Misstropolis

Monday, January 28, 2008

Tour Fest at the Peabody Essex Museum

by Robin Hauck

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So much fanfare surrounds high profile traveling exhibitions at museums, (remember Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts or Bodies the Exhibition at the Science Museum?) that the permanent collections often get sidelined or ignored. People get programmed to wait until a new splashy exhibition is in town before planning a visit.

That means a whole lot of important art gets missed. The ICA actually created a special exhibit of new additions to its permanent collection ("Accumulations"), thus giving the work both the sense of permanence and stature but also novelty and excitement.

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA has designed a special day of tours which highlight works in the permanent collection. The oldest continuously operating museum in the United States, the PEM as it is known by insiders, has a very extensive, very diverse permanent collection, with a little something for everyone. These tours - which will take place on Saturday, February 2, showcase the diversity - from the Maritime collection to the works by or about women, celebrated in a tour Maya Angelo would love entitled “Phenomenal Women” after her poem.

The Peabody Essex has a staggering 2.4 million works of art, from China, Japan, Korea, India, the Pacific Islands, and Africa, as well as its collections of Native American Art, Architecture and Design, American Decorative Art, Maritime Art and History, photography, the nation’s premier collection of objects from New England, and the distinguished manuscript and book collection of the Phillips Library. These tours are a great way to experience or re-experience some of the best.

You most likely read about and perhaps visited the museum in 2003 after the opening of the widely acclaimed $125 million renovation and expansion designed by Moshe Safdie, one of the century’s most exciting architects. Safdie was selected to do the design partly because of his ability to create stunning contemporary buildings that blend into historic contexts. The Atrium is a celebration of that integration, and a representation of the wide cultural expanse the museum’s permanent collection embraces. One of the goals of the expansion was to give more space to items in the permanent collection which had never been on display for visitors - yet another reason to go check it out.

“Museums can present art and objects in ways that create dialogue rather than support a singular worldview. The new paradigm for the Peabody Essex remains planted in curiosity, as it was at its founding, but this time it is a curiosity that seeks freedom from ideological boundaries.” PEM Exec Director and CEO Dan Monroe said in an interview at the time of the 2003 re-opening.

Tour Fest on February 2 is a day long series of 45 minute docent led tours “created to help you see and think about works of art in the museum’s collections in new ways.” Six unique tours are scheduled. Patrons are encouraged to take as many as they like. Reservations are a good idea though, because the docents can’t take more than 20 people on a tour.

Misstropolis is thrilled to be able to offer two free tickets to the museum for this exciting day of tours on Feb. 2. The person who can first correctly tell us who Fanny Campbell was will win the tickets. Write back with your answer to , and reference PEM.

“Sailors’ Souvenirs” going at noon and 2:30 PM is designed to be fun for the whole family. The tour spotlights the wide range of art sailors brought back from their voyages including “Sailors’ Valentines” which kids can make at the corresponding Drop In Art Activity.

The other tours include:
“Contemporary Connections” 12:30 pm
“Tales from the Sea” 1:00 pm
“Phenomenal Woman” 1:30 pm
“A Sense of Place – Decorative Arts in Early New England” 2:00 and 3:30 pm
“Portraits” at PEM 3:00 pm

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, is open daily, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays until 9 p.m. Adults $12; seniors $10; students $8; children 16 and under and residents of Salem free.

Go Visit! And good luck with the tickets - Who is that Fanny Campbell anyway? Send in your answer and you may be off to Salem on Saturday matey!