Groundbreaking held for Perry Center for Native American Art

After seven years of planning for the construction of the Perry Center for Native American Art, the Shelburne Museum was ready to go. The museum held a ceremonial groundbreaking on Friday, June 20, with the actual construction set to begin after the following weekend.

Getting to the actual physical beginning of the project may have taken longer than originally thought. However, all those speaking before the conventional shoveling concurred: the project required a lot of education.

Thomas Denenberg, director and CEO of Shelburne Museum, said planning for the Perry Center began with about a year of “cultural competency work” followed by a couple of years of listening at “talking circles” with Indigenous leaders. By that time, the pandemic had begun, which brought more listening, planning, putting together the architecture team and raising money.

Seven years ago, Terry Perry met with Denenberg to say that her husband Tony Perry had passed away and that they thought the Shelburne Museum should be the steward of their collection of Native American art. When he heard this, Denenberg said he felt like the equilibrium had changed in the room.

“I said, ‘That’s an awfully big idea. That’s a big project.’ Little did I know how big an idea this would be,” Denenberg recounted to those gathered on the museum grounds.

Denenberg and others began with cultural competency workshops. “We began a kind of process of close listening to Indigenous cultures,” he said.

Denenberg told the board of trustees that the museum couldn’t just stick a Native American collection in a Colonial Revival gallery or a rehabilitated barn. It would need a new building, the 40th on the museum’s grounds, and one that would be different than the museum’s 39 other buildings.

Raising the $14 million for the 11,200-square-foot structure also took a good bit of time. Raising that much money in a small state like Vermont “is not something you do lightly,” as compared to larger states. “It’s just kind of the pace of how one raises capital,” he said.

Sen. Peter Welch said he had been asking himself where the museum had gotten the ambition to build something this grand.

“Who thinks that it’s exactly the right time, with COVID, to pursue a project of this magnitude?” Welch said.

Welch said he thought it was a Vermont trait to do hard things in hard times. As an example, he used Justin Morrill. During the middle of the Civil War, Vermont’s representative to the U.S. House of Representatives pushed for the creation of colleges in every state via the Morrill Act of 1862.

“It was his idea that education was so important that we were going to start land-grant colleges in the middle of the Civil War,” Welch said. “In this incredible state of Vermont, that’s been the way we roll.”

The museum staff’s efforts to reeducate and readjust how they thought about housing pieces from Indigenous cultures have been an example to other museums. In March, a number of those involved with working on the Perry Center went to a conference for museum professionals in St. Louis. After Denenberg spoke at the conference, he was approached by a landscape architect for the National Park Service, who said, “I want to tell you, Tom, I think down the road in the future, we are going to speak about museum projects before the Perry Center and projects after the Perry Center.”

One thing that has changed Denenberg’s thinking is realizing “the degree to which so many cultures have that animist worldview about this material, that these are living ancestors, not museum objects.”

Another thing that has changed his thinking is grasping the emphasis on balance in nature.

“If you’re going to remove some of the dirt for the basement of this building, you use it somewhere. So, you balance cut and fill in that regard,” Denenberg said.

He said even though the pandemic was horrific “it gave us the opportunity to slow down and talk about this project. So, you know, balance. Balance kind of showed up as a theme throughout the whole conversation.”

Initially, Denenberg had sort of “dug in his heels” about his desire to have the Perry Center built on museum property next to Route 7. He wanted it located in a prominent location where the estimated 20,000 cars that are passing every day would see it.

But every talking circle concluded with Denenberg being told that it was paramount that the building have an east-facing door.

Finally, he realized that “to put it on the road would be to make it a storefront, basically.”

Chief Brenda Gagne of the St. Francis-Sokoki Band of Missisquoi Abenaki put the conversation about the project taking seven years in perspective. She said the museum is situated in her people’s traditional homeland.

“This is where our ancestors are. So today, we are thinking of them. We’re thinking of the next generations,” Gagne said. “We do everything for the next seven generations. So, seven years? We do seven generations.”