Wrapped! Search for the Essential Mummy

June 19 - October 31, 2010

Pahat, Berkshire Museum’s world-famous mummy, will be the centerpiece for the debut of Wrapped! a travelling exhibition that includes Egyptian artifacts from the Akhimim region. Two other mummies on loan to the Museum will join Pahat,
each in its own richly decorated sarcophagus.

Wrapped! explores the long-held fascination with Egyptian mummies as a source of inspiration as well as a significant shift in Western sensibilities toward these important artifacts.

Wrapped! examines the relatively recent role of modern forensic analysis in Egyptian studies, presenting the work of specialists who use CT-scans to reconstruct the appearance of people from the ancient Egyptian community of Akhmim. These forensic reconstructions put a human face on the past, contributing to an enlightened understanding of a single community and the more compassionate treatment of mummies. The exhibition was developed by Jonathan Elias, Ph.D., Director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium (AMSC), which is conducting an on-going and sustained effort to understand the ancient population and mummies of Akhmim.

In addition to three significant mummies, Wrapped! also includes ancient mummified cats, falcons, and a crocodile. Fascinating artifacts, including funerary scarabs, necklaces, amulets, vessels, figurines, and headdresses, as well as historical documents related to the trade and study of mummies, will surround the sarcophagi in the Berkshire Museum’s galleries. The exhibition illuminates the rise in popularity of Egyptology among Western European scientists, addressing on the destructive 19th century practice of public “unrollings” of mummies. Interactive displays will allow visitors to make their way through a tomb, participate in a mummy-wrapping activity, and view a video on forensic reconstruction methods. Wrapped! will also include a variety of public events and educational
programs.


Nancy Graves: Journey to North Africa
June 19 through October 31.

Berkshire Museum is pleased to present Nancy Graves: Journey to North Africa, running from June 19 through October 31. This companion show to the groundbreaking exhibition Wrapped! Search for the Essential Mummy features camel-inspired work in various media by Pittsfield native Nancy Graves (1939 – 1995), the first female artist to receive a solo retrospective at the Whitney Museum.

A renowned sculptor, painter, printmaker, and filmmaker, Graves was the daughter of Walter Graves, assistant director of Berkshire Museum for many years. She literally grew up in the Museum’s galleries and was profoundly influenced by Berkshire Museum’s natural history collection – especially the taxidermy animals. In 1970 Graves travelled to North Africa and produced the pioneering art film Izy Boukir, a revolutionary examination of the interrelation of line and form as revealed in a caravan of camels in Morocco. Graves had an abiding fascination with these awkward, iconic desert beasts of burden, which led to her first camel sculpture in 1966. Her camel-inspired sculpture formed the basis of her solo show at the Whitney in 1969. Selections from this body of work, including Izy Boukir, will be on view in Berkshire Museum’s Jane & Jay Braus Gallery through October 31.

Graves found camels alluring, she explained during a talk in 1986, because they “shouldn’t exist… They have flesh on their hoofs, four stomachs, a dislocated jaw. Yet with all of the illogical form the camel still functions. And though they may be amusing, they are still wonderful to watch.” Her chosen subject matter makes Nancy Graves: Journey to North Africa an ideal companion show to Wrapped! Search for the Essential Mummy, a historical exploration of the West’s ongoing fascination with ancient Egypt; the evolution of mummy studies from destructive methodologies to today’s noninvasive, high-tech analytical technologies; and the first-ever reunion of a father-and-son pair of mummies in North America.

“We are proud to be able to exhibit the work of Nancy Graves, especially on her home territory,” says Berkshire Museum executive director Stuart Stuart A. Chase. “Graves is a significant figure among U.S. contemporary artists, not only because she broke new ground by being the first woman to have a solo show at the Whitney, but also because of her pioneering work in film as a medium for art, and for her refusal to be categorized as a representational or abstract artist. Nancy Graves truly paved the way for such vaunted figures in today’s art world as Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, and Gerhard Richter. Her role in this pantheon earned her a permanent place in Berkshire Museum’s Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation.”  


Berkshire Museum announces major commission
Internationally renowned glass artist Tom Patti to create original work for Museum’s entrance.

Stuart Chase, Executive Director of Berkshire Museum, announced that Tom Patti, one of the world’s most highly regarded artists working in glass, has been commissioned to create an original work of art for the Museum’s entry vestibule. This major commission, the Museum’s first since 1937, is made possible by funds from the Florence Keep and Josephine Crane Fund, which is restricted to acquisitions, and the care and maintenance of the Museum’s collections. Patti’s new work is expected to be completed and installed in 2011.

Pittsfield-based artist Tom Patti was honored 1987 as the first Massachusetts Living Treasure by the Foundation for the Arts. He has received international acclaim for both small-scale sculptural works in glass and large architectural art commissions. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y.; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Louvre, and numerous other vaunted cultural institutions.

Patti was raised in Pittsfield. He received a master's degree in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute in 1969. His career began with a project co-founded by Robert Rauschenberg to promote collaboration between artists and engineers, a theme that became predominant in his later work. An artist, designer, and materials scientist, Patti has received numerous awards for his collaborations with architects on projects using high-performance glass, including his work with renowned architect Cesar Pelli on integrated art for the Toledo, Ohio Owens-Corning World Headquarters when it opened in 1994. Patti’s museum commissions include SPECTRAL BOUNDARY for the Mint Museum of Craft and Design in Charlotte, North Carolina and SPECTRAL-LUMA ELLIPSE, an entrance wall and glass doorway at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His most recent commission, MIAMI RAIN, a sculptural façade on the Marquis building in Miami’s arts district that produces a constantly changing pattern of spectral color as the sun transverses the sky, was completed in January, 2010. The Berkshire Museum project will be Patti’s first commission for a public institution in the Berkshires.

The last artist commissioned by Berkshire Museum was Alexander Calder, who created the two mobiles in the Museum’s Ellen Crane Memorial Theater in 1937. This work was Calder’s first public commission.

“We are thrilled to commission work by an internationally recognized artist from our own community of Pittsfield,” said Executive Stuart Chase when announcing this news at Berkshire Museum’s preview gala for its new exhibition, Wrapped! Search for the Essential Mummy. “Having a vestibule designed by Tom Patti was something we have dreamed of ever since completing the second phase of our major renovations in March 2008, on the heels of the success of our Wider Window $10 million capital campaign. Our sale of the three Russian paintings by Russian artist Boris Dimitrievich Grigoriev (1886-1939) that we uncovered in our collection is making that dream a reality, since the proceeds from that sale, held in the Florence Keep and Josephine Crane Fund, can only be used for acquisitions, care, and maintenance.  This commission is especially gratifying because Tom is recognized in our award-winning Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, and even appears in the gallery’s introductory videos.”

“I am honored to receive this major commission from Berkshire Museum,” said Patti, in attendance at the preview gala along with his wife Marilyn and daughter Sienna, owner of the Sienna Gallery in Lenox, MA. “The Museum has long held an important place in my career. As a young person growing up in the community I had no formal art training. Wandering the Berkshire Museum’s galleries afforded an oasis of inspiration. It offered a world of discovery in natural history, science and fine art, creating an environment that I wanted to be a part of. It served my imagination as a child without it ever occurring to me that I would become an artist. These early explorations still inspire me.”

“For my work to be part of the Museum’s environment thrills me,” Patti continued. “Hopefully this commission will stir the imagination of others – just as the Berkshire Museum inspired me as a boy growing up in Pittsfield.”

Berkshire Museum already holds three glass sculptures by Patti, dating from 1976 to 1980, as part of its permanent collections. More information about Tom Patti can be found on his website, tompatti.com