Museum Impossible

It was two days before the opening of an exhibit that, by all rights, really shouldn't even be happening.

Wooden shipping boxes were stacked three and four deep in a gallery at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown.

Ornately framed, richly hued paintings circled the floors, leaning against the walls, cushioned on bubble wrap.

Blue painter's tape marked the spots where those paintings needed to be hung in fewer than 48 hours.

Would they make it?

"Oh, ye of little faith," chuckled Michener curator Brian Peterson, escorting a small band of visitors through the gallery. "It actually doesn't take that long to hang the paintings. All the hard parts have already been done."

Indeed they had.

"The Painterly Voice: Bucks County's Fertile Ground," an exhibition that captures the vision of Peterson and his passion for Bucks County artists, recently opened at the on Pine Street.

Peterson is not given to superlatives. The best, the most, the longest, the biggest - all seem foreign to the vocabulary of the man who has worked since 1990 at the fine art museum dedicated to Bucks County arts and culture.

Even he, however, acknowledges that this exhibit is the largest, most ambitious project the Michener ever has attempted.

Twenty years in the making, the exhibit has been a huge undertaking for a small, regional museum, with only about 20 fulltime and 20 parttime employees.

"This show should not be happening here," Peterson said, during that walk-through before the big launch. "It's a show for a much bigger museum, with a staff of 300. We were sort of the little museum that could. But, ok, we're not the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but why should we think small?"

"The Painterly Voice" pulls together about 200 works from leading Bucks County artists, including Daniel Garber, Edward Redfield, John Folinsbee, Charles Rosen, Fern Coppedge, and many more.

It is the first time, to the museum's knowledge, that these paintings have been brought to one place, to help tell a story that hasn't been told before.

"If you cracked open an American art history book, the Bucks County guys, they were barely mentioned. Yet, in their day, they were fabulously successful," Peterson said. "There is quality and there is substance in these paintings that warrants more attention than they've been getting...These artists deserved a better fate than they received."

For decades, the paintings created by Bucks County artists, in Bucks County, ended up anywhere but in the county that inspired them.

Hidden away in private collections, or bought by museums or institutions, many of the most notable paintings created by Bucks artists haven't been seen here for years.

One of the stars of the show is an iconic painting by Edward Hicks - a Quaker preacher turned artist who lived near Newtown - on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

"'The Peaceable Kingdom' is arguably the most famous image in all American folk painting," Peterson said. "They’re very difficult to get, so it’s a big deal for us to get one of those."

Peterson has spent the past 20 years getting to know collectors and curators around the region. He visited museums, and was invited into the homes of private art collectors.

He wrote books and put together smaller exhibits over the years that focused on individual artists, but knew that was just one small part of Bucks County's artistic story.

Once the had grown enough over the years, Peterson knew he finally had the wall space to tell the visual story he wanted to tell.

So he started putting miles on his car.

Of the 200 or so works in the exhibit, only about 45 or 50 are owned by the Michener. The rest were borrowed.

Just about every borrowed painting - especially those of private collectors - required a home visit, and photographs, and mock ups of where it might fit in an exhibit.

Then, when Peterson decided which paintings he wanted, there were formal letters asking to borrow the work, and legal agreements, and shipping arrangements.

When works of art, such as arrived from other museums and institutions, they often came accompanied by curators from the other museum. Each painting was inspected upon arrival at the Michener for any damage that might have been incurred in shipping, Peterson said. Reports were written, and in some cases, the other museum's staff members even stayed to watch the Michener's staffers physically hang the paintings on the wall.

Then, there was also the written information about the artists and the paintings, and how it would be presented to the viewers. Brochures, and websites, and labels, and signs - thousands of bits of information, and it all had to be correct.

So Peterson can be forgiven if, by two days before the show, he knew that everything would be finished in plenty of time. It was.

And even though he had seen the paintings before, seeing them all hanging at the Michener was a little amazing.

"In restrospect, I was probably crazy to do a show this big, but it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, so I decided to go for the gusto," Peterson said. "There's just nothing to substitute for standing in front of that painting and letting it speak to you. Ultimately, it's about the paintings."

"The Painterly Voice" runs through April 1, 2012. A series of lectures on various art history topics runs from now through March.

Click here for the website the museum put together for the show. An interactive element also allows smartphone users to scan codes to access more information.