On a visit to a circus-poster show at Vermont’s Shelburne Museum in 2016, Bennington Museum Curator Jamie Franklin saw a wad of paper—a three-by-five-foot wad, two inches thick—made up of layers of posters advertising circus performances from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The poster on top said “BEN’GTON.” “I knew then that I wanted to bring that chunk of paper—and whatever wonders might lie within—to the [Bennington] Museum.” It took eight years, but it is here, and the wonders have been revealed. “The Circus is Coming to Town” runs through the end of the year.
The full story behind the exhibit begins in June 1972, when a just-out-of-high school lad—now professional photographer Nicholas Whitman—photographed vintage circus posters on the wall of a protected bay at a former livery stable in North Petersburgh, N.Y., 12 miles northwest of Williamstown. Thirty years later, he returned to see what had become of the posters. The stable had become an antique store, and only a few fragments remained on the wall, but two of those three-by-five-foot slabs of paper had been stored in the former hay loft. Whitman acquired them. He loaned the bundle to the Shelburne Museum, but it was only in 2022 and 2023 that he was able to look inside, thanks to the invaluable assistance of paper conservator Leslie Hill Paisley, the former head of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center.
Separating 30 fragile poster layers that had been glued together for 125 years was a formidable challenge, but Whitman and Paisley soaked and washed and peeled the images back to life. As each layer was unrolled, there were elephants and camels, performers on horseback, bears, lions, monkeys, aerialists, Native performers, and the face of circus impresario Sig Sautelle. The posters sometimes broke into fragments, creating ephemeral collages of carnivalesque images (photographed by Whitman as they appeared). In antique colors, the images conjure up the excitement that these exotic shows brought to small towns across America in the heyday of traveling circuses—a time that managed to extend into Franklin’s own childhood in Seattle. The images on view include photographs of the conservation process, as well as Whitman’s photographs of the finest fragments and some of the collages that emerged as the work progressed.
The circus exhibit occupies only the museum’s downstairs pocket gallery, but two other shows also beckon for attention. The Bennington Museum has recently renovated its Grandma Moses gallery, on the occasion of its acquisition of five paintings by the artist to add to what is the largest Moses collection in the world. At age 78, encouraged by family admirers of her needlework scenes, Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961) turned to painting pictures of rural life for herself and her friends. A couple of her paintings were displayed in the window of a drugstore in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., not far from Moses’ home in Eagle Bridge, N.Y., where in 1938 they caught the discerning eye of New York collector Louis Caldor (an engineer for the water authority) as he was passing through town. That same year, Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, proclaimed that art by self-taught artists had a place at the table of Modernism, and a year later Moses was included in a show of “unknown American painters” at MoMA. A successful solo show at Otto Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne, titled “What a Farm Wife Painted,” followed. When Gimbels department store exhibited some of those paintings, and when the 80-year-old artist whom the press would come to call “Grandma Moses” showed up (by invitation) at Thanksgiving with her homemade jams, she was surprised to find herself facing an audience of 400 fans of her art. Working into her 100th year, she completed more than a thousand paintings before she died a beloved national celebrity in 1961.
Don’t hold it against her that Hallmark had already sold 100 million Christmas cards of her iconic winter scenes. No less a sophisticate than Cole Porter purchased two of her winter paintings, one to hang above his piano at the Waldorf and the other to take with him on the road. The revamped exhibition at the Bennington Museum takes notice of the commercialization of Moses’ work (besides cards, there are curtains and china) in an adjacent hallway gallery. In the main room, the paintings cast their spell in landscapes and scenes of festive communal activity.
Moses owes something to Currier and Ives, but her own visionary imagination goes well beyond their naturalistic style. Moses often worked from an elevated perspective, as in “Cambridge Valley,” a luminous large-scale work from 1943 that is one of the museum’s new acquisitions. The lively, snowy panorama of “Sugaring Off,” another recent acquisition, shows all the phases of the process of making maple syrup. Were actual sap buckets ever such a vivid green? No, but that was no obstacle to a natural Fauve like Moses. Moses painted the action at the Battle of Bennington (1777) with the Bennington Monument (1889) visible in the distance (and reflected in the river in the foreground, seven miles away). The D.A.R., which had commissioned the painting, asked her to try again. She obliged, sans Monument; fortunately, the time-traveling first version came to the museum.
The museum’s main summer-fall exhibit is “Vermont Rocks.” Forget Phish: The rocks in question are marble, slate, and granite, Vermont’s three official state rocks. Talc, the state mineral, and grossular garnet, the state gem, are also featured. The Green Mountain State has a long and creative history of exploiting its mineral wealth, amply and imaginatively documented here through painting, sculpture, photography, and film. There is also an impressive display of Vermont rocks and crystals. You don’t have to be a geologist—or a rockhound like Franklin—to enjoy this show.
The eclectic offerings in these exhibits and those elsewhere in and outside of the museum—ranging from a gallery dedicated to Bennington Modernism to Ethan Allen’s bar tab from the Catamount Tavern—make for an engaging, only-in-Bennington experience for adventurous visitors.
