Collections are an important museum asset

Small community museums exist in a tentative world, their collection expansions inhibited by strong competition, their display innovations curbed by lack of funding, their visitation challenged increasingly by digital distractions.

The Holley-Williams House in Lakeville — which inexplicably on Yelp and a dozen other internet travel sources is listed as alive and open to the public — was decommissioned and sold in 2010 as the Salisbury Association struggled to staff and maintain the facility.

It was not an easy decision, but necessary. A decision by the Berkshire Museum north of us in Pittsfield, Mass., is in a similar situation but with more far-reaching implications. Museum officials decided it shouldn’t try to compete with expanding MassMOCA in North Adams and the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge.

So they want to sell off about 40 of their works through Sotheby’s art auctions department. The sale, which has triggered strong opinions, was set for Monday, Nov. 13, until the Massachusetts attorney general’s office persuaded the commonwealth’s appeals court to place an injunction on the sale until Dec. 11, according to Art News and The Berkshire Eagle. 

These publications, and many others across the nation, have taken notice of the move by the Berkshire Museum trustees to redefine the museum by liquidating art acquired by purchase or gift over the years.

Anticipated millions from the art sale will go in part to gut the museum and mount new science and history displays — how and why this new vision will draw a new audience is not apparent from what little detail has been revealed.   

In the museum world, it is acceptable to deaccess artwork, but to further its mission, to purchase other works — not to alter a facility, change its thematic direction and create endowment.

The Berkshire Museum was founded in 1903 by Zenas Crane, of Crane Paper (which still makes the paper that the U.S. Treasury uses to print currency.)  From its beginnings, the museum was dedicated to collecting not only art and sculpture, but also natural science specimens and historical artifacts. Given Berkshire County’s natural beauty and its population’s connection to nature and the environment, this is fitting.

As a result, the museum reflects the history and culture of Berkshire County through its holdings, but also has items of universal interest, such as  parts of a Wright Brothers’ flier, Matthew Henson’s sled that went with Robert Peary’s expedition to the North Pole, one of William Stanley’s groundbreaking 1886 a-c power transformers, the stuffed head of Old Bill, the moose of October Mountain, and (until a few years ago) Oliver Wendell Holmes’ One Hoss Shay. Local people added to the collection. Artists Alexander Calder and Norman Rockwell gave works, not as future valuable objects to be sold, but so the museum could reflect the culture and creativity of the Berkshires.

Many who grew up in this region, not only in Berkshire County but also those in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut and eastern Dutchess and Columbia counties in New York, remember school and family trips to the Berkshire Museum to look at the possum or Egyptian mummy. There have been and are still natural science and animal exhibits along with paintings and sculpture in the museum’s collection. Should the heritage that has been valued for all these decades be discarded in favor of a different approach to the museum’s mission? 

Most valuable on the block are two paintings by Rockwell and art by Albert Bierstadt and Calder.

The decision to, as the director has called it, “monetize” the collection should not be easy to make or to implement. 

The one-time sale of works that took more than 100 years to gather cannot be undone. Those who donated or financed the acquisitions of these works to this nonprofit institution or relished viewing them on display should have their voices heard and understood in the battle for its future. But the planning was undertaken without public discussion, and apparently without letting staff know all that was going on.

While all sides want the museum to survive and thrive, it is worth the time it will take to be sure all concerns are carefully considered before irrevocable action is taken.

The Berkshire Museum’s gathered art and artifacts, reflecting the region’s rich history and cultural heritage, should be given the importance they deserve before the museum’s collection is decimated to create a large endowment for a nonprofit that could become an empty shell if these works are simply sold off to the highest bidders — very likely bidders with deep pockets who will not put them again on public display.