The Wish of a Reverend:
Making a Museum for Lawrence, Massachusetts

Shana Dumont Garr
May 8th, 2019
Region > Lawrence, Massachusetts

On a Wednesday morning, the cafeteria of The Senior Center in Lawrence, MA bustled with people gathered to witness an artistic performance. A diverse group of elders, joined by a smattering of art enthusiasts, watched two people systematically take apart a large, sleek wooden crate and turn it into a display complete with miniature paintings that the artist, Cathy McLaurin, calls a mobile museum. She was about to share with the audience something that, as residents of Lawrence, was theirs.

 The mobile museum addresses a long-standing issue about access to a group of seventeen valuable European paintings dating from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century that were left to the city of Lawrence by Reverend William Edgar Wolcott (1852-1911) in his will. McLaurin has worked since 2015 on a body of work regarding this contested legacy. A multi-media project, The Reverend, His Lover, Their Monet, and The Museum suggests the use of art itself—or its facsimile—as a means of engaging a city. The series includes a marionette of the donor, Reverend Wolcott, video interviews, and eight-minute animation of a tour of “Lawrence’s Museum,” set in the basement of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Part of this work was shown at the the exhibition Fine at the Gallery at Atlantic Wharf, Fort Point Arts Community, Boston, in 2017, and the mobile museum is the next in a progression, debuting in 2018. The series builds awareness, and ultimately, an approximation of access to the paintings.

McLaurin stood before the group, dressed casually, and she was joined by a Spanish interpreter. As the artist and the interpreter each spoke in turn, people referred to the programs that had been handed out before the performance began, with a sketch of Reverend Wolcott on the cover, and passages from his will typed within, including, “My purpose in making this bequest is to create and gratify a public taste for fine art, particularly among the people of the city of Lawrence.”

The Reverend, His Lover, Their Monet, and The Museum has a complex premise, brought about by legal stipulations attached to a will; meanwhile, the stakes are simple. Who may access the paintings, and to what end? While the program makes for relatively dry reading, it passes key phrases into each attendee’s hands, to share an understanding of the issue. It was unclear how many people connected the mobile museum before them with the contents of the will as it was read aloud. Symmetrical, with white walls and pointed arches on the windows, the mobile museum’s forms echoed the aesthetics of a stark Protestant church, or an altar. McLaurin hopes to bring the mobile museum to as many public venues throughout Lawrence as possible, ministering to the value of art through interactive neighborhood meetings.

The Reverend, His Lover, Their Monet, and The Museum, Reverent Wolcott look-alike marionette, wood composite, wood, fabric, pigment, string, 2016, image courtesy of Cathy McLaurin.

Lawrence’s Museum, (overview), oil on canvas, watercolor, paper, wood, gold leaf, paint, casters, 40 x 36 x 120 inches, 2018, image courtesy of Cathy McLaurin.

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Lawrence’s Museum, (detail), oil on canvas, watercolor, paper, wood, gold leaf, paint, casters, 40 x 36 x 120 inches, 2018, image courtesy of Cathy McLaurin.

Cathy McLaurin and Kai Vlahos build Lawrence’s Museum at the Lawrence Senior Center, Lawrence, MA.

The questions the meetings raise, upon engaging with this legacy, become increasingly complex. How hard is it to build a museum? Can a simulacrum of a missing structure call forth a more permanent space? Is there only one correct context in which to exhibit historical paintings? Whose values, those who care for culture, or those who receive culture, receive priority? Would the paintings better serve the city if they were sold, and the proceeds went to public services? The collection, according the McLaurin, is now valued at over $20 million. The mobile museum suggests analogues as a  paradigm for how to solve a problem. The mobile museum in particular is a set of carefully placed signals, the paintings hanging on white walls with gem-like materiality. Their presence may hold forth in the imagination of their viewers, so the question of fine art in a struggling city may no longer be neglected.

This project is characteristic of other series McLaurin has made in its counterbalance of complexity with the familiar. Drawing from archives, and driven by research, she excavates subtleties from overlooked impasses for audiences to individually puzzle over and perhaps collectively feel through. She suffuses her multi-media art with a spirit of reconciliation, having identified tender psychological areas that require attention, then created tools to inform and mobilize others to help set things straight, or at least welcome them to join in her musing.

When Reverend Samuel Walcott left his seventeen paintings to the citizens of Lawrence, it was a thriving town, with an economy powered by textile mills, and he had no reason to believe its progress would slow in the post-industrial era. He stated that when the town had its own public gallery, the paintings could become a part of its permanent collection. Until then, they would be in the care of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

 Now, 125 years later, the paintings remain in storage at the MFA, as Lawrence does not yet have a public museum. Administered by the White Fund, a trust meant to benefit the town of Lawrence established by philanthropist, Judge Daniel Appleton White (1776-1861), in 1852, Revered Walcott’s hope is like a time capsule, complete with well-intentioned but dated aims. Even those who make an appointment to see the paintings—including McLaurin— in storage have a limited view of the works. The largest painting at fifty by forty inches, Portrait of a Boy by Jan Albertsz Rootius, (1615-1674), does not come fully out of its position on a pull-out rack.

The collection was shown at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in nearby Andover 2007, accompanied by a booklet telling the history of the donation that came to be administered by the White Fund. That exhibition was bittersweet for taking place just over the border, in the wealthier neighboring town. While, over one hundred years, some of the paintings have traveled for exhibition in Europe, none of them have ever returned to Lawrence.

Only three, Claude Monet’s Coquelicots (1890), and Camille Pissarro’s Le Pre (1893) and his Matin d’automne (1889), have recently been on view. After learning that trustees wanted to sell some of the paintings, The Museum of Fine Arts brought a case heard in in the Massachusetts Superior Court in 2000, against Trustees of the White Fund, including Elizabeth A. Beland, whose generosity established a contemporary gallery named for her at the Essex Art Center. The Judges found that the bequest could not be sold.

The impasse raises questions about what, specifically, was at the essence of Revered Walcott’s intentions. Did he wish for the citizens of Lawrence to be inspired by these actual paintings, or by visual art in general? After all, he did not personally select these paintings. He inherited them from his brother Edward Oliver Wolcott (1848-1905), who purchased the art during trips to Europe. The collection is wide-ranging, reflecting the broad taste and including Dutch, English, and both conservative Salon and Impressionist French paintings, but it is not a collection based on a singular subject or philanthropic intention. An artifact of privilege, the paintings are not of sufficient volume or fame to leverage the creation of their own museum, until now, on this artist’s terms.

Lawrence’s Museum, (detail), oil on canvas, watercolor, paper, wood, gold leaf, paint, casters, 40 x 36 x 120 inches, 2018, image courtesy of Cathy McLaurin. image courtesy of Cathy McLaurin.

To support the construction of the mobile museum, McLaurin applied and received a grant from the Ella Lyman Cabot Trust in 2017. The grant money, with support from other notable grants including the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation’s Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant, enabled her to realize the project, but even with these funds, she could not afford to have each painting recreated as a scaled-down version within the United States. Undeterred, she stuck to her vision to create a portable version of the museum, hiring frame makers from the Czech Republic to duplicate the frames as a smaller scale, and artisans in China to paint miniature replicas of each painting. A local cabinet maker and artist, Kai Vlahos, made the structure itself. While her choice to source labor from outside of the United States was controversial, it spoke to her desire to move forward within realistic boundaries of time and budget.

McLaurin’s urge to move forward with some speed on The Reverend, His Lover, Their Monet, and The Museum speaks to her strong commitment to Lawrence arts community. She has worked at the Essex Art Center, a non-profit arts organization based within one of the converted mills along the river in downtown Lawrence, for twenty years, long enough to fully recognize the misfortune of the untapped potential of Wolcott’s bequest. Having brought contemporary art to the community in the form of exhibitions and programs, McLaurin’s day job, presently interim director, but also overseeing the exhibitions at the Elizabeth A. Beland Gallery, and her artistic practice now directly correspond. Each component speaks to action above all else, with a pragmatism and grittiness formed from extended work for a non-profit organization.

The mobile museum features paintings with the texture of hand-painted, gessoed canvases, but they are missing the patina of time and the precise traces of the artists. At their small scale, the human-to-painting ratios of these works of art cannot compare with the presence of the originals, but their bright, gem-like richness, and the content, including many serene landscapes, comes across brilliantly.

The diminutive canvases signal the existence of the originals, lest Lawrence’s citizens forget. The informative quality of the duplicates corresponds to a new paradigm in the art market, where in recent years auction houses and galleries internationally have decreased their physical spaces as more sales take place online. In the digital age, the idea of the art object is enough to move it. In this case, McLaurin’s work hopes to spark a movement grounded in social practice. 

Racial and socioeconomic tensions are raw throughout the United States, and Lawrence is no exception. Many people of color were in the audience for the unveiling of the mobile museum that Wednesday morning. “White!?” Someone asked, as the interpreter translated McLaurin’s history of how Wolcott’s will became managed. “Just his last name,” the interpreter reassured her. This was the only moment when a flicker of doubt may have been detected during the performance. Altogether, the recipients received the presentation with kindness and visual interest. Their first impulse, beyond close observation and snapping cell phone photos, was expressing the intention to share it with their grandchildren.

 Brochure handed out at August 15, 2018 presentation at the Lawrence Senior Center, Lawrence, MA.

Cathy McLaurin is an artist living and working in New Hampshire. Her work work connects history and current social issues with notions of value(s), morals, national identity, philanthropy, kinship, and legacy.
cathymclaurin.com

Shana Dumont Garr is the Curator at Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA, where she brings contemporary art to a museum devoted to New England history and the vital significance of the landscape.  
@shaygarmont (instagram)

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