They reap, they show

ELLEN Perry Berkeley can thank Bret Chenkin for starting the chain of events that led the museum here to display some of the bars of soap she has swiped from hotels around the world.

Chenkin, who teaches humanities at a local high school, began lobbying the Bennington Museum two years ago to duplicate an exhibition he had once seen at the University of Vermont’s museum, which displayed the prized collections of its alumni, generally paintings and other fine art you’d expect to find in a museum. Chenkin figured that the museum here similarly might hang notable local collections such as the drawings accumulated by Julius Held, a Rubens and Rembrandt scholar, or his own of black-and-white 20th century photographs.

But it was not until 29-year-old Stephen Perkins took over as director last summer that Chenkin found a receptive ear for his proposal, sort of, for Perkins thought the Bennington Museum should democratize it -- by inviting locals to display anything they collected.

That’s how the museum best known for its wing full of Grandma Moses’ paintings wound up also displaying Amanda Haar’s antique toasters, Susan Beal’s windup toys, Adam Kunin’s maple sugar taps ... and a sampling of the 74-year-old Berkeley’s lifetime collection of soaps, each carrying a memory.

The soap from the Algonquin Hotel in New York reminds Berkeley of how she and her husband, Roy, found shoes sticking out from under their room’s bed and wondered whether a body might be attached. A soap from the QE 2 cruise ship reminds her how the winds were so strong on the voyage the loudspeakers warned passengers to clutch their children’s hands tightly on deck. And the soap from a Days Inn reminds her how much cheaper a night’s stay used to be -- “$8 and up,” the wrapper boasts.

Berkeley was baffled when the museum asked her to value her collection. “Mine is not valuable except to me,” said the Shaftsbury, Vt., resident, who put down $1,000 anyway.

Of course, the entire “Bennington Collects” exhibition came with a distinctly low-end cost. “It’s a zero budget line show,” said Perkins, the museum director.

Though first suggested by schoolteacher Chenkin in 2003, the show became a reality almost by chance in a frantic few weeks before its October opening.

In addition to the scenes of a bygone New England created by Grandma Moses, the museum has permanent exhibits of Bennington Pottery, Vermont furniture and artifacts of the Revolutionary War Battle of Bennington. It also assembles a special show for the summer tourist season, this year’s being “The Art World of Brattleboro’s Hunt Family,” which included Richard Morris Hunt, the 19th century Beaux-Arts architect of various Newport, R.I., mansions and the base of the Statue of Liberty.

As fall approached, the museum staff took preliminary steps to renovate a room next to the Hunt show, removing the items normally there -- a collection of antique glassware -- and leaving its display cases vacant. That’s when Perkins decided that the shelves might be used to display the local collections and he put out a plea, through area newspapers, for submissions.

The first collector to call in was Haar, offering some of her 30 antique toasters, though she said, “You probably won’t want these,” Perkins recalled. In fact, his intent was, “We would take everything until we ran out of space.”

He pointed out at the time that museums someday may covet the items people think of as insignificant today, and he joked, “I wish I’d never lost my Mighty Mouse lunchbox.” That’s when Jay Pokines called in offering his collection of lunchboxes paying tribute to “Hopalong Cassidy,” “The Dukes of Hazzard” and the like.

Each collector was allotted a 3-by-1-foot shelf in the glass cases, which soon were being filled with old piggy banks and eggbeaters and Amanda Rice’s ceramic and wood roosters and hens. There were model train locomotives and chocolate molds and a couple of exotic collections, one of oil lamps from Nepal. The museum also set aside a few full cabinets for collections donated in the past, of Victorian fans, Brother Thomas pottery and American dolls.

More than simply filling a vacant room, Perkins said, he hoped the grass-roots show would connect the local population with what some might see as a lofty “museum on the hill,” despite its abundance of Americana in the form of old war muskets, quilts and Grandma Moses memorabilia. The museum sits just below a neighborhood of high-end Colonial-era homes and white-fenced mansions, and next to the cemetery with the grave of poet Robert Frost.

So Perkins offered free admission on the last Saturday in October that “Bennington Collects” officially opened, with a popcorn truck outside and an “Antiques Roadshow”-like appraisal of any “treasures from their attic” that area residents brought in. The open house drew about 450 visitors, quite a turnout for a museum that attracts about 35,000 visitors a year.

The most talked-about shelf, Perkins said, was the one with Ellen Perry Berkeley’s soaps.

As an author of books on topics as diverse as wild felines (“Maverick Cats”) and old family recipes (“At Grandmother’s Table”) and with a photographer-author as a husband (“A Spy’s London”), Berkeley has done a lot of traveling and long ago made a habit of leaving each stop with a sample of the soap set out in the hotel, boat and airplane restroom. She brings her own specialized soap for actual washing (“for dry skin”) and figures she is merely doing what the establishments intend.

“I think they want you to have their soaps,” she said. “I think they would feel badly if you didn’t take them.”

Berkeley attributes her hobby in part to being a child of the Depression who takes delight in “anything freely given” and in part to how “little girls love little things and there’s a little girl in even a grown woman.”

She has about 500 soaps in a plastic container at home and periodically takes them out to play with them, perhaps arranging them geographically or just to see what memories they dredge up. She had to make hard choices in picking the fraction that could fit on one shelf, though she knew she would include the large QE 2 soap that reminded her of their stormy voyage and whose egg-shaped blue case she saw as a symbol of the “overachieving elegance” of the British. But she also included the plain small soap she got on a plane of now defunct TWA. “That’s pretty mean,” she said.

A newly minted memory

BERKELEY recently was back at the museum offering to add a soap tied to a fresh memory, from the Arlington Inn not far away. She and her husband stayed there after the first big snowstorm of the year knocked down tree limbs and knocked out power at their house, “and it was cold and you couldn’t flush anything,” she said.

The 25-year-old museum employee who unlocked the cabinet understood what Berkeley’s soap collection is about. Caitlin Corkins has her own display, in the next cabinet, that’s also about memories -- one of beer coasters she’s collected mostly in Europe. She said she has been to two Joshua Tree bars, in Boston and Florence, Italy, both places without actual Joshua trees.

To the right of those cabinets, on a wall, are four of the photographs collected by Bret Chenkin and his wife, including a 1909 shot of the London Bridge tower by Alvin Langdon Coburn, the sort of moody freeze-the-moment work that’s right at home in a museum.

Like a good teacher, the 36-year-old Chenkin has pondered what broader meaning might connect such traditional objects of aesthetic contemplation with the more mundane keepsakes on the shelves. He spoke of watching one man set up his display of pre-1920 bottles found in local dumps or in the woods and learning from another collector, of “Titanic” movie memorabilia, how one Titanic victim was buried in the cemetery next door.

“There was someone in the show who was asking, ‘How is my collection going to fit next to the soap?’ ” Chenkin said. “But post-Warhol, I think everything got collapsed. As far as I’m concerned it’s just sharing everyone passions in the art ... for what they collect. That’s their autobiography right there in those soaps.

“It’s not only the museums that are the store holders of culture,” he went on. “These people are saving what’s been produced and created in the world and believing in it.”

As for Perkins, in his first year as a museum director, he’s torn between seeing the show as a curiosity or as something more.

“The soaps intrigued me from a sociological standpoint, being able to connect an object to a feeling and a thought,” he said. “If these collections were to come into the museum 50 years down the road, we would jump all over the photographs. However, once you divorce the collector from the soaps, they’re just soaps. In 100 years, if we were to find these in a box, we probably wouldn’t take them.”

But his “interesting sociology experiment,” which runs through this month, may not be the last time the Bennington Museum displays hotel soaps or items like them. The show was assembled so hastily, the staff was not able to rope in a couple of local collections it would have liked -- one of a lead soldier enthusiast said to have perhaps “the largest single collection in the world,” Perkins said, but who was reluctant to let them out of his house, and another of vintage New England beer cans, whose owners could not get them out of storage in time.

So they may well do it again next year.

Chenkin said he might go a little lower-brow, if they do. “I have a nice collection of baseball cards,” the teacher said.

And Ellen Berkeley said her husband may try to get in a 2006 exhibit with his “marvelous matchbook collection.”

“If they do the show again, you betcha,” Roy Berkeley said, “if I can find them.”