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Masterworks
 The Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art is a must-see for any arts lover visiting Bermuda — especially now that the museum has an impressive new home.
The museum — Bermuda's first purpose-built museum of any description — opened in the spring of this year and dramatically transformed the former Arrowroot Factory in the beautiful Botanical Gardens in Paget. It also fulfilled the long-held ambition of Masterworks founder and director Tom Butterfield to find a permanent home for the more than 1,200 pieces in the Masterworks Collection.
More than three years in the making, the 16,000-square-foot facility houses three environmentally controlled gallery spaces, including the impressive, high-ceilinged main Butterfield Family Gallery, which is overlooked by the Bank of Bermuda Foundation Mezzanine Gallery. Adjacent to the main gallery is the Richard Faries Gallery, named after the late Masterworks chairman. The handsomely renovated 150-year-old former shed will house exhibitions of local artists and Masterworks' ongoing artists-in-residence programme. Visitors can be assured of seeing something new there every month.
Indeed, the first exhibition in the Faries Gallery will be entries in the Charman Prize, a new $10,000 art competition for local and resident artists. The inaugural event ran from March 1-25.
Supporting the walls of the Faries Gallery is a beam inscribed with one of Faries' favourite Tom Butterfield quotes, which sums up the mission of the Masterworks Foundation: "In the future, we will understand Bermuda through the eyes of the Collection."
The museum also includes a library, classroom, state-of-the-art conservation and storage rooms for artwork, and a café leading out onto the delightful Rose Garden of Camden, the premier's official residence. All floors are wheelchair-accessible by elevator.
The Masterworks Collection was started by Butterfield in 1987 to "repatriate" works created in or inspired by Bermuda, and now includes an impressive collection of works by artists who found inspiration here, including Winslow Homer and Georgia O'Keeffe.
The core of the collection is on display in the new museum's opening exhibition, which will run through the summer, appropriately entitled Somewhere Beyond the Sea. Explains Butterfield, "We wanted to get across the notion of days gone by, when people would step on a boat in New York, disappear for two days and end up in the ocean paradise of Bermuda."
The exhibition has a particular focus on 1917, when three notable painters — Albert Gleizes, Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley — worked here. "We now have the academic link between the painters that came here and Arthur Stieglitz," says Butterfield. Steiglitz, the pioneering New York photographer and gallery owner who was later married to Georgia O'Keeffe, was amongst the first Americans to champion European modernist names such as Picasso, Cézanne and Matisse and introduced them to the American public, along with the works of Hartley and other important early American impressionists.
Somewhere Beyond the Sea features five works by Gleizes, three by Demuth, and Hartley's Movement, Bermuda, which Masterworks acquired at auction last year.
For Tom Butterfield and Elise Outerbridge, the assistant director, the opening of the new space really has been a dream come true. "We finally have a home for all the wonderful works that we've collected for the past 20 years," says Outerbridge, adding: "We think the museum, with its location here in the Botanical Gardens, will really change the visitor experience in Bermuda."
Masterworks is open seven days a week, from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. on weekdays, and from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. on weekends.
Get more information about Bermuda's art galleries and artists using the link at the top of the page.
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