that arena, as well. We know that the Berkshires is blessed to have some fabulous museums. I definitely talk to those colleagues, whether it’s the Clark or MASS MoCA or Norman Rockwell Museum or Berkshire Museum. I’m curious about what they’re doing with their collections and what kinds of platforms they’ve been experimenting with. We’re a culture that thrives on stories. In what ways can we be compelling and captivating? A good museum has a great narrative and offers many, many different ways in and possibilities for people with different interests. I think museums right now are more relevant than ever before.
Mark your calendar! Berkshire Magazine in Conversation— Anastasia Stanmeyer and Guests, will be held Mondays 2:30–4 p.m., July 17–August 21, at various cultural institutions. The Summer Two 2023 course is presented by OLLI at Berkshire Community College (BCC). OLLI at BCC members can register for the six-session program on Zoom through the Summer 2 registration process. To register, and for more information, go to berkshireolli.org/SummerTwo2023. The public is also invited to attend, in person.