photo by Mario Morgado
Museum Pieces
Matisse to the mummy, Andy Warhol to arrowheads, 75 years after opening its doors the Fleming Museum continues finding new ways of 'bringing the world' to Vermont.
FIRST FIND
Works of art and artifacts from throughout the world make-up the Fleming’s diverse 23,000-piece collection. But the first recorded acquisition of the College of Natural History Museum, which eventually grew into the Fleming, was found just a few miles from campus.
In 1825, a Burlington surveyor uncovered the piece while working in Colchester, and two years later it was donated to UVM with the following note detailing the jar’s discovery.
“This pot was found in Colchester in 1825 by Capt. John Johnson of whom (sic) bought it yesterday. He says he found it covered with stone over which a large tree had grown and had been so long dead that the body was perfectly rotten. A large root of the tree grew over the stone which covered the pot which was also much decayed. He found near it some Indian stone arrows which he did not preserve. If you think it worthy a place in the College of Natural History you will please accept it from your humble servant, Luther Loomis.”
Archeologists believe the jar was left behind by New York-based Iroquois Indians who were hunting in Vermont. Dating from 1500 AD, it is regarded as the finest and most complete representation of early New England Indian pottery.
A SERIES OF FORTUNATE EVENTS
If timing is everything, the Fleming Museum was almost nothing. The story of the museum’s tenuous beginning starts with James Wilbur— retired businessman, avid student of Vermont history, and a stalwart UVM supporter who brought us the Ira Allen statue, the Ira Allen Chapel, the Wilbur Fund, and with some luck, the Fleming Museum.
Initially interested in funding an annex to the Billings Library to house his extensive collection of Vermontiana, Wilbur was persuaded to think bigger by UVM President Guy Bailey. The president, who championed a period of major growth at UVM, suggested a separate facility and had the top New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White draw up plans.
It was the summer of 1928 when Wilbur was swayed by Bailey’s vision for a museum and agreed to put up $100,000 if the University could raise an additional $150,000 by the following fall. A year passed with no fundraising progress, then in August 1929, Wilbur’s deadline just two days away, Katherine Wolcott stepped into Guy Bailey’s office. The niece of the late Robert Hull Fleming, a UVM alumnus who had made good as a Chicago broker and shipping merchant, Wolcott was interested in helping UVM build a memorial room in honor of her uncle.
The day before her meeting with Bailey, Wolcott, an artist, had paid a visit to the University Museum. Confronted by the old brick building (now Torrey Hall) which had served as the museum’s quarters for more than 60 years, she sensed the need for something better. Inspired, she met with Bailey and told him she wanted to dedicate a museum in her uncle’s honor. One hitch: she didn’t have all the money such a project would require.
Not a problem, Guy Bailey pulled the year-old blueprints out of his desk and the project was on. In addition to getting in just under the wire to secure Wilbur’s matching gift, the Fleming narrowly made it on two other counts: James Wilbur died on April 28, 1929, just a few months after formalizing his gift, and Katherine Wolcott’s pledge was delivered on Oct. 1, 1929, three weeks before the fatal stock market crash. Benefactors Wilbur and Wolcott never met one another.
‘JUST A BRICK BOX’
Humble Torrey Hall was first museum
When Professor George Henry Perkins arrived at UVM in the summer of 1869, the museum “cabinet” occupied the ground floor of a two-story brick building that housed the University’s library. “The new building was very plain, just a brick box,” Perkins recalled some sixty years later at the dedication of the Fleming. “I saw, as we entered, a small but good collection of birds, a few mammals, shells and Indian relics, more minerals and a very few geological specimens…As a museum it was not very important nor attractive but it was to be my museum.”
Perkins would curate the University’s collection (his museum) from 1873 until 1927, when he passed the reins to his son, Henry F. Perkins. The elder Perkins shepherded the museum and Torrey Hall through changes that included: in 1873, adding a third floor to house the Park Art Gallery; in 1885, expanding to occupy all of the first and second floors when the library collection moved into the newly constructed Billings; in 1894, moving the entire building to its current site to make way for Williams Hall construction; and in 1898, adding a room on the building’s west side to house the Cannon Room.
George Henry Perkins long championed the construction of a museum building such as the Fleming, a dream realized two years before his death in 1933.
ART'S FIRST HOME
The University’s first art gallery emerged in the 1870s when
Trenor W. Park, an entrepreneur from Bennington who made his fortune in the railroad industry, made a $5,000 gift to add a third floor to the UVM museum. Underneath a mansard roof and trimmed with elegant ceiling trusses and wainscotting inside, the new space would become the Park Gallery.
An art gallery on a university campus was a rarity at the time and by most accounts it was well-loved by Vermonters. Summer exhibitions of paintings by leading contemporary American artists were very popular, drawing up to 4,000 visitors. But from the outset, the Park, as a teaching gallery, had different aims than a standard public gallery. Its mission was not to “gratify the sight-seeing and picture-gazing propensity,” but to illustrate the “great art-ideas that liberal study aims to inculcate.”
The Park Gallery had a vigorous first decade, but by 1885, its influence on community and University life seems to have diminished. The original gallery space on the third floor of Torrey Hall is now home to the Pringle Herbarium.
ADMIRABLE DEPORTMENT RULES
School field trips, family days, the Fleming Museum has always had a soft spot for kids. When the Fleming first opened, in fact, it was one of the first museums in the country to have a section for children.
Just as “talkies” were coming into vogue, the Fleming developed a weekly program of Saturday afternoon lectures and film showings for children, an enormously successful initiative that continued through the 1950s. Kids who attended the Saturday series became part of the “Junior Guild.” The 1938 “Museum Director’s Report”makes note of the behavioral influence of the program on the several hundred kids who visited the museum every Saturday: “To be deprived, even for two weeks, of the Museum Guild Badge is a hardship which makes for admirable deportment.”
“…A museum of fine arts should present a beautiful vista to anyone entering its doors.”
So said Katherine Wolcott in a letter to UVM President Guy Bailey as they collaborated on the design and building of the Fleming Museum.
A major donor behind the Fleming, Wolcott detailed her ideas for a marble court with porticos and a central stairway in this sketch, basing the design on the sculpture courts she saw in the Isaac Delgado Art Museum in New Orleans. The Fleming’s Marble Court is made of stone from Italy, France, and Vermont.
Evelyn Hankins, left, and Janie Cohen, right
photo by Mario Morgado
TALKING ABOUT TODAY'S FLEMING
It’s July 21, the morning after the opening reception for the Fleming Museum’s new exhibit “Colors of the Amazon: Featherworks from the Nalin & Petersen Collections.” It’s a cruel time to ask a museum director and head curator to sit down and talk about their work when they deserve to be reveling, resting, or maybe just pondering a quiet gallery, but Janie Cohen, Fleming director, and Evelyn Hankins, curator, graciously sat down with VQ’s Tom Weaver to talk over the contemporary Fleming and the rewards of stewarding some of the University of Vermont’s greatest treasures.
Vermont Quarterly
I read that when the Park Gallery, one of the precursors to the Fleming, was first established in the 1800s its mission was not to “gratify the sight-seeing and picture-gazing propensity,” but to illustrate the “great art-ideas that liberal study aims to inculcate.” That’s some grand nineteenth-century talk. To what extent would you say the same is true of the Fleming’s mission these days?
Janie Cohen
It is still central to our mission. When the museum opened in 1931, I think the University saw that the teaching component was critical, but the community component was there from the very beginning, too. So we, like a lot of university museums in small communities, really see our role as serving both.
But having said that, we take very seriously the teaching aspect. It has been one of my goals as director to continually increase the extent to which our collections and exhibitions support the curriculum. In August, we’ll be collaborating with the Honors College to host a faculty seminar. Twenty members of the faculty from a wide range of disciplines are coming into the museum for three days to be introduced to the collection, go to storage, discuss collection issues, and really focus on how to use our resources for teaching and research at UVM.
Evelyn Hankins
One of the appeals for me in coming to UVM was that tie in to the faculty and the students, that strong educational mission. That’s what we do. We care deeply about how many people are coming through the door, but it is that educational component that really drives the museum. That’s what we think about when we consider what kinds of exhibitions and accompanying programming we’re going to do.
For me, it’s meant finding new ways to bring in faculty and using their expertise with the exhibitions I’m doing. With the Amazonian featherwork exhibition, we’ve worked with John Crock in the UVM Anthropology Department and brought in Michael Heckenberger (one of the late James Petersen’s former students and a research colleague) from the University of Florida.
Vermont Quarterly
Over the past decade, the Fleming has hosted a number of “big name” shows—Picasso, Rembrandt, Warhol, Goya. Could you talk a bit about what bringing in works by a widely known, legendary artist means to a museum such as the Fleming?
Janie Cohen
Those exhibitions definitely have higher visibility, and a name that is recognized by the general public tends to bring people in. When we can bring those big name shows in it is obviously very exciting for us, as well as for the community. But I think we’ve also been increasingly successful at drawing people for smaller exhibitions, more scholarly shows.
Evelyn Hankins
My only experience here with blockbusters is the Goya show, and I have to say that everybody in the museum was very excited when those crates came in and were being unpacked and hung on the wall. They are extraordinary objects that span centuries and still have this incredible power.
Along the lines of what Janie just said, it was interesting to see what happened when we paired Goya’s Los Capriccios and the Michael Mazur-Robert Pinsky collaboration on Dante’s Inferno. Our thought was that they’d be a wonderful pairing, both very dark looks at humanity, but the Goya would be the bigger draw. We don’t have the numbers to prove it, but if I were to put money on it, I’d say that as many people came in to see the Mazur-Pinsky exhibition as the Goya show.
The point is that you can’t always peg what is going to be the blockbuster. It is not always the big names.
Janie Cohen
I’ve always felt really strongly that it is not enough to just have a recognized name. The exhibition itself has to be very, very solid. It needs to be thoughtfully curated. It is easy to bring big names, but the challenge is to still add something, contribute something to the scholarship or people’s experience with it. Particularly with the Rembrandt, Picasso, and Warhol exhibitions, it was very exciting that we were able to do something that not only introduced the artists to people who had not had the opportunity to see the work up close but also added something new for people who had seen the work over and over again through the years.
I’ll second Evelyn, though, on the personal impact of bringing these pieces in. During the Rembrandt show it was incredible to have the experience of walking into that gallery over three months and just living with those pieces. It brought me to tears.
Evelyn Hankins
We hope that when people are drawn in to see something that they’re familiar with they’ll look at other objects, other shows, and it will spark their passion for art. The idea is to create new interests. That is one of the really fun parts of the job. Maybe people will discover lesser-known names or Vermont artists or South African beads or any number of things. Again, that’s the draw of a university museum, not every show has to be a blockbuster.
Vermont Quarterly
Say you could borrow one piece from the Fleming collection and display it in your offices, what would it be?
Evelyn Hankins
That’s not a fair question! We’ve got, like, 23,000 objects!
OK, I have a real love for the Winslow Homer painting The Tent. I’m an Americanist at heart, that’s where my training is. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful painting, an example of Homer’s mastery of the genre.
Janie Cohen
My first love in art was works on paper and it still is very close to my heart.
I’d choose a drawing by Richard Diebenkorn, a charcoal of a nude, very abstract, very beautiful. Unfortunately, since drawings can only be exposed to light for three months out of every year, it would have to be a very quick installation in my office. Or maybe I could have a little window shade to pull down over it.
WHAT'S A MUMMY COST?
and some other things you might not know about your museum
In 1910, Professor George Henry Perkins acquired for the Fleming a 25th-dynasty mummy from the Royal Museum of Egypt in Cairo for $35.
The architect of the Fleming was William Mitchell Kendall of the prestigious New York firm McKim, Mead, and White. The firm also designed UVM’s Waterman, Southwick, and Slade buildings, as well as Ira Allen Chapel.
In the mid-1930s, when the Burlington population was approximately 27,000, an estimated 25,000-30,000 people visited the Fleming Museum every year.
The Fleming’s basement auditorium was the first permanent performance space for the Theatre Department, and, in 1959, the Champlain Shakespeare Festival debuted there.
The Fleming owns three works by Henri Matisse, one of which is a simple charcoal drawing of John Dewey, UVM Class of 1879.
NOW SHOWING
“Colors of the Amazon: Featherworks from the Nalin and Petersen Collections” features objects than range from elaborate headdresses and full-body costumes to ornate baskets and musical instruments. The exhibit, on display through November 19, includes objects recently donated to the museum by Dr. David R. Nalin, a member of the Fleming’s board of advisors, and a collection belonging to the late UVM anthropology professor James Petersen ’79, which is on loan from his wife, Jennifer Brennan. Professor Petersen’s legacy as a teacher and scholar were honored this fall with the opening of the James
B. Petersen Memorial Gallery of Native American Cultures. This newly-installed, long-term exhibition explores the material cultures and artistic traditions of indigenous peoples of North America through art and artifacts from the museum’s collections.
Background materials for this article include “Fleming Museum History through the 1980s” by Glenn Markoe, former curator; Torrey Hall history by Sarah Farley, Historic Preservation Program; Fleming history by Michael McQuillen, Historic Preservation Program; “The Fleming at 50” by Julie Becker, Spring 1982, Vermont Magazine; and additional research by Chris Dissinger, Fleming marketing and public relations manager.
SEE FOR YOURSELF
Plan a visit to the Fleming’s Wilbur Room to check out the current exhibit exploring the museum’s history. Or, if you prefer the comfort of your computer, surf the Fleming’s past through an interactive feature at flemingmuseum.org
(for UVM staff)