James Bandler, Exiles on Main Street

Exiles on Main Street; Unique Vermont museum looks for off-the-wall art, and a new home.

James Bandler, Globe Correspondent

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."

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.

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, the buildings 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.

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