Muskegon Museum of Art

Muskegon, Michigan
I know, I know. It's east of the Mississippi. Well, I'm going to cheat anyway, because I've got to tell you about Muskegon. Once upon a time Michigan was covered with virgin stands of pines. Climax forests they called them. Then the lumbermen (my Grandfather Fitzpatrick was one) buzzed and buzzed away, and before you could say 1890, Michigan was as bald as Telly Savalas.

In Muskegon, this bothered a man named Hackley, who vowed he'd stake his whole lumber-generated fortune to giving Muskegon a second chance. As you approach the L.C. Walker (the second Maecenas of Muskegon) Civic Arena area in downtown Muskegon, your eye catches what you are sure is a recycled Richardsonian city hall.

The date (1891-92) is right; the materials--rusticated bands of red and gray--are straight out of the master's quarries. But the structure is in fact the Hackley School, but his first big benefaction to give his adopted hometown another break.

Kittycorner to the northwest is an even more savory morsel of the same Stone age architecture--the Hackley Library (1889!) And north next to it is the Muskegon Museum of Art (1912) nee the Hackley Gallery.

It's beaux arts at its least flashy best, designed by Chicago's Solon Spencer Berman, perhaps better known for the Studebaker Theatre in Chicago, but renowned in Muskegon for having designed the first art gallery in the United States in a city of under 30,000, thereby pushing Hackley's haven a cubit closer to his American dream of making it "one of the most distinctive cities of its size in the country."

The city fathers imported a Nottingham man, one Raymond Wyer, to lead the Philistines out of their darkness. One of his first moves was to buy James McN. Whistler's Study in Rose and Brown from the Armory Show of 1913 for $6,750! The bottom-line watch howled in disbelief that the whole gallery cost only $43,750 to build--and purchases like that would son deplete the $150,000 Hackley had left to buy pictures with. Wyer slyly (and we must guess snidely) replied that, sure, he could buy 500 inferior canvases for the same dollars. But the name of the game was excellence.

Two years later, in 1916, Wyer got his walking papers. (Feminists might note that his replacement, Miss Lula F. Miller, became only the second woman to head a museum in the country, Buffalo's Albright having pioneered with Miss Cornelia B. Sage.) The high point of Miller's tenure was the acquisition of the considerably less controversial-and, alas, to me more lasting--Answering the Horn by Winslow Homer.

In the summer of 1980 the museum was in the throes of expansion, a new wing for offices and gallery having been designed for Hackley's heirs (viz., all of Muskegon) by John Hilberry and Associates, whose current estimable success is the new wing at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

And old Charles Hackley would be thrilled as well to know that his horrendous hodgepodge of a Victorian house (which is to say a zany marvel) has escaped the snapping jaws of Bauhaus bulldozers and is open to the public he had such an emulatable way of serving. All hail to the quirky independent American patron. May their tribe increase.

--from 20 Museums You've Never Heard Of/Horizon Magazine 1981