As part of a $23 million renovation, Cape Ann Museum recast 8-ft version of Katharine Weems sculpture for a permanent home in courtyard
by Erika Brown | May 22, 2026
Photo by Matt Genta.
On Friday, the Cape Ann Museum took delivery of a very special item—an outsized sculpture with a Manchester connection.
The monumental bronze sculpture—“Seated Cat (Sphinx)”—is an enlarged version of a 1941 work by noted animal Manchester sculptor Katharine Lane Weems. The cat was placed in its permanent home in the renovated downtown courtyard as part of the museum’s reopening following a nearly 20-month closure.
The new bronze stands approximately eight feet tall, or about 10 feet including its base, and was modeled directly from the original sculpture, which measures roughly 18 inches high. Matthew Genta from the Manchester by the Sea Museum attended the installation to capture the historic moment.
The enlarged version was created by sculptor Robert Shure of Skylight Studios in Woburn, who was on hand Friday to ensure safe delivery of the sculpture. Shure worked with Weems during her lifetime and has completed numerous large-scale public art projects throughout New England.
Museum officials said the project cost more than $100,000 and is intended to recognize Weems’ contributions as one of Cape Ann’s most prominent 20th-century sculptors.
Weems lived from 1899 to 1989 and was born into a Boston family. Her studio was in her home on Summer Street in Manchester, known as “The Chimneys.”
She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under sculptor Charles Grafly and became widely known for her animal sculptures. Among her best-known works are the bronze rhinoceroses outside Harvard University’s Biological Laboratories and the “Dolphins” sculpture installed at the New England Aquarium in 1979.
The sculpture was installed by crane at approximately 10 a.m. Friday in the Cape Ann Museum’s granite courtyard at 27 Pleasant St. in Gloucester. It’s there now for everyone to enjoy.
Skylight Studios, Cape Ann Museum, Iron Tree Service, and Araneo Landworks employees. Photo by David Sokol.
Tucked away in a corner of downtown Gloucester, a delicate operation took place in which an 8-foot bronze cat, weighing 1,200 pounds, was lifted from a flatbed truck more than three stories and lowered into the back courtyard of Cape Ann Museum.
The giant sculpture is an enlargement of an 18-inch cat by artist Katharine Lane Weems (1899–1989), called “Seated Cat (Sphinx),” modeled in 1941. This new commission of the enlarged work was created by Robert Shure of Skylight Studios in Woburn.
The museum has been closed for nearly 20 months as part of a major renovation project and will reopen on June 30.
The bronze feline arrived in town around 9:30 a.m. Friday, and gave many motorists a surprise that morning as they passed by this unexpected sight on Route 128 before it turned onto Washington Street from the rotary. It also drew attention as it was parked on Pleasant Street in front of the museum with some people posing for photos.
One of the stars of the operation was Mike Kolodka at the controls of the crane parked in the middle of the tiny one-way street, who brought the statue up over the roof of the museum to avoid the many power lines that run down the street.
Also on site was Shure, along with a team of other museum staff, to maneuver the sculpture onto a granite block, like landing a helicopter on the pad.
“Shure worked closely with Weems on many projects during the artist’s lifetime,” according to a press release. “The museum has invested more than $100,000 to enlarge the piece and fabricate it on a monumental scale, to honor Weems’ legacy as one of Cape Ann’s most significant sculptors of the 20th century.”
Weems was born into a wealthy Boston family who had a summer estate in Manchester-by-the-Sea, where the artist did much of her work, which most often features animals. A couple of her works are in the Boston area, one a bronze rhinoceros at Harvard University’s Biological Laboratories, commissioned in 1930, and the other a 12-foot-long group of dolphins that was installed at New England Aquarium in 1979.
According to the press release, the family estate in Manchester included the house, nicknamed “The Chimneys,” and an adjacent studio.
She studied with leading artists of the era.
“Between 1918 and 1919, Weems studied sculpture under Charles Grafly at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Grafly also spent time on Cape Ann was the preeminent portrait sculptor of the time. In addition to teaching Weems, Grafly provided instruction to Walker Hancock, George Demetrios, Paul Manship, and Amelia Peabody, among others,” according to her bio shared by Cape Ann Museum. “Through her work with fellow Cape Ann sculptor, Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington, Weems perfected the art of portraying animals in clay, a passion for which she was widely recognized.”
Her bio notes that one of her early successes was a 1927 bronze Narcisse Noir, now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which earned her a prestigious award of the Widener Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.png00Haley Wolfe/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.pngHaley Wolfe2026-05-18 09:18:542026-05-18 09:20:50Gloucester Daily Times: Meow: Gargantuan cat installed at Cape Ann Museum
Left, Seated Cat (Sphinx) by Manchester sculptor Katharine Lane Weems, modeled in 1941. At right, the statue’s enlargement at Skylight Studios where it was cast in bronze, 2026.
The Cape Ann Museum will install a monumental bronze sculpture by noted animal Manchester sculptor Katharine Lane Weems in its renovated downtown courtyard on Friday, May 15, as part of the museum’s reopening following a nearly 20-month closure.
The sculpture, “Seated Cat (Sphinx),” is an enlarged version of a 1941 work by Weems.
The new bronze stands approximately eight feet tall, or about 10 feet including its base, and was modeled directly from the original sculpture, which measures roughly 18 inches high.
The enlarged version was created by sculptor Robert Shure of Skylight Studios in Woburn. Shure worked with Weems during her lifetime and has completed numerous large-scale public art projects throughout New England.
Museum officials said the project cost more than $100,000 and is intended to recognize Weems’ contributions as one of Cape Ann’s most prominent 20th-century sculptors.
Weems, who lived from 1899 to 1989, was born into a Boston family with an estate in Manchester known as “The Chimneys.”
She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under sculptor Charles Grafly and became widely known for her animal sculptures.
Among her best-known works are the bronze rhinoceroses outside Harvard University’s Biological Laboratories and the “Dolphins” sculpture installed at the New England Aquarium in 1979.
The sculpture will be installed by crane at approximately 10 a.m. Friday, May 15, in the Cape Ann Museum’s granite courtyard at 27 Pleasant St. in Gloucester. The sculpture is scheduled to depart Skylight Studios in Woburn on Thursday afternoon.
/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.png00Haley Wolfe/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.pngHaley Wolfe2026-05-18 09:14:562026-05-18 09:15:03Manchester Cricket: Cape Ann Museum to Install Monumental Katharine Lane Weems Sculpture Friday
Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Milton Avery summered and painted together on the North Shore. Their work will be on view at Gloucester’s Cape Ann Museum.
by Murray Whyte | May 13, 2026
Gloucester’s Cape Ann Museum has been closed for more than a year for a major renovation, but its reopening June 30 will be more than worth the wait. Its stately new building will welcome “Avery, Gottlieb, Rothko: By the Sea‚” a big-time blockbuster worthy of the museum’s much larger peers.
Mark Rothko, “Untitled (bathers on the beach),” 1934, a seaside scene the Abstract Expressionist giant painted in an early summer sojourn to Gloucester. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
But of them all, Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism’s high priest of the oblique sublime, surely tops the marquee. But the dissonance between his most famous work and his pieces here are sure to startle and delight: Who knew that Rothko, famous for his oppressive fogs of color that seem to hover in a suspended state of transformation, tried his hand at harbor scenes and beachscapes along the Massachusetts shore? Not many, and not enough.
In Gloucester, Rothko developed his vision and technique alongside Adolph Gottlieb, his close friend, and Milton Avery, a mentor to them both. Their time in Gloucester is as foundational to American Modern art as anything in New York, or anywhere else. I’ll take a longer look soon, but in the meantime, here is a sampling of three of the more than 80 works waiting for the grand reopening next month.
See? I told you you’d be surprised. This little watercolor, painted decades before Rothko became Rothko, is positively jaunty with its aquamarine shimmer of a water’s surface and bright canary-yellow wharf; and by the artist himself’s sombre standard, it’s outright euphoric. There’s something enchanting about an artist’s formative era, before he or she finds footing in a vision that comes to define their life’s work. This piece, painted on one of Rothko’s earliest forays up the coast with Avery, one of the artists he most admired, feels wobbly with equal parts enthusiasm and eagerness to please. It feels personal and unsure in the way his mature work feels distant and inscrutable. It feels like a work by a knowable human being, in other words, and not the mysterious wizardly presence in the darkness behind the curtain that he would eventually become. Milton Avery, “Black Sea,” 1959. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Despite his profound influence on Rothko and a generation of his peers, including colorfield minimalist pioneer Barnett Newman, Avery never painted an abstract painting in his life. He did, however, love to tease at it. Whether as a playful foil to his devoutly abstractionist students or, more often, an intense study of color and proportion in his gleefully reductive images of both people and landscapes, Avery’s studious flattening of the picture plane and taste for the dynamic frictions of color and form were a model for Rothko and his ilk to both follow and resist. Case in point: If “Black Sea” were renamed “Untitled,” wouldn’t it fit neatly into the AbEx canon? But Avery rejected abstraction in his own work to the last, despite the occasional tease. (He joked, late in life, about painting bigger and bigger canvases “like the abstract boys.”) Ever moored to the knowable world, Avery’s tension with the rising movement was deliberate, and a generative challenge to a generation of artists finding their way.
Gottlieb and Rothko were close friends, painting confreres, and students of Avery’s at the Art Students League in New York. Their journeys were close parallels, though Gottlieb leaned into Surrealism more than his friend in his earlier years. This painting is a good example of the playful absurdist departures he would sometimes take. But the timing is important, too. Painted in 1938, Gottlieb had already embarked on his journey as a foundational Abstract Expressionist. He and Rothko had formed a group called “The Ten” in 1935, when he led the way in harnessing and merging the competing visions of abstraction and Expressionism, the direction this painting appears to be leaning. In 1943, roughly five years after he painted this piece in Gloucester, he and Rothko would co-author a letter in The New York Times announcing and defending the formative project of Abstract Expressionism — the first formal, publicly articulated statement of the very first homegrown American art movement that would soon stand atop the art world.
June 30-Sept. 27. Cape Ann Museum, 27 Pleasant St., Gloucester. 978-283-0455, capeannmuseum.org
To read the full Boston Globe article, click here.
In the 1930s and ’40s, three influential American artists escaped the stifling crowds and heat of New York City summers for the rocky shores of Cape Ann, finding inspiration not only in its working harbors and natural beauty, but also in one another. Now, the Cape Ann Museum is telling that story of artistic camaraderie with Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea, a landmark exhibition featuring 82 works by Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko.
“We’re talking about three titans of 20th-century American art, all of whom had really formative experiences here on Cape Ann,” says Oliver Barker, director of the Cape Ann Museum. “They met in New York, but they really solidified their friendships here during a series of successive summers. And this is a story that has not really been told before.” The exhibition, on view at the Cape Ann Museum from June 30 through September 27, coincides with the reopening of the museum’s main campus, which was closed for 20 months for renovations and improvements. In October, the exhibition will travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., marking the first time an exhibition organized by the Cape Ann Museum will tour to a national museum.
Each of the three painters would go on to become giants of American art in their own right. In those early years, however, Milton Avery—the oldest of the three—was already an established modern painter when he met Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, who were then emerging abstract expressionists. Avery later introduced Gottlieb and Rothko to Cape Ann. “They were very close friends, despite the fact that Milton Avery was 18 years older than Rothko and Gottlieb,” says guest curator Eliza Rathbone, chief curator emerita of The Phillips Collection. “They saw him as a mentor.”
The exhibition spans decades of work, tracing both the artists’ stylistic evolution and their enduring friendship. It also reframes Avery, Gottlieb, and Rothko not solely as New York artists, highlighting the influence of the sea during their summers in Gloucester and later Provincetown. “The fact that they found each other repeatedly in the summertime—in the same place, at the same time—and went out sketching together, spending evenings sharing their work and ideas, makes this one of the most fascinating stories of artistic exchange I’ve ever worked on,” Rathbone says.
Barker notes that the exhibition is organized into nine sections, with roughly half devoted to early works leading up to the 1940s. The second half showcases the large-scale canvases the artists produced in the 1950s and ’60s, including a seven-foot-long, 56-inch high painting by Mark Rothko on loan from the Museum of Modern Art. “Visitors entering that space will be surrounded by these mature works for which all three artists are perhaps best known,” Barker says.
The newly renovated space. Photo by Steve Rosenthal.
Because of its scale, the exhibition occupies the Cape Ann Museum’s entire fourth floor, giving it “the breadth that it needs,” Barker says. By comparison, the museum’s acclaimed 2023 Edward Hopper exhibition filled only half of that floor. The Cape Ann Museum collaborated with 26 lending institutions—including 16 museums and the artists’ families—to assemble the show, resulting in an exhibition that features not only well-known paintings but also a wide array of rarely seen works.
“I hope viewers will become deeply engaged in their process, because we will have sketchbooks, drawings, watercolors, and finished paintings,” Rathbone says. The exhibition celebrates not only Avery, Gottlieb, and Rothko as artists and friends, but also Cape Ann as a gathering place for creative exchange—making it a fitting tribute to the museum’s reopening. “As a museum, we exist to tell the story of this singularly unique place,” Barker says. “We do that by blending stories of labor and ingenuity with those of beauty and creativity, all of which have coalesced—and continue to coalesce—here on Cape Ann.”
To read the full Northshore Magazine article, click here.
/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.png00Haley Wolfe/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.pngHaley Wolfe2026-05-12 13:50:512026-05-12 13:50:53Northshore Magazine: The Cape Ann Museum’s Newest Exhibition, Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea, Coincides With the Reopening of the Museum’s Main Campus
This episode of Haptic & Hue is about one group of people who designed and made craft textiles at a particular moment in America’s history. The Folly Cove Designers came from a little-known area of Massachusetts. They had no professional qualifications and they were taught around a kitchen table by one woman. For nearly thirty years in the mid-twentieth century, they formed a close creative and supportive network making work of the highest quality. Even today, over seventy years later, their story has a lot to tell us about how communities help individuals shine.
Notes
The place to go to see the best of the Folly Cove Designs and their story is the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts. https://www.capeannmuseum.org/
The Museum is temporarily closed for a refit but it will re-open in June.
The Museum is still actively searching for five missing designs to add to its collection of Folly Cove designs. If you think you have one or you want to know more, the details are on the landing page of their website.
Gossips By Virginia Lee Burton. Courtesy of Cape Ann Museum and Archives
To read or listen to the full podcast, click here.
/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.png00Haley Wolfe/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/logo.pngHaley Wolfe2026-05-11 16:02:372026-05-11 16:04:04Haptic & Hue: Community Makes a Nation: America’s Folly Cove Designers
Maritime painter’s still life hanging at Cape Ann Museum
By Gail McCarthy | May 11, 2026
On left, the unrestored “Untitled (Floral Still Life),” an oil on board painted by Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865) in 1849. On right, the painting, a gift of the Philip G. Lewis family in 2025, after being cleaned by Essex conservator Lisa Mehlin and restoration of the frame.
A painting of a bouquet of flowers picked from a garden in the center of historic Gloucester 177 years ago is now a focal point in the Cape Ann Museum as it prepares to reopen this summer after a major, 18-month renovation.
The restored 1849 still life by the celebrated American artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865) is now hung on a wall in the Lane Gallery of the museum, which is home to more than 45 of his artworks, the largest collection of Lane paintings in the world, in addition to 100 of his drawings and lithographs.
“During renovations, two Lane paintings have come back to this community,” Museum Director Oliver Barker said. “The still life is of flowers picked on Middle Street and grown in the garden of two friends of Lane, which he then painted and gifted to another friend.”
A Gloucester native, Lane is known for his detailed artworks in the Luminist style. He also was a well-known printmaker. The floral still life represents a rare departure from Lane’s plentiful maritime artworks depicting Gloucester’s bustling waterfront and harbor in the mid-19th century.
The small floral still life stands out when taking in the extraordinary seafaring and atmospheric paintings that line the walls of the large Lane Gallery.
The still life was donated to the museum by the Philip G. Lewis family, along with a letter from the original recipient thanking Lane for the gift. The letter reads: Mr. Lane, Dear Sir, … I can not find words to express to you my thanks for the beautiful picture which you have presented to me. I should have prized it for its intrinsic beauty but its value is doubly influenced by coming from one who esteemed my Father his friend. I feel greatly obliged to you for your kind offer of assistance in drawing and shall avail myself with pleasure of so favorable an opportunity to cultivate that art as soon as it is in my power. Please to accept my warmest thanks for the interest and kind feeling you have expressed towards our family. Yours with much respect Harriet P. Mason Gloucester July 23, 1849
Martha Oaks, the Henrietta Gates & Heaton Robertson chief curator, noted that Mason, in 1853, had married William Fuller Davis thus becoming Harriet Mason Davis. Her daughter Catalina Davis wrote a second note on the back of the painting, noting that the flowers were gathered in the garden of a house which stood at 44 Middle St.
“Shooting Seabirds,” painted 1842 by Fitz Henry Lane is displayed on a wall inside the Cape Ann Museum on Thursday. The work is recent gift from Jane Wyeth.
The second “new” Lane painting in Cape Ann Museum’s collection, also now hanging in the Lane gallery, is “Shooting Seabirds,” a graphite and watercolor on paper painted in 1842, a gift of Jane Wyeth.
“It really is amazing for an organization to receive — as gifts — two such important works by a major 19th century American artist such as Lane in quick succession,” Oaks said. “Both were done early in Lane’s career and speak volumes of Lane’s transition from a printmaker to a painter. We received the floral still life first and thought that was early — 1849. And then to receive the watercolor —1842 — which is even earlier, really was quite remarkable. We all are truly humbled by people’s generosity.”
The cleaning of the floral painting transformed the very dark looking artwork into a bright bouquet of flowers.“It’s remarkable what the cleaning revealed, bringing out the vibrancy of color and the delicate detail of Lane’s floral depiction,” Barker said.
Cape Ann Museum is preparing to re-open its doors on Pleasant Street again this June, following a $9 million renovation of its downtown Gloucester campus.
“Our ability to better tell these rich stories of Cape Ann is going to be amplified in the new spaces,” Barker said. “I’m thrilled to share this with the community.”
Now that the construction phase is completed, museum staff has been working to repopulate the galleries with its collections and is preparing to open another ground-breaking special exhibition with “Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea,” which opens June 30. Tickets for the timed exhibition go on sale June 1.
Cape Ann Museum Assistant Curator Leon Doucette takes a closer look at a few Fitz Henry Lane paintings displayed inside the museum’s Lane Gallery on Thursday.
