All The Wonders Right Here In The Berkshires (A Collection of Eccentricities)
Buried deep in the Berkshire Museum's archives, a collection of curious objects sees the light of day.
Things that make you say “huh” would be: just about everything in the Berkshire Museum’s new exhibition, "One of a Kind Wonders". Some of the objects might make you shudder, or shake your head, or blurt out a wow in place of the huh, but mostly they’ll make you chuckle, not the least because the informational signage is presented with a sense of humor. And who couldn’t appreciate a more playful museum exhibition just now?
"One of a Kind Wonders" is the brainchild of the museum’s new-ish chief curator, Jesse Kowalski, who, upon leaning into his position, was astounded by the quantity and breadth of objects in the institution’s archives. Many didn’t fit into any sort of conventional exhibit or theme. No one even knows how the museum acquired some of them. What we do know is that when Zenas Crane of the paper manufacturing behemoth in Dalton created the museum, he envisioned an institution that would be a quasi-Smithsonian in the Berkshires. With that resolve, he sent people around the world to find items of interest. Boy did they.
Chimpanzee skeleton
To wit: A stone that was used to bury the devil in Tyringham, lava from Mt. Vesuvius, and a holy water sprinkler. A tile from the Taj Mahal. A portion of the pillowcase on which Abraham Lincoln died.
Kowalski says he asked the museum’s archivists for their thoughts on the weirdest things in the lesser-exhibited collection, and came up with a circus motif, which seems entirely appropriate —some of the objects resemble things you’d have seen in a circus freak show: a couple of albino taxidermies, a ten-foot-long anaconda skin.
Freaky, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, but you can’t deny the unsettling gazes in the weird-looking kid portraits section. “Why do babies look like tiny middle-aged men?” asks the sign. There’s an actual explanation but suffice it to say kids then sure weren’t depicted like the infants in an Anne Geddes portrait of today.
“We thought it would be fun to do a lighthearted exhibition,” Kowalski says. And for that, we say, thank you. We think.
"One of a Kind Wonders" runs through January 7, 2024.
