O
The artist was the British-American modernist Aidron Duckworth, whose home and studio in a former schoolhouse in Meriden was transformed into the Aidron Duckworth Art Museum after his death in 2001. Finer is the new director of the museum, which opens for the season on Saturday with a reception for two shows, one for “In Rhythm” by the Tunbridge artist Bunny Harvey, and one that Finer has curated from three series of Duckworth’s oeuvre.
Finer, 39, has a distinct vision in mind for the future of the Duckworth. He wants to make it more accessible and visible, more of a place people think of as one “that has a lot going on — where you go to spend a night at the museum,” he said. For Finer, this means incorporating a wider range of media into the museum’s offerings, especially performance art; the docket for the 2018 season includes puppetry, experimental theater, music and dance, all of which are meant to strengthen the Duckworth’s identity as a hub of activity.
He also wants to bring in artists to create site-specific pieces, which would be unique to the Duckworth and exist in open dialogue with the museum’s history and energy.
“I like the idea of this space acting as an influence on the artist … because it’s an incredible space. I mean,” he said, gesturing around Aidron Duckworth’s largely preserved living space and studio, “just look at my office.”
Despite his concrete ambitions for the museum, “I don’t come from a museum administration background,” he acknowledged. “I’ve been very much learning on the job.”
Luckily, he’s got a couple advantages: First, as a Norwich native and graduate of Hanover High School, he already knows the Upper Valley. Second, as an artist who entered the professional world during the financial crisis of the late aughts, he’s also no stranger to absorbing new skills and information on the fly. Before picking up and moving to Hartford Village in January, Finer had spent the past decade living in New York City, “piecing together” a living, as he put it.
At times, “it was pretty bleak,” he recalled. When he started in the master’s of fine arts program at Parsons Fine Arts at The New School, it was a better time for galleries, and for the artists whose work filled them.
But right around the time he finished his degree, the economy tanked and “the middle cratered out” of the art industry, which had never had much of a reputation for being prosperous anyway. “Galleries tightened up,” Finer recalled, and all the young artists, MFA diplomas still hot off the presses, started applying for the same handful of academic jobs, leaving many of them professionally unmoored. He was one of the lucky ones: He managed to teach for a short time at Burlington College, before it went defunct.
He also scored an internship with Basil Twist, MacArthur “genius” and creator of the renowned underwater puppet show Symphonie Fantastique. Finer likes puppets; he started making them in grad school, compelled by the human tendency to project life onto inanimate objects.
“I love objects,” he said, in that they act as a sort of vessel for the human imagination.
On his artist website, there’s a whole category of his work listed under “objects.” He’s fascinated by the effect they have on us, and the effects we have on them: the heroism we attribute to plastic action figures, the psychological states we read even from poorly rendered versions of humans, the strange beauty he saw in the masks that decorated the house he grew up in.
“You’re holding this piece of wood, and then you paint a face and suddenly it’s alive, sort of,” he explained.
Working in puppetry, he found that “the puppet world is both bigger and smaller than you would imagine,” he said. “You have a connection with everyone.” After a while he started working in the more commercially-driven, custom puppet-making world, a perk of being part of such a niche artistic community.
After years spent freelancing and working on shorter-term projects, he landed a full-time job at Gulliver’s Gate, which also held a world — in miniature. The Times Square museum contains some 50,000 square feet of cities and continents, complete with architectural and natural landmarks, plus airports, railroads and seasonal displays, all at 1/87th of their real-life sizes.
He enjoyed the work because it was object-driven, but it also came with a certain amount of tedium: A major part of his job was working from under a platform on a tiny airport, installing tiny lights to hang on tiny wires.
“It was kind of like working in a dark cave,” he recalled. “Just doing this mindless task for hours and hours and hours.”
With such an eclectic work history, “the only thing that’s a constant for me is that I make art,” he said. Finer’s art, too, is what he calls “a bit all over the place.” He draws and paints, sculpts and photographs. He makes short films, several of which he shot around the Upper Valley and which screened locally, notably in the White River Independent Film Festival and the Vermont International Film Festival. He makes masks, ranging from the whimsical to the grotesque, and incorporates them into his other mediums.
When he received the news that he’d gotten the job, “it shook up my life,” he said. “It seemed like I was just getting comfortable and finding stable ground.” But he had also become deeply disillusioned with New York, and was ready for a change.
“It’s a whole different sort of world,” he said, sweeping his arm as if to communicate the breadth of that difference. “It moves slowly here … And it’s not like moving to a whole new place, because I already know how to get around.”
Finer’s arrival takes some of the burden off Grace Harde, senior trustee of the museum. She directed it for around 15 years, “but I didn’t have the energy for the PR work,” she said. On top of that, there’s the paperwork, the curating, the framing and storing and managing of collections, the presentation and other unseen aspects of operating a museum. Finer, who’s new to all this, said Harde has been a valuable mentor whose wealth of knowledge means that “I don’t have to do triage,” he said.
But “Ben is energetic and quick to learn. He’s learning about as fast as I can teach him,” Harde said last week over the phone, raising her voice a little over the sounds of exhibit preparations in the background.
She sees Finer’s multi-disciplinary resume as an asset, one that has helped shape the sensibility he brings to the Duckworth, and which she finds so exciting.
“Aidron would be so pleased to have a young artist (as director) whose practice is so diverse, and who would take in Aidron’s work and have it enrich his own work,” she said. Duckworth, too, was an artist who worked in many mediums, including sculpture, furniture and painting. All these years after his death, Harde said she can practically hear his voice, chiming in with his approval on the museum’s new leadership.
“Aidron and Ben would have hit it off very well. They’re both fiery,” Harde said. “There’s no wasted energy.”
The Aidron Duckworth Art Museum opens Saturday with two exhibits: “In Rhythm,” paintings and drawings by Bunny Harvey, and “Exhibition XXXI: Forms Hidden, Forms Revealed,” an exhibit curated from three series of Duckworth’s body of work. To learn more about the Duckworth Museum and its offerings for the 2018 season, go to its new website, aidronduckworthmuseum.org.
To learn more about the museum’s new director, Ben Finer, visit benfiner.com.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at ejholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.