The Bruce Museum

 

 

This past weekend we made our way down to Greenwich to visit The Bruce Museum. I'm familiar with the museum residing in CT,  but that was about it. Normally I don't head down to Greenwich area because it seems like no matter where you go, parking is almost nonexistent. I was surprised to find the museum pretty much smack dab off the highway and in the center of a busy intersection area, nestled in its own private drive.

 

The building from the exterior is impressive. The walk to the entrance, looking up the entire way reminded me of some sort of golden age of Hollywood mansion in the hills. After seeing the museum for the first time, I left feeling slightly underwhelmed with the amount of exhibit on display (not to mention much of what was on display was not able to be photographed..in actuality, the museum's rules also stated no strollers among the exhibits, but nobody had stopped our double-wide behemoth; more than likely because there was nobody in the museum at 10am). I'm really unsure how much writing I can get out what I saw. Still, what I did come away with I am sure all of you will find as impressive as I did.

 

So returning back to my initial impression of the building being some sort of old time mansion on a hill, according to the history of the museum, it was. The museum's website tells us that the building was originally a house built in 1853 for a lawyer and clergyman, Francis Lister Hawks. Robert Moffat Bruce, who was a textile merchant (a wealthy one at that. Remember, this is Greenwich after all!) had then purchased the house five years later. Ten years later, Bruce deeds the property to the town to be utilized for the arts, "as 'a natural history, historical, and art museum for the use and benefit of the public'." (brucemuseum.org history) The museum houses not only paintings, sketches, and photographs, but many scientific exhibits such as minerals,  natural science exhibits, and textiles.

 

There is much to see in terms of sculpture and displays in the museum, albeit much of their current exhibits are not able to be photographed. Their natural sciences displays are a work of art all their own. This is an image of a sample of polished malachite, taken from a mine in Zaire in 1990. Green is my favorite color, so naturally I had to stop and check this out. Malachite is a mineral that was mined extensively during the Neolithic Age. It's used primarily in jewelry and decoration, but the color had religious and spiritual connections to the Egyptians. The particular pattern of this sample reminded me of flying over Arizona and Nevada on the way in to McCarran Airport. There are all these strange lakes and bodies of bright-colored water that dot the dry landscape.

 

THIS sample of stibnite I absolutely LOVED! Stibnite is another mineral that would have been known to ancient Egyptians and the Middle East as they used it for cosmetic purposes (this sample was pulled from and mine in China in 1992). Stibnite apparently crystalizes in these sort of jagged, splintered, harsh patterns.  I've seen much more aesthetically pleasing samples when I looked into what the mineral was, but the odd formation of the sample looked like Escher and Lovecraft built a nightmarish castle together.

In the middle gallery of the museum there was a fairly large exhibition called "Downsized: Small-Scale Sculpture by Contemporary Artists". Unfortunately, I mistakenly assumed that this was part of the exhibit where photography was not allowed. I did take a few photos further inside the exhibit, but only because I was out of sight. If you would like to see many of the miniatures sculptures that were on display, I suggest checking out Tracy's visit to the museum because he snagged quite a few photos of the exhibit that I did not.

In any case, this is one of the dioramas that was on display by one of the artists. Brooklyn Bridge Station by Alan Wolfson is a throwback to old, seedy New York City. Wolfson states of his work, "The real impact of my work is not how small everything is but in the stories these small things tell." Wolfson in a sense encourages the viewer to form his own tale of what the work is telling, and I enjoy this concept (I'm a big fan of non-definite, open to interpretation endings to film and books; it encourages repeat viewing). I liked looking at the piece and trying to pinpoint down when the setting was. You'll notice on the pillar there is a poster of the controversial mascot, Spuds MacKenzie and a Guess Jeans ad, so we're looking at a time frame of late 1980s. The grittiness of the train is what I like about this setting. There's some fairly minute detail involved also; check out the phone pillar and what looks like a partially exposed Pepsi ad! It doesn't matter how upscale New York City gets, I will always see it as this grimy, urban sprawl that he portrays in this setting, much like the portrayal of the city in the 1979 classic The Warriors. Again, check out Tracy's post for another awesome example of some super small detail, Occupied Hotel Room. 

 

One of the last displays that I enjoyed looking at during our time at the museum was a multi-piece display by artist Amy Bennett. Sweetness in the Air. This is part of a larger project of hers called Small Changes. Bennett lives in the Hudson Valley, one of my favorite areas of New York State. Her paintings are based upon the small scale model town that she has built (also on display) and fictionalized a history thereof.

Bennett's exhibit invoked an emotional response and fond nostalgia as I viewed them. I grew up in Ansonia, part of Naugatuck Valley. When I was in high school, I had a very close friend who lived in Beacon Falls and occasionally we would walk up the street to the local middle school and hike up the mountain behind it. The view offered up from the top was similar to the small-town perspective that Bennett sees in her own home town. The layout of the streets was almost familiar to me, as if I had driven them dozens of times before.

One of the last things I had noticed in her paintings that I found was interesting was that in such a small community she had chosen to include two churches, and in such proximity. It was small details such as this that kept me viewing and reviewing the paintings while we walked the exhibit.

Her large-scale representation of her small-scale town was a great addition to offer up an aerial view of the entire project. it reminded me a lot of the town that Alec Baldwin's character was constructing with models in the attic of their home in Beetlejuice. Much like Wolfson encourages with his pieces, I found myself looking over some of the portions of the display and thinking over what kind of people lived in some of these areas of the town? There is a section in the top right of the photo composed of only two or three houses on the outskirts: would the town theoretically extend beyond the borders of the display? Were the people living in that area some of the original residents or owners of the land? What denominations utilized the two churches? What type of supermarket did they shop at? It was a lot of fun to compose my own narrative to the town.


I would say my overall experience of The Bruce Museum was somewhat disappointing. I was not expecting a building so large to house so little, or be limited to a single floor for viewing. Still, it was an interesting experience to view some of the "natural" works of art pulled from the earth and examine the unsculpted forms and see what imagery I invoked for comparison. I wish I had known that the small-scale work was able to be photographed; I would have spent more time in the exhibit gathering examples of the work that interested me and less time sneaking around like an infiltrating spy attempting to covertly photograph top secret projects.

Cited

“Our History.” Bruce Museum, brucemuseum.org/site/about_us_detail/history.