 This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont. And my guest today is Tom Denenberg, the director of the Shelburne Museum. And we're gonna be speaking about a number of exciting things going on at the Shelburne Museum past, present and future. Welcome, Tom. Dennis, it's great to see you again, thank you. And just tell us a little bit about yourself if you would. Oh, goodness, sure. Well, I've been at the Shelburne Museum for almost a decade now. It's pretty amazing to me. It feels like just a few months. But, and came here from Portland, Maine where I was most recently before. But, you know, Shelburne is a museum that has loomed large in my thinking ever since I was a kid. I remember a few years ago cleaning out my father's study, his library. And I found the catalogs from Shelburne Museum from the 1960s. So I think I literally grew up with them on the coffee table when I was a boy. So I'm very, very, very wedded to this part of the world and our institution at Shelburne. That's wonderful. And tell us a little bit about the museum itself, its history and how it got started and maybe some of its evolution over the years. Sure, yeah. Well, the museum was founded by a woman named Elektra Habemeier Webb. And it was incorporated in 1947. And she wrote kind of a manifesto. She was asked by the president of Colonial Williamsburg, what kind of museum are you starting? And she wrote back a letter and she said, it will be an educational project varied and alive. And that's a kind of a sentence that I quote all the time. We've had any number of mission statements over the museums for what the museum is designed to be and for the community in the community. But I always liked this idea of we're an educational project varied and alive. The sort of push in museums in the mid 20th century was to create these open air experiences. Old Sturbridge Village, Colonial Williamsburg, the Henry Ford out in Michigan. And so what Elektra Webb did is she went and rescued in her way of thinking a number of buildings from Vermont and upstate New York and created a campus that represented a sort of idealized New England village. And then what she did was she just filled each of the buildings with a different specific collection. And I know many of the viewers have all been to Shelburne Museum many times in life or on a field trip. And you know that each separate building is an immersive experience with American folk art and painting and the general store at the textile galleries, the quilts. So it's a very, very rare museum where you can come and see rather than kind of one masterpiece quilt, you'll see a thematic installation of quilts for the summer of 20 of the finest 19th century quilts or 20th century quilts, contemporary quilts. So it's that immersive experience that really makes Shelburne Museum different from other institutions. And it's of course all set in a very intentional landscape. There are 18 gardens at Shelburne Museum and several of those change every year. So as often as not, we hear from visitors that they come to the museum to walk around the gardens and then they get kind of interested in what's going on in the buildings. That's great. Over time, the museum has changed. We've added buildings, we've changed emphasis. Give us an idea of the scope in terms of the acreage. Someone gets there, what do they see? How does it work when they go through it? Sure, thank you. Well, the entire acreage, the 153 acres at Shelburne Museum, now a lot of that is the parking lot and other lands. So we always say it's about 42 acres is actually the museum campus itself. The museum comprises 39 separate buildings. So there are things like the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education, which is our latest building, our two galleries where we do projects based on the collection or exhibitions that we bring from other institutions into the community, as well as a classroom for school visits. There is the Electra-Havamar Web Memorial Building, which of course is the famous interior of her New York City apartment with the French Impressionist paintings installed in it. And then we have the Web Gallery, which are the American paintings collection, the Circus Building, Beach Lodge, which has an installation of Vermont firearms. The kind of unusually named Hat and Fragrance Building, this was a name that Electra-Web gave the structure years ago, which has so many of the decorative arts collections, glass collection, adjacent to another building that she called the Variety Unit, which is a series of these discreet collections installed in each room, each gallery. So it's extremely heterogeneous. They're wheeled vehicles, horse-drawn wheeled vehicles, the carriage collection, fine art, folk art, examples of American ingenuity. So I always sort of tell this joke that all museums think they're unique, but we are. That's great. Tell us about the vessel that is there. Yeah, and of course the Ticonderoga. The whole museum, of course, surrounds the Ticonderoga. The keel of this steamship was laid in 1904. It was on the water by 1905. And it served the communities along Lake Champlain and Burlington from 1905, 1906 until 1950 or so when Electra-Web purchased the building. So it was the last steamship on Lake Champlain. Initially, she ran it for a few years on the lake, thinking it would be kind of an excursion boat to accompany her museum when she was organizing the museum. But by 1955, 54 and 55, she realized that wasn't gonna be a sustainable proposition anymore. So she moved the boat in the winter of 1955, overland three miles and placed it right in the middle of Shelburne Museum. And those of you who've been to the museum and been on the boat will all recognize what a Herculean task that was. It literally came almost three miles from a basin that they carved in the shores of Lake Champlain, put it on two railroad cars and moved it that winter. Yeah, I remember you speaking about that the last time we had an interview, which I think is now several years. It's been a few years. And that's really wonderful stuff. And if you're going there by car, we'll get to that later, but can maybe give us a little idea how the museum and the Ticonderoga appear on the scene. Sure, sure. Well, we're of course immediately adjacent to Route 7. So Electraweb married into a family that owned Shelburne Farms, which was organized in the 1880s. And in the 1940s, as she began thinking about her museum and her collections, because she had been a ecumenical and active collector since her teenage years. There's a very famous story when she was 16 or 17, she brought home a tobacco store sign, so a three-dimensional carved figure and presented to her mother and her mother collected French Impressionist paintings. So her mother looked at her and said, oh my, what have you done? So this idea that collecting Americana was almost inappropriate behavior for a well-born lady in the early 20th century. But eventually her collections outgrew her house in Long Island, outgrew her house in Vermont and Shelburne, and she's created this museum in 1947. The relationship to Route 7, to the highway, is important. Originally, people were supposed to come across the covered bridge, which is perpendicular to Route 7, at the museum. So the first entrance was the covered bridge in the 1950s. And then a few years later, they moved the entrance a little further south on Route 7, and then probably 10 years after that, they hooked around off of Boswick Road, so you would come in and enter at the train station at the museum. She moved Shelburne's train station several hundred yards to create a compound around a locomotive. And then I think it was 1986 with the current entrance with the visitor's center and round barn all came to the museum. There's a wonderful famous story about how round barn was moved to the institution and the silo of this barn literally came from another part of Vermont by way of helicopter. So the silo is right in the middle of this round barn and they moved it with a sky crane. So this idea that you would lift up a great piece of architecture and move it to the museum in 1986 is one of my favorite stories. That's really fun. And obviously the photos of that in the museum of that operation. We have photos and there's usually a video of that endeavor playing in round barn when you come see it. I had a fun story about that. Four or five years ago, a woman in town sent me a photograph that her mother had taken of the silo moving by helicopter over Shelburne. And this woman must have been a toddler at the time or a young woman when this happened. And she said to me that, you know she always thought this was a dream that she'd seen it as a little girl but she didn't believe it was true until her mother brought the snapshot of the helicopter out and all of a sudden she realized she actually did watch it happening as a little girl. Wow. I think that kind of magical experience with the museum that she had is something we try to engender throughout the grounds. It's a very special place walking the grounds at Shelburne Museum and people have wonderful memories. Yes, I've spoken to a number of people about that. It's the stories within stories here. It's amazing, absolutely amazing. Now, we're recording this in the beginning of March, 2021 that tell us how the pandemic has affected you and what has been going on since then? Well, thank you. It's been exactly a year now, right? Since this all started. And I've been telling people the story that we had just adopted our annual budget last March with kind of an April fiscal year we switch. And so that takes a lot of work, putting budget together. And so we did it and the board passed it and exactly two weeks later I ripped it up because we knew that there was gonna be no nowhere earned income for months to come. And then our board president really centered the discussion. Peter Graham, our board president, he said, well, I guess what you need to just keep asking is what can we do for the community? This is what we're gonna be doing for this coming year because it's not gonna be business as usual. So the first thing we did was a big pivot to online content and online education because we knew that families were gonna be at home and schools were gonna be at home. So in the course of this last year we've done 11 separate online exhibitions. And I think we're up to 24 different webinars that either relate to those exhibitions or are separate topics. We began to put together art kits that we distributed in different places in the state. We served as a distribution site for the National Guard providing emergency food and emergency rations for Vermonters in need. So we basically just kind of asked ourselves, what can we do as a campus space, a place-based organization now that we're virtual? We're very famous for our gardens, we're very famous for our peonies. So when those came into bloom, we cut them all and we took them to nursing homes and memory care facilities all around Greater Burlington. So in the assumption that people weren't coming to the museum, we were gonna take the peonies elsewhere. We did that with our lilacs as well. And our wonderful employee, Louis Godin organized project peony. He then did it again in the fall. So we have so many apple trees at the museum. So the staff gleaned the apples and donated all the apples to the Vermont Food Bank. Wow. And a number of feeding Chittenden was another one of the groups we worked with on that. Well, just to get clear, the facility itself was closed at this because of the... Well, we were open from July 30th until October 15th. So we were able to be open and we're gonna do that again this summer. We'll open June one. But normally this time of year, we would be open and doing school programs, but we're not able to do that now. So everything we're doing is virtual engagement, online exhibitions and figuring out how we can be useful to the community different ways. We partnered with the Flynn back in the fall to do a magical concert with Wynton Marsalis. And we're looking at working with some community groups this summer, Lyric Theater, perhaps the VSO, who's a traditional partner of ours to provide some socially distant programming outside in the warm weather. That's great. Well, we learned about some really exciting exhibits coming up or acquisitions. And of course, the Alfred Jacob Miller. Well, tell us about that, how you obtained it? Yeah, well, I was very surprised that we kind of thought we were gonna be in quiet mode and digital mode this year, but there were three wonderful acquisitions that came in. The first was an Alfred Jacob Miller painting and it's before the Civil War. Miller was one of the artists who went West and began sort of documenting both Westward expansion, but also the kind of lives of indigenous people, Native Americans and the Midwest and far West. And a friend of the museum, Terry Perry, gave us this painting for the collection. So it's a wonderful, both a document of American history, but it also opens up all of these conversations about the relationships of European settlers as they move West with indigenous people. And Miller is a very interesting figure because he was funded on these expeditions by a Scottish nobleman. So it's part of this, even this kind of European fascination with North America that you see in the 18th and 19th century. So we're gonna have a program on that painting, which will come up, a woman named Lisa Strong who wrote a book on Alfred Jacob Miller will be speaking to us in the coming days. And that'll be then evergreen on our website. So people will be able to be able to see that thereafter. And you anticipate having the painting for personal viewing at some point? Oh sure, once we're open in June, so it'll be in the web gallery at Shelburne Museum. So it'll be up. The other painting that came in, which will also be up this summer, was a John Singleton Copley portrait. And this came up at auction in December. And again, we weren't really thinking of purchasing a Copley. And I think you'll understand these are difficult financial times. So we weren't planning on adding a major work. But it's kind of a fun story. A friend of the museum called my attention to a different painting in this auction catalog. And as I began to kind of flip through the auction catalog, I saw the Copley and it said, you know, portrait of Mrs. John Scali, Mercy Scali, 1762 or so, John Singleton Copley. And it said, a pendant portrait to John Scali, portrait of John Scali. So it's the pair to a portrait of John Scali, comma, whereabouts unknown. And I read that sentence two or three times. I said, well, that's awfully interesting because John Scali's at Shelburne Museum. And that half of the portrait has been with us since 1958, I think, or 59. Wow. So I felt a kind of responsibility to reunite this poor separated couple. The portraits had been separated in the 1920s. And, you know, it's a little bit tricky to explain, but museums have restricted monies. We have gifts of funds that are given to the museum just for acquisitions of the collection. So I can't spend that in other ways on, you know, the operations, the general operations, the museum. And so it turns out we had enough restricted money to go buy that painting at the auction. And then what was really lovely is four individuals then stepped up and replenished those restricted funds. So we would go forward next year out of the pandemic, still with that money. So it was a lovely gesture on their part for four trustees did that. That's wonderful. Yeah, so now we have John and Mercy Scully back at Shelburne Museum. That's a great story. And let me ask now, what carrying us through to the end of the year, what do you have coming up at the museum or programs that you're gonna be running virtually? Well, more programs online. And if people check the website, they'll be able to find those webinars. We have a series called Conversations with the Curators where each curator is presenting a different either new acquisition or favorite object of theirs. We have a series of projects called Webby's Art Studio. So these are hands-on programs that mostly children can do with their families at home. We were just coming into the last phases of something called Quilt Club, which I enjoyed very much where we had one of our education staff was leading an online quilting class and group. So there are a series of offerings for really individuals of all ages and any interest in the museum. And then as we move forward toward opening, our horticulturalists, our gardener, Jen, excuse me, Jess Gallus, will be leading a series of conversations on what's coming in the gardens before people can actually come to the museum. And then June 1 will be open. That's great. We'll have two exhibitions open this summer. One is called New England Now. So it's a contemporary project with artists from all over the New England States looking at the sort of concerns and conversations around how we represent New England today, which is obviously very, very different from the kind of stereotype of New England or the archetype of New England. And then we also have a project on Courier & Eyes, the 19th century lithographer with the graphic firm. So I think that those two exhibitions are also a very good representation of the kind of relationships that we like to present at Shelburne Museum. So Courier & Eyes being a new look at a very traditional way of approaching and looking at our country and the New England Now being what do people working on today in Vermont and New Hampshire and Connecticut and Massachusetts. So I always like the tension created by these different exhibitions. And that's something that we do intentionally. We are intentional in those relationships. That's great. I want to ask you, how can people get involved with the museum? Basically, what do you need from the community or would like to see community people and our viewers get involved? What do you need from our audience? Shelburne has a wonderful membership program and if people want to become members, I would encourage them to. We sometimes tend to forget that membership is one of the principal ways that the community can support the institution. The museum, of course, is a nonprofit like all of our brothers and sisters in the nonprofit community this year. This has been one of the most challenging years, if not the most challenging year in our history. We took a $7.5 million a year annual budget and cut it to a $5.5 million annual budget just by going bare bones right down to our core activities and then pivoting toward remote engagement. Annual fund, if people care to contribute, they're always welcome to. We would encourage that and welcome that. And we have a very active volunteer cadre. We're still figuring out exactly how that will work this summer. But taking care of 42 acres is the work of many, many hands and that's another way if people want to get involved this summer or in the years to come that people can come help. But I would say supporting the museum, becoming a member, coming back when we're open is really the way to support the museum. And again, we're here to support the community. So this is something that we've always tried to do and I think this year in particular, we've doubled down on our relationship to Vermont and our many audiences here. That's wonderful. I know many museums have shops. So the things that people can buy to remember the Shelburne Museum where people want to get by mail because we have a viewership all over the country sometimes. We know, we sure do. We've got the museum store. We moved it a little farther into the campus into a structure called Diamond Barn last summer because we completely renovated the visitor center and store. We needed to create a touch free, touchless way of entering the museum. So if people haven't come to the museum during the pandemic I think you'll be very impressed with how you enter the museum. So the store was completely rethought as a touchless ticketing and welcoming center. And so the store itself moved in a little farther into the campus. That's great. And items are available online? We do have just sort of very select items available but those who want to call when we're open and talk to Lee Wheeler, our store manager are always welcome to do that. That's great. That's really fantastic. And how do you feel about the future now? You know, it's been a rough year but it seems to be a very productive year. Maybe you can just give us an insider's to how you feel about the coming months and the coming year. I'm optimistic about the coming months and coming years. You know, we've all been scratching our heads for months trying to figure out, you know the duration of the pandemic and then, you know, what, what, you know this phrase the new normal will look like. But the one thing that I'm quite clear about is, you know, the museum two years from now is not going to be anything like the museum we closed, you know, last year. All of this digital muscle that we're building up virtual muscle online content, none of that's going to go away. It's clear to me that that's going to be a very, very important part of the museum for years to come. And we had, you know kind of an interesting meeting a week or two ago where we were looking at some of the data we were getting back from the online programs and some of just the anecdotal comments where people said, oh, I'm so glad that I was able to hear this lecture and not get in the car on a February night, you know, to drive from Stowe to Shelburne Museum. I had another person from Boston say, I'm so glad I was able to hear your lecture. I never would have gotten to Shelburne, Vermont in the winter time. So I think we've increased our reach, our geographic reach and we've kind of reasserted that national pulpit that we have a little bit for talking about Americana and folk art. And I also think the social challenges of this year, we need to recognize that this wasn't just a public health crisis. This wasn't a biological crisis alone. This was a cultural crisis in this country. And I think that's also helped us center our discussion at Shelburne Museum on making sure that we are speaking to as many audiences as we can with our collections and remind people why museums are important, why looking at art is important, why taking examples from the 18th and 19th century, whether that's a little bit of American ingenuity or a little bit of French artistic genius is all hugely important as we move forward as a country. So I think that's one of the lessons we've taken from the pandemic and will carry as we move forward. That's great. Well, that's wonderful, Tom. And I wanna thank you for appearing on Positively Vermont. And hopefully as things progress, we can have you back at some time in the future. And it's really been great having you. And thank you for you and your staff for helping us put this together. So my guest today has been Tom Denenberg, the director of the Shelburne Museum. This is Dennis McMahon. Thank you for watching Positively Vermont.