ART IN THE BERKSHIRES | July 14th 2008

girl_named_fred/flickr

Ariel Ramchandani braves the unseasonable chill to examine what the arts have wrought on the mill towns of Massachusetts. She begins at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, where everybody knows her name ...

From ECONOMIST.COM*

The morning is unseasonably cold and I'm standing with a friend outside the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, pounding on the front door as if to break it down. It's a few minutes before 10am, we're late for an academic conference and underdressed for the freezing climate. Eventually, we cease our banging, so as not to disturb the crowd of nice-looking, elderly folk who have queued up behind us. "Good", we think, "they're here for the conference as well."

But we're wrong. While we are late for our lecture, they are instead early-bird visitors gathered to see one of the greatest arts centres this side of the Mississippi. They are readying themselves for the journey into a major collection of Impressionist art--including a Turner, a uniquely outfitted van Gogh dancer, and a few impressive grainy-impasto cathedral studies by Monet. The visitors are from everywhere; they are a mix of locals, day-trippers and vacationers here for a would-be-beautiful May weekend in the Berkshires.

It may seem rude of me to distinguish myself from these lovely people, but I cannot resist confessing, and revelling in, my insider status. This isn't my first time at the Clark, and Williams College, the college that comprises "downtown" Williamstown, is my alma mater. My digs are a bit different than I was used to having as a student, but not far away: my room at the Northside Motel--which really ought to be called "Peeping Tom's Cabin"--looks directly into the dorm room I used to inhabit in the undergraduates' Greylock quad.

It could only be more fitting if my room came equipped with a pair of binoculars. I'm here this week to look at art in the Berkshires, with a perspective somewhere between that of an insider and that of an outsider. I want to see the many ways in which the arts have stitched together this cluster of idyllic and post-industrial mill-towns in north-western Massachusetts. I want to examine the extent to which the arts actually serve as the backbone of these rural economies--as students, especially local art students, are often led to believe.

There's no better place to start than the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Founded by Sterling and his wife Francine, the Clark is the Berkshires' pre-eminent cultural institution. The Clark brothers had inherited a bundle of money as heirs to the Singer sewing-machine fortune. The brothers, Stephen and Sterling, differed in their habits and styles, with Stephen emerging as capable businessman and trustee and Sterling a careful and decisive private collector. As art-loving sibling rivalries go, this one proved to be good and fruitful. A few years ago New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, in conjunction with the Clark, put on a show entitled "The Clark Brothers Collect".

Williamstown is lucky that Sterling dumped his collection here. Its pieces would be impressive anywhere, here they shine spectacularly among the college buildings, dairy farms and a string of refurbished houses peopled with retired Williams alumni. The Clark is also one of the largest economic boons to the Berkshires. According to a study done in 2005, each year it draws more than 175,000 visitors, who spend over $20m annually.

These visitors must include all those academics (bleary-eyed, present company thereby excluded) who are here for the conference on Diaspora art. We grab our lovingly laid out press kits, settle into the dark lecture hall and listen, along with a smattering of scholars from all over the country, to Kobena Mercer--who, if you ask me, is the Tiger Woods of art history--of dapper style, great likeability, talent and panache.

He gives an excellent lecture on the subject of what's beyond the threshold of the visible in a series of 19th-century paintings. I admire his light, sure touch with the material, analysing the paintings as deftly as a surgeon with his patient, letting the work lead him rather than imposing his views heavily. We do not fall asleep once.

I have much to do, so we duck out at the end, swipe a banana from the breakfast buffet and head out. "I wish art historians spoke English," my friend grumbles, as I push open the glass doors onto the deserted parking lot, where the sun is now burning through the mountain chill.

Picture Credit: girl_named_fred/flickr

(*Ariel Ramchandani is contributing editor to More Intelligent Life. This column is part of a week-long diary on art and urban growth in the Berkshires)