De Hirsh Margules, Mother Ann Lighthouse, Eastern Point, Gloucester, 1946. Gouache on paper. Gift of Jean M. Horblit, 2002. [Acc. #2002.004.002]
Boston Globe: The Cape Ann Museum starts a new chapter Tuesday
By Mark Feeney | June 24, 2026
Cape Ann Museum director Oliver Barker stands next to a circa 1860 Fresnel lighthouse lens on permanent loan from the United States Coast Guard on Thursday, June 18. The Cape Ann Museum is preparing for its reopening in Gloucester. Photo by Pat Greenhouse.
GLOUCESTER — Tuesday marks a new beginning for the Cape Ann Museum. The museum reopens its main campus after being closed for 20 months for extensive renovations.
Some of the changes are visible: Lighting is improved, the new cherry-wood floors gleam. Others are more felt than seen: The museum’s five buildings better cohere, and its 17 levels (yes, 17) are more easily negotiated. There’s increased exhibition space, with collection storage moved to the 4-acre CAM Green campus, a little over a mile away, which opened in 2020.
The overall aim of the renovations, said CAM director Oliver Barker in a recent interview, is to “create a parallel spine for the building.”
The reopening comes after a successful $23 million fund-raising campaign. How successful? The original goal was $18 million.
The reopening and conclusion of the campaign belatedly observe CAM’s 150th anniversary. It was founded in 1875, only four years after the Museum of Fine Arts.
The carved and polychromed wood and metal Our Lady of Good Voyage, circa 1915, is gift of the Parish of Our Lady of Good Voyage, 1984. Photo by Pat Greenhouse.
In an era when museums are becoming more and more alike, CAM defies interchangeability. It’s at once art museum, history museum, and regional museum. “The Cape Ann Museum is crucial to the fabric of Cape Ann and the North Shore,” Karen Ristuben, program direct of the Essex County Community Foundation, wrote in an email. “Having multiple missions is CAM’s power; it is relatable and accessible to all.”
At the moment, the mission that’s getting the most attention is art. Tuesday also marks the opening of the much-anticipated exhibition “Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea.” It includes 82 works by Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko, all of whom painted in Gloucester during their formative years.
“I’m sure many people familiar with these artists think of them in terms of New York City,” said Renée Maurer in a telephone interview. Maurer is associate curator at the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C. CAM organized the exhibition in partnership with the Phillips, which is where it will travel after Gloucester. The exhibition, Maurer added, “shows how this region inspired” the three painters.
Drawn from 26 institutions, the exhibition is the latest in a series of high-profile shows CAM has mounted, including ones devoted to Winslow Homer, in 2019, and Edward Hopper, in 2023.
Cape Ann, which comprises Gloucester, Rockport, Manchester-by-the-Sea, and Essex, may be the “other” cape in Massachusetts. That’s not the case artistically. Even with Provincetown’s long history of attracting artists, Cape Cod is a distant runner-up to Cape Ann as regards art history.
Barker recalled being in Washington, D.C., last year, visiting the National Gallery. In the bookstore, he noticed that out of three dozen fine arts postcards on display, a sixth were of Cape Ann.
Assistant curator Leon Doucette helps carry Adolph Gottlieb’s “Under and Over” painting up to a temporary exhibition gallery. The painting is on loan from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. Photo by Pat Greenhouse.
“The mission of the National Gallery is to present the Renaissance through to the modern day,” Barker said. “The fact that six of those images were by Cape Ann artists of Cape Ann speaks to the [artistic] importance of this place.”
Starting with the Luminist painter Fitz Henry Lane (CAM has more than 160 Lane works in its collection), artists associated with Cape Ann include Homer, Frank Duveneck, Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, Hopper, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Avery, and Joseph Solman. There’s also the Folly Cove Designers textile collective.
Sometimes the association is fleeting. CAM owns a rather Avery like painting of Gloucester Harbor by a teenage Frank Stella.
For 2028, CAM is putting together a Davis show, in association with Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Museum of Art; and, for 2030, an exhibition of painters who worked in both Venice and Cape Ann. “There is a surprising amount of overlap of artists who spent time in both,” Barker noted.
CAM didn’t acquire the name Cape Ann Museum until 2007, under Barker’s predecessor as director, Ronda Faloon. Originally, it was the Cape Ann Scientific and Literary Association. The association was a “breakaway,” as Barker put it, from Gloucester’s Sawyer Free Library. The two institutions remain near neighbors, just a few blocks from each other.
Art wasn’t what the association — now museum — was founded to promote. Even with art having long since become such an important part of CAM’s remit, it remains committed to local history and culture. Exhibitions continued at CAM Green when the main campus was closed. Subjects included Cape Ann quarries, the Gloucester pipe-organ firm C.B. Fisk, and a photography show dedicated to the local fishing industry.
Is having commitments to multiple fields too much for an institution of CAM’s size? The endowment of its North Shore neighbor the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, is nearly $630 million. Barker said that CAM, which doubled its endowment over the past decade, hopes to reach $22 million by 2028.
Elliot Bostwick Davis, who curated the 2023 Hopper show and is now on CAM’s board of trustees, thinks that the museum’s wider range of commitments is one of the things that makes it distinctive. “Having art, having history, having culture, I think of that as a great strength,” Davis said in a telephone interview. “I’d like to say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
Barker concurs. “We’re pulled in a lot of different directions. I don’t see that really as a challenge, though. It’s just that it requires good planning.”
Barker, 50, has a personal connection to the CAM collection. He first visited the museum in 2000. The great-grandfather of his then-fiancee had been a Swedish immigrant who worked on Cape Ann as a stone mason. His future wife wanted to show Barker her ancestor’s chisel, which CAM owned. Through his wife, Barker has an additional local connection. Last year, his father-in-law, Paul Lundberg, was elected mayor of Gloucester.
Barker took a roundabout route to Cape Ann. Trained in his native Australia as a painter and printmaker, he accepted an internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in Venice, and then joined the staff. From there, he became a curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, in Connecticut. After returning to Australia to get a master’s in arts and cultural management, he went to work for UNESCO, then the Museum of Fine Arts, as an administrator. In a happy coincidence, he and his family decided to live on the North Shore, in Wenham. Four years later, in 2019, CAM named him director.
“‘Oh, that’s exciting: what a hidden gem,’ Barker recalled people telling him about CAM when the announcement was made. “My ambition has been to keep that gemlike quality. There’s an intimacy to this institution, not only in terms of the subject matter, but physically, to the galleries, that I think is vitally important. All we have tried to do, in the most subtle way possible, is just make sure that it’s no longer a ‘hidden’ gem. It is just the gem.”
To read the full Boston Globe article, click here.
