Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation (Review/NYT)
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Among the many visionaries celebrated in the Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, which opened here last weekend at the Berkshire Museum, one figure, Zenas Crane Jr., is not fully given his due.
It isn’t that he was too local a figure to warrant notice. In fact, this 3,000-square-foot exhibition space in Berkshire County’s oldest museum is explicitly devoted to local innovators, ranging from Herman Melville, who wrote “Moby-Dick” not far from the institution, to William Stanley Jr., the Great Barrington resident who used his revolutionary alternate current electrical generator to illuminate businesses on the town’s main street in 1886.
Crane would not have been too eccentric a figure for the new hall either: the museum seems to define innovation as broadly as possible. So along with the Stockbridge native Cyrus W. Field, who succeeded in laying a trans-Atlantic cable in 1866, there is the minor figure Clarence J. Bousquet, known as Clare, a local businessman who created nighttime skiing in 1935. The intellectual and political achievements of the Great Barrington native and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois are celebrated, but so are the less compelling accomplishments of the Pittsfield-born artist Nancy Graves.
Read entire article at Edward Rothstein in the NYT
It isn’t that he was too local a figure to warrant notice. In fact, this 3,000-square-foot exhibition space in Berkshire County’s oldest museum is explicitly devoted to local innovators, ranging from Herman Melville, who wrote “Moby-Dick” not far from the institution, to William Stanley Jr., the Great Barrington resident who used his revolutionary alternate current electrical generator to illuminate businesses on the town’s main street in 1886.
Crane would not have been too eccentric a figure for the new hall either: the museum seems to define innovation as broadly as possible. So along with the Stockbridge native Cyrus W. Field, who succeeded in laying a trans-Atlantic cable in 1866, there is the minor figure Clarence J. Bousquet, known as Clare, a local businessman who created nighttime skiing in 1935. The intellectual and political achievements of the Great Barrington native and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois are celebrated, but so are the less compelling accomplishments of the Pittsfield-born artist Nancy Graves.