James Bandler, Exiles on Main Street
Exiles on Main Street; Unique Vermont museum looks for off-the-wall art, and a new home.
White River Junction, Vt.‚—Until this summer, there was a sign in front of 42 South Main St. that caused many people to mistake this museum for a restaurant. The sign, in big black letters, said Lena's Lunch, and two or three times a week someone would wander inside, hoping to grab a quick bite to eat.
"People were always telling me to take the sign down," said the museum's propietor, David Fairbanks Ford, who finally did remove it this summer at the urging of his museum's board of directors.
"But you can't pay for that kind of advertising," he said.
The Main Street Museum of Art has been confounding visitors wiht its campy weirdness since it opened in 1993. The museum is most famous for a 1994 Elvis Presley exhibition that purported to showcase the King's toenail clippings and gallstones.
Another crowd pleaser featured the carcass of a creature that Ford claims is an aquatic monster dredged from the Connecticut River. These exhibits remain in the museum's permanent collection, which includes a stuffed osprey, a live cat, and a yoke for use on humans.
"The opinions about the museum are as varied and eclectic as the offerings," said Herb Hansen, the executive director of the Hartford Development Corporation, which spearheads the town's revitalization efforts. "It's intriguing and unique. It's art that pushed the frontiers and causes you to think. And it gets people downtown."
But the isn't a lure these days. That's because there's a new sign in front "Closed," victim of a fire marshal's edict and a landlord's neglect.
The museum has been closed since September after a fire marshal's inspection revealed a host of safety vilatoins, including inadequate separation between floors and cielings, and shoddy electrical wiring, to name just two. To protect the public, the fire marshal ordered the museum closed just three days before the unveiling of the photographic exhibit, "Big Fish & Good Looking Women."
At present, a dozen exhibitions are in limbo until Ford finds a new home.
"You'd think I'd be depressed by all this," said Ford, who said he had tried unsuccessfully to persuade his landlord to fix the safety violations.
"But I'm kind of excited, actually. It put us on the street where we belong.
"Plus," added Ford, slyly, "it gets us more newspaper coverage."
Elitism shunned
Ford, an artist, moved to Vermont in 1992 from Boston, disgusted by the "stuffy elitism" of the Newbury Street art scene.
In White River Junction, he found a community that is the antithesis of stuffy. He opened his new museum (Ford detests the word "gallery") in a building that in better days housed a silent picture palace, a honky-tonk dance hall, and much later, the dinette, Lena's Lunch.
Today, it is a "fixer-upper," to use real estate agnet parlance, a "great project" for someone with time on their hands and bountiful cash. The building's facade is a homely amalgam of asphalt faux bricks and roting barn boards. Heating is non-existent. There are times when water flows directly from the upstairs neighbors showe into buckets that Ford has positioned on the floor below.
Even the tenants of 42 South Main Street, it seems, could use a little sprucing up. Most prominent among them is "Santa Claus," an old man with a nicotine stained beard and shaky hands. He spends much of his day standing on the front steps of the museum. Every so often he leans over to spit, squirting copious streams of brown tabacco juice over the snow.
"That's exactly what drew me here," said Ford, whose ancestors, the famous Gillingham family, hail from the tony town of Woodstock. "I mean why live in place like Woodstock when you can have this?"
Ford's egalitarian sensibility extends his management of museum affairs. Anyone can hang their work in the Main Street Museum of Art. There is no attempt to judge work based on quality or content. "My 5-year-old daughter could have done that," scoffed a visitor at one show. "And she is welcome to display her work here," smiled Ford, a former Boston cabbie who now makes his living doing art restoration and has exhibited his own paintings at the museum as well.
Unique Directors
The board of directors is motley. The members include Bunny Harvey, a professor at Wellesley College and winner of the Rome Prize, a prestigious art award, and Jack Rowell, a sixth-generation Vermonter who has made a name for himself as a photographer.
"You should have seen the opening night of Jack's show 'Big Fish & Good Looking Women,' Ford said. "We held it across the street in an abandoned storefront because of our problems with the fire marshal. Jack arranged the entertainment. Cheri Tartt (a transvestite comedian) wore her crotch-high leather boots and sang 'These Boots were Made for Walking.' There were go-go dancers. Jack, you know, is even more of a shameless self-promoter than I am."
That, coming from a man who has been described in the local papers as White River Junction's P.T. Barnum. But Ford's press releases are often more interesting than the exhibits they boost.
Take, for example, the brochure he prepared for the museum's Phineas Gage exhibition, which features the "Miserable Bandages" of Gage, a Vermont railroad worker who went into medical history books for surviving a lobectomy after a blasting accident in 1846 sent a metal rod through his skull.
"In short," the release says, "one of the most phenomenal Journeys ever taken by an iron tamoping rod occurred here in the Green Mountains and we at the Museum are exceptionally gratified to reveal Genuine Relics of the Momentous Medical Travesty."
"And as ever we have focused our attention on Phineas Gage the Man. His Pain, &c. Why? Because we care about people—folks like you even. Enjoy."
Visitors who wish to see the Phineas Gage exhibit will need to wait until the Main Street Museum finds a new home.
Ford, in the meantime, is still working on the final touches of the Gage exhibition. More "restoration work" is needed, he said, "to bring out the blood on the bandages." The exhibit will open as soon as the museum acquires a proper space. Ford said, last week that he was on the verge of buying a building.
"We're doing fund-raising right now," he said.
James Bandler, Globe Correspondent
