The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

“We saw in the pandemic that people loved and sought out this part of our program,” says executive director Cybele Maylone. “But because we were inundated with visitors, we saw all the problems of our site.” Chief among them: steep grade changes, a lack of accessibility, invasive bamboo, and a grass lawn that easily devolved into a mud field. Some of it was simply not usable, unless “you went out in sneakers and were maybe willing to roll down a hill.”

So the Aldrich fast-tracked plans to overhaul its three-acre grounds at a cost of $3.6 million. Now with 50 percent more programmatic space, accessible pathways, a new amphitheater, and native plantings, it’s reopening on November 17 with the outdoor portion of the group show A Garden of Promise and Dissent. Featuring works by 21 artists who range in age from 30 to 82 and offer intriguingly disparate takes on nature and our relationship to it, the exhibition will cross the indoor-outdoor divide.

For instance, Anders Hamilton’s delicate ceramic morning glories, made with the ashes of botanicals, will be installed in both the atrium and the courtyard directly behind it. The living flower will be planted around the outdoor piece in the spring.

“What I love about his work is it’s really encapsulating life, death, regeneration,” says Amy Smith-Stewart, the museum’s chief curator. Several other works also make use of plantings that will grow and change over time. “The show is a living organism itself.”

Then there’s Paraguayan-born Faith Wilding’s anthropomorphic painting of a leaf. “It’s inspired by when she was a child and they used to wrap their bodies in banana leaves to keep cool,” Smith-Stewart says. The show also includes Alina Bliumis’s “Plant Parenthood” photographs of species used by various cultures to terminate pregnancies, Mary Mattingly’s engineering of medical tubing to cycle rainwater through an installation that “talks about the garden as a body and the body as a garden,” and Meg Webster’s solar-powered grow room.

Founded in 1964 by Larry Aldrich, a New York City fashion designer and philanthropist, the museum initially occupied a converted 18th-century general store. But as the decades passed—and the art became more historic than contemporary—the board decided to sell the collection and operate more like a European kunsthalle so as not to lose sight of its mission: showcasing the new. The present building was constructed in 2004 behind the store.

But a thread still carries the spirit of the founding collection through the museum. This month, the Aldrich will also host a posthumous five-decade survey of Martha Diamond’s vibrant, brushy canvases. Both her first museum acquisition and first museum show came courtesy of the Aldrich. “Because it’s the museum’s anniversary, we’re thinking a lot about our legacy,” says Maylone. “It’s really exciting to be able to bring it full circle.”