De Hirsh Margules, Mother Ann Lighthouse, Eastern Point, Gloucester, 1946. Gouache on paper. Gift of Jean M. Horblit, 2002. [Acc. #2002.004.002]
Forbes: Cape Ann Museum Reopens After 20-Month Renovation
By Chadd Scott | June 29, 2026
Following a 20-month closure, the Cape Ann Museum reopens its main downtown campus in Gloucester, MA to the public on June 30, 2026. More than $20 million has been spent upgrading the institution’s five-building footprint, including its historic 1806 captain’s house. Ship’s captain.
Gloucester, 35-miles up the coast from Boston, is the oldest seaport in the United States, founded in 1623 and named after the English hometown settler colonials arrived from.
Between the late 1800s and early 20th century, little Gloucester was America’s largest fishing port. That’s how you know Gloucester–how the world knows Gloucester–even if you don’t think you do. “The Perfect Storm.” George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg portrayed Gloucester fisherman on the doomed Andrea Gail. If you go, be sure to see the iconic Fisherman’s Memorial–the Man at the Wheel–featured in the movie. “They that go down to the sea in ships.”
Renovations to the Cape Ann Museum include a new showcase of the city’s deep history with the sea in a redesigned suite of three Fisheries Galleries telling captivating stories of the fishing industry, past and present. Fisherman still go out of Gloucester, although nowhere near the numbers of a century ago.
Upgrades across the campus included full guts of multiple buildings, new HVAC and climate control, electrical, plumbing, lighting, security systems–all the expensive, boring stuff visitors rarely recognize, but are essential when welcoming the public and housing priceless art and artifacts. Museum officials took great care not to change the nature of the institution despite its significant facelift.
“(The museum is) small and intimate; we are a regional museum, and we tell a very important local story, but one of national significance, and we do so in gallery spaces that are relatable,” Museum Director Oliver Barker told me via video interview. “We are not talking about these cavernous galleries that exist in metropolitan centers. We love that feel of intimacy here and wanted to keep that as part of the renovation.”
Campus wayfinding has been improved, the auditorium refurbished, the atrium reimagined, spaces for education upgraded, and a new archival display gallery added among other improvements.
Visitors begin with an introduction to the area’s indigenous people and their 12,000-plus year presence, then enter a gallery devoted to the fishing industry in its heyday. Cape Ann is also renowned as a popular artist’s retreat, particularly at the turn of the 20th century.
“That active fishing industry here, concurrent to that, there was also a granite boring industry, it made Gloucester a very real American place, and artists flocked here,” Barker explained. “We have the ability to show the art and also the objects, the industrial objects that inspired these artists so greatly. Anyone coming to the museum is going to have the opportunity to see the fine art and these industrial artifacts in juxtaposition. We believe that tells a much stronger story by putting these items in conversation.”
Paintings from American art titans are displayed alongside a Fresnel lens designed for one of two lighthouses on nearby Thatcher Island as an example. The Fresnel lens innovated a system of prisms that allowed lighthouses to shine out to sea by roughly 20 miles. Combined with Cape Ann’s northeasterly location along the East Coast jutting out into the Atlantic, the lighthouse would have been one of the first signs of human habitation people making the trip from Western Europe to America would have seen.
“There’s an opportunity to look at works that Winslow Homer made here during the course of five successive summers where he actually learned how to use watercolors as a medium,” Barker said. “As you’re looking literally at a fishing vessel or items that were used by fishermen as they were fishing out at the Grand Banks, you’ll see those items with work that Homer, Edward Hopper, so many other greats of American art, were making in response to being here.”
One fishing vessel on view recalls the grisly story of Howard Blackburn, a Gloucester fisherman who went out as part of a big schooner to the Grand Banks. He and his dory were overlooked and forgotten by the mothership in a fog leaving him and a compatriot at sea five days from land.
“The only way in which he was going to survive due to sleep deprivation and the awful conditions they were going to need to withstand, he actually froze his hands to the oars,” Barker said.
His shipmate perished. Blackburn received a hero’s welcome upon his return to Gloucester. The vessel on view at the Cape Ann Museum is one Blackburn would later guide across the Atlantic Ocean. Another small boat on view–20-footer–similarly made the transatlantic journey, this one stemming from a bar dare. Very on-brand for New England. Alfred Johnson in Centennial was the first to sail from Gloucester to Liverpool. Sixty-six days alone at sea.
“It’s part of a long history we have here of intrepid men and women who, against all odds, have succeeded,” Barker said.
The Artists Of Cape Ann
Milton Avery, ‘Harbor at Night,’ 1932. Oil on canvas, 32 x 48 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Acquired 1942, 0038.
© 2026 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The Museum’s reopening is the capstone of its 150th anniversary and coincides with the launch of a major national exhibition also debuting on June 30, “Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea.” Presented in partnership with The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the exhibition explores the relationship and artistic influence among three great American artists—Milton Avery (1885–1965), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), and Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974)—as they summered together on Cape Ann during the 1920s through the 1940s.
“American artists at the turn of the 20th century were looking for distinctly American subject matter, and so Milton Avery came here, along with a group of fellow artists from Hartford, Connecticut, in the early 1920s,” Barker explained. “Our exhibition features two very early works that Milton Avery made when he was here in the 1920s painting in an American impressionist style. We know from the Gloucester Daily Times, our local newspaper that is still very fortunately in print, that Milton Avenue is here, and he not only was here to paint, but he participated in the 300 plus celebrations for colonial arrival in 1923.”
1923 was the tricentennial of settler colonials founding Gloucester.
“Apparently, he dressed in traditional garb and was responsible for designing some of the floats that we used as part of the official celebrations,” Barker continued.
Avery met his wife Sally Michael–a hell of an artist in her own right–in Cape Ann and the couple honeymooned there in 1926 before moving to New York and meeting Gottlieb and Rothko.
“They admired the way in which Milton Avery was so committed to his own artistic practice, and as friends, initially in New York, they came here on successive occasions to Gloucester, summered here as a group, and our exhibition deals with that part of their story, a part of their story that has never been told,” Barker said. “We know about them as three New York-based artists, but the fact that they spent many seminal summers here on Cape Ann has not been featured.”
Eighty-two artworks are featured in the exhibition; three come from the Cape Ann Museum’s permanent collection, the others are loans from private collections, the nation’s most prestigious art museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery, and the three artist’s estates.
“They’ve allowed us to bring out of their vaults things that have never before been seen. Over 40% of the work that we’ll be showing has not ever been on public view,” Barker said.
The presentation begins with Avery paintings from the 1920s and continues with artworks made towards the end of his life. Interestingly, while Avery began as an influence on the younger artists, he was 18 years older, Gottlieb and Rothko began influencing Avery later in life. The exhibition shows that changing dialog.
Mark Rothko In Gloucester
The shore, the sea, the horizon.
Mark Rothko.
His iconic fuzzy stacked squares and rectangles, his “planes of color.”
Did Cape Ann inspire one of art history’s most recognizable artistic signatures?
“Mark Rothko himself said that he saw a real through line in his work, and so anyone who comes here, when they step into the exhibition, if they do it in chronological order, one of the first things they’ll encounter is a painting that Mark Rothko made of fish drying on racks here on the Gloucester Harbor, and if you look at that, or if you look at paintings he was making that same year of figures lying on the beach, it’s very clear to see how he’s already simplifying his compositions,” Barker explains. “You can virtually see the horizon, the ocean, and the sand, and whether you choose to read those as the planes of color for which he is now better known, that’s obviously very subjective. I love that Rothko, in looking back on his own work, said that he could see how he got from where he was then (later in his career) to those earlier works he was making in places like Gloucester.”
“Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko: By the Sea” can be seen at the Cape Ann M through September 27, 2026, before traveling to The Phillips Collection, marking the first time an exhibition organized by the Cape Ann Museum will tour to a national museum.
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