by Carlene Phillips ·
Friday, June 28, 2024
It’s the same magnificent view across the valley to Wachusett Mountain and beyond, the same picturesque buildings nestled into the hillside, the same sense of stepping into the past. But in other ways much has changed about Fruitlands Museum, 102 Prospect Hill Road, which became a Trustees of Reservations property in 2016. Recently, staffing and spaces have been reorganized, and the museum’s interpretation of history and culture has broadened and shifted in emphasis.
Statue of Wo-Peen at Fruitlands Museum. (Courtesy photo)
Some of the changes are operational. Rather than the six open days of previous years, the museum is open four. Thursday and Friday hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and on the weekend the closing hour is extended to 5 p.m. On all four days the buildings close from 12:30 to 1 p.m. for staff to have a lunch break. The restaurant, open all four days, from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., is run by Fireside Caterers, the same group that runs Gibbet Hill in Groton. The menu—sandwiches, soups, salads, snacks, kids’ selections—is also online, and food may be ordered ahead for takeout.
As in the past, guests purchase tickets at the white house at the top of the hill, which is also a gift shop, operated by Harvard resident Harriet Friedrich, Fruitlands guest services and retail manager. Friedrich stocks books related to different aspects of the museum and commissions paintings, ceramics, jewelry, and more by area artists. Parking is there or down the hill a short way at the Wayside Visitors Center, which is now an unstaffed information center with a large gallery at the back. That gallery space is now empty, but Friedrich has arranged for an exhibit to open Sept. 14 with Bethany Peck, a fine arts painter who finds her inspirations in nature.
Founder Clara Endicott Sears used to be the focus of the Fruitlands story, and in a way she will always remain at its core. But the museum has expanded beyond her vision of preserving a specific history and culture to one that envisions a living, changing story. At Wayside, tribute is paid to Sears as “The Pioneering Collector.” On one wall hangs a large photograph of a 2019 exhibit that hung in the Art Gallery: a floor-to-ceiling collage of objects collected by Sears over 47 years, starting with a pitcher she bought in Paris when she was 7. On another wall is a shelf displaying some of the 15 books she authored. Large photos show scenes from the 2018 movie “Little Women” that used the Shaker Office for the home of Meg Alcott. More informational panels are scheduled to be installed soon.
In 1914 Sears started the museum with the 1826 farmhouse to which transcendentalist Bronson Alcott brought his family from Concord for an experiment in communal living on property he called Fruitlands, intending to find sustainability from the land. The Fruitlands Farmhouse, at the bottom of the hill, is self-guided but staffed by a knowledgeable interpreter. Next up the hill is the Shaker Office building, moved there from Harvard Shaker Village and opened in 1922. This too has an interpreter to answer questions. On weekends there are three scheduled “Visions of Utopia” tours each day, where an interpreter talks in depth about the people and the culture each of these buildings housed.
Updates in the two buildings have been made under the direction of Trustees Senior Curator Christie Jackson. A Shaker chest of drawers from the permanent collection has been moved into the Shaker Office. Jackson wrote in a memo that this large pine chest “may be a quiet piece, but has been described as a ‘star.’” A rediscovered 18th-century highboy has been moved to the second floor of the farmhouse, where it once stood when Sears restored and furnished the farmhouse.
Paint analysis done on two rooms in the Shaker Office reveals original paint of a pink shade in the front room and yellow in the workroom at the back. Paint on the exterior of the farmhouse has been analyzed with an intention of redoing the facade. The wallpaper in the left front room of the farmhouse has been conserved and the discovery made that, unlike the story interpreters told for years that Sears found pieces of wallpaper on the walls and had the paper replicated in France, the paper was original to Sears’ restoration, with paper appropriate to the earlier period.
It is the third building, the former Native American Museum (1929), that visitors returning to Fruitlands after some time away will find most different. It is now called the Seasonal Gallery and is unstaffed. Museum curators spent several years rethinking the building’s collection and the ways in which the Indigenous communities’ stories were being told. They invited some Indigenous people to give their input and discuss what would be a respectful way to use the collection. Changes were made, but none seemed to go far enough.
In October 2022 the Trustees hired Tess Lukey, an Aquinnah Wampanoag tribal member and native New Englander, as the first-ever associate curator of Native American art, to be based at Fruitlands and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. A press release states she was “charged with developing exhibits and researching initiatives to broaden access and knowledge of the Trustees’ extensive Indigenous art collections.” The first results of that charge are three exhibits, opened June 15, that more authentically interpret the Indigenous collection originally assembled in the early 20th century. At that time, Sears, like other collectors of the time, was intent on preserving the “vanishing Indian” myth. Baskets and pottery she purchased from buyers in the Southwest were totally disconnected from the culture of the Native communities they came from. Other items formerly in the then Native American Museum—the panoramas, King Philip’s war club, the two Native American mannequins dressed in ceremonial garb—showed distorted views that either romanticized the culture or showed it as violent. All the objects have been put into storage.
Currently in the Seasonal Gallery until Nov. 4 is an installation of a pairing of video-based artworks by Sky Hoping and Cannula Hanska Luger titled “A Surreal Place.” According to a press release, “The works reflect on a sense of place that is grounded in Indigenous realities and identities. Using visuals, sound, and some text, each piece navigates a story of personal heritage, historical trauma, erased identities, and collective healing.”
Lukey has curated two other exhibits in the fourth museum building, the formerly named Art Gallery, built in 1939 and expanded after World War II. In earlier days Sears’ collections of Hudson River School paintings and early portraits were displayed, later a variety of rotating exhibits. It is now the Four Seasons Gallery, and a significant change has been made in the use of its spaces. While the large gallery room and the front room across from it remain exhibit space, the back gallery is now a study room with a work table, bookshelves, and comfortable chairs.
The exhibit in the large gallery, “Across Boundaries across Barriers,” highlights Fruitlands’ collection of contemporary Indigenous artists from across the country and also showcases historical objects in the collection that had been in storage for decades and are now reframed through a Native lens. It captures the living presence of these communities through the art of their decorative and practical belongings. The plan is for the exhibit to remain up through September 2029. Lukey will swap out objects periodically to protect them from overexposure to light.
In the smaller gallery, through May 2025, is “Place of Intersection: Survivance in the American West.” The exhibit shows paired images that contrast a stereotypical view of Native Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries with what was really happening in the culture of those communities.
The word “survivance” is used in describing the three exhibits. According to an online source, the term was first used by the Anishinaabe writer and cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor in 1999 to mean an active sense of presence. “By changing the suffix from ‘al’ to ‘ance’ Vizenor insists on an active survival in which Native American people go beyond merely subsisting in the ruins of tribal culture to actively inheriting and refashioning those cultures for the postmodern age.”
Next week: A review of the exhibits.