OLD, NEW

the number of deeds a buddha should perform throughout her lifetime.

Ran Hwang’s works are just one of many exhibits featured in the Baker Museum, which “seeks out the best traveling exhibitions from the leading arts institutions in the world—including recently the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian Institutions—to enrich the Southwest Florida community.”

For the 2023 season, the Baker Museum features work that particularly engages with southwest Floridians.

In the midst of the Hwang exhibit, for example, is an activity room filled with bowls of buttons, where patrons are invited to make their own Hwang-like creations and place them on the wall. Already, there are pandas with black button eyes and flowers with sequin petals.

Helen Frankenthaler’s exhibit features works from later in her life. They demonstrate what curator Courtney McNeil describes as the “restless creative energy” that filled Frankenthaler throughout her life.

“We have outreach programs where we teach about Hwang’s works in local schools. We provide supplies for the students to make their own creations, and we bring them here to place on this wall,” Courtney McNeil, art curator of the Baker Museum, said. She points to a button Captain America shield, which her husband made with her children as they visited the museum, and smiles.

McNeil, who was raised in the northeast, described the Isabella Gardner Museum, which she jokingly called “her museum”—the museum where she knew each painting, drawing, and so felt a sense of intense belonging to the space. It is this same sense of belonging that is palpable throughout The Baker Museum

“We are always looking to engage the community,” McNeil said. “Everyone absorbs information differently. In addition to our text on the walls, we invite visitors to learn kinesthetically as well as visually.”

In addition to the art-making room, there are also meditation cushions placed in front of Hwang’s spider exhibit. “We’ve hosted mindfulness sessions here by partnering with the Florida Community of Mindfulness.”

McNeil said she hopes these kinds of activities help visitors engage with the artwork through all of their senses. Hwang’s exhibit is only one of the current exhibits that engages viewers in this way.

On the second floor, in the midst of the Helen Frankenthaler exhibit, for example, there is an interactive station with colored pencils and paper to invite viewers to imagine using color and texture the way Frankenthaler does in her art.

“I love making spaces like these,” McNeil said. “These work for parents, children, and even those looking to rest for a moment within the exhibit.”

Frankenthaler’s exhibit features wallsized soak-stained canvases arranged in an impressive display of the breadth and length of Frankenthaler’s career.

The works on display in the museum come from later in Frankenthaler’s life. They demonstrate what curator Courtney McNeil describes as the “restless creative energy” that filled Frankenthaler throughout her life.

A young contemporary of Jackson Pollack, Frankethaler’s “innovative soak-stain technique” changed ideas about abstract expressionism and color field artistic schools.

“What is special about these Frankenthaler pieces is that they show a true life-long pursuit of art,” McNeil said. “Our population here in Naples skews older, and these works speak to the process of creativity as well as aging.”

The exhibition, ‘Love Stories’ will be on display on the third floor, February 4-May 7 and will feature different depictions of love that are normally on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

McNeil describes Frankenthaler’s use of sawhorses when creating her later works due to her arthritis in back from hours of leaning over canvases that fill an entire building. Yet Frankenthaler continued making art until her death, and the restless energy that filled her life and work is palpable in the exhibit.

McNeil showed me a large blue canvas of Frankenthaler’s, and described it as “her favorite in the exhibit.” The canvas looks as if the inside of a wave was pressed onto canvas. Trawler-lines, rake lines, and mops—all tools Frankenthaler used to create unique textures—are visible on the paintings.

“She uses mundane objects you could get at a hardware store to make these,” McNeil said, “which shows how artists transform the regular world we see each day.”

In the midst of Frankenthaler’s works is a rectangular offset room with a wall featuring the timeline of Frankenthaler’s life to “show the expansiveness of her career and almost overwhelm the viewer with the breadth of her creation,” McNeil said.

Like Frankenthaler, the Baker Museum contains a wide breadth of types of creations.

In addition to the galleries, the museum features an acoustic, soundproofed music practice room where the museum hosts lectures in connection to current exhibits as well as practice spaces for musicians of the Naples Philharmonic and other artists. A classroom on the bottom floor contains tables available for art camps and classes like Make-and-Take and Art After Hours.

“All of these spaces are designed to make the community part of the museum,” McNeil said.

One of the spaces that literally brings the community in is contained in the Frankenthaler exhibit, where a small hallway features work by René Margritte, a renowned Surrealist artist.

“These works were donated by the Van Parys family who came to see a performance at the Naples Philharmonic. She handed her card to the usher and said that she had some pieces she might be interested in talking to someone about. They then ended up here,” McNeil said.

The pieces, on a five-year loan, are startling in their eccentricity: a woman with a seashell head peers back at the viewer; a disembodied face is composed of pearls at a dining table. The frames of the paintings are ornate, as if they are the lids of jewelry boxes. “It’s a gem of the museum,” McNeil said.

Collaborations like these are at the heart of the Baker Museum. In addition to its collaboration with southwest Florida residents and the Mindfulness Alliance of Southwest Florida, The Baker Museum also recently collaborated with the Holocaust Museum in curating the Envisioning Evil: Nazi Drawings exhibit on the first floor of the building.

This exhibit features work by Mauricio Lasansky, the son of Argentinian Jewish parents who fled from Nazis during the Holocaust. Lasansky’s work is “his visceral response to the horrors committed in Nazi concentration camps.”

Many of Lasansky’s drawings are on sometimes-ripped pieces of off-white paper and feature drawings of Nazi soldiers in connection with skulls: the pervasive symbol of death that haunts this exhibit. He uses charcoal, pencil, asphaltum, turpentine, and red wash to create images of human monstrosity.

In addition to his depiction of Nazis, Lasansky draws other victims of the Holocaust: mentally-disabled children. In some of the final images of the exhibit, Lasansky depicts children walking to gas chambers and a look of haunting blankness.

This traveling exhibit is its first comprehensive display in “a generation,” according to the Baker Museum.

Amidst the drawings is a video recording of the Eichmann trial, when top-ranking Nazi official Adolf Eichmann admitted to heinous acts of genocide which revealed the scale and horror of the Holocaust in the years following the end of World War II.

“We partnered with the Holocaust Museum to have them read over our museum text to ensure the language was correct,” McNeil said. “This is so important to have right, especially considering the Jewish population in this area.”

Following Eichmann’s testimony in the video are the voices of Holocaust survivors recounting the trauma they endured in concentration camps in Polish, Hungarian, French, German, and other languages that show the global genocide.

“If some of these pieces can cause any kind of transformation, even if it’s just an opinion or a thought, I think that it is successful,” McNeil said. In addition to the Frankenthaler exhibit, the exhibition, Love Stories will be on display on the third floor February 4-May 7 and will feature different depictions of love that are normally on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

“We’re looking forward to sharing these new exhibits with the community,” McNeil said of what is coming next for The Baker Museum in the new year. We prepare exhibits usually four years out. By the time the show opens, it comes to an end for us on the curation end.”

The Baker Museum is a never-ending space of change, bringing in new work and closing out the old, just as Ran Hwang’s spiders make and unmake their webs on the third floor.

As the museum closes for the day, the staff close down the exhibits. The spiders disappear from the walls as the projector turns off. The phoenix rises and then fades. The lights go dark on a shell-headed woman in the Magritte painting. In the morning, it will all begin anew. •

The Baker Museum is located on the Artis—Naples camous at 5833 Pelican Bay Blvd. in Naples. The museum is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-4pm & Sunday, 12-4pm. For information, call 597-1900.