Three years ago, Jerry Beck took a drive with his young daughter through New Hampshire and passed a sign for Ruggles Mine in Grafton. His daughter shrugged, but Beck convinced her to check it out. Armed with a pail and hammer for rock collecting, they emerged from a tunnel into the expansive cavern of the now-defunct mica mine. “We just thought this was the coolest place we had ever seen,” he says today.

Beck, who specializes in bringing art to unique and forgotten spaces, immediately envisioned a show there. Ruggles Mine has since closed and gone up for sale. In November, Beck got permission to stage an exhibition of musicians, sculpture, light and sound installations, video, poetry-readings and performances throughout the rock-framed environment.

He now hopes The Revolving Museum, the artistic-event organization he founded in 1984, will purchase the mine and turn it into a destination—an experimental and interactive theme park of visual creations woven together “so that your imagination is exploding wherever you look,” he says. To that end, he and TRM are planning another Ruggles Mine exhibition and fundraiser in late summer or fall.

But that’s not all Beck has planned for New Hampshire. He also has partnered with City Arts Nashua to help revitalize its downtown with public art. The “Comeback Kitchen Table” show will launch in May to call attention to the vanishing custom of families gathering for meals and conversation—“what used to be the heart and soul of family life,” Beck says.

Comeback Kitchen Table | Revolving Museum Director Jerry Beck and City Arts Nashua Board President Kathy Hersh

More than 1,000 artists are working on 10 projects for the show. An alternative high school has created a Jean-Michel Basquiat-themed installation with an anti-drug message. “It will hopefully be a catalyst for people to explore the tables, sitting down, talking,” Beck says of the show.

The idea grew out of Beck’s nostalgia for his own family time spent around the kitchen table when he was a kid, laughing and telling stories. Today, trying to draw his 10-year-old daughter’s attention away from her digital screen is a challenge, he says.

An art major at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Beck spent a semester in London, charmed more by the punk rock scene than Renaissance painting. Back in Florida, he and some fellow art students launched a series of public art projects in empty buildings and other forsaken sites. They called themselves SARTists—Student Artists Reshaping Tallahassee.

In 1983, Beck started graduate school in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. He founded The Revolving Museum soon after with “The Little Train That Could .. Show” in an abandoned city rail yard. The old train cars were turned into gallery space and performance stages. On “hobo night,” homeless participants told stories. Another early TRM show took over an old Civil War fort on Georges Island in Boston harbor.

Each of Beck’s efforts seeks to connect communities with the creative work in their midst, a goal all the more relevant during this time of upheaval, he says. “We’re in a cultural revolution right now,” Beck says. “And the arts—as they always have—need to be at the forefront.”

The Revolving Museum – Jerry Beck, founder and artistic director
Fitchburg, Massachusetts
Ruggles Mine –  Grafton, New Hampshire

Comeback Kitchen Table exhibition in Nashua, New Hampshire
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Top photo Ruggles Mine Show, Revolving Museum

The post Of Abandoned Mines and Kitchen Tables appeared first on Take Magazine.

Our region is home to some of the world’s most dedicated synthesizer archivists, people who’ve spent their lives documenting this built analog circuitry of sound. Like the intricate mazes of inputs and connections hidden inside these electronic instruments, New England also has a deep, complex, and somewhat tragic history with synthesizers.

You can’t accurately or truthfully discuss the history of synth archiving and documentation in New England without mentioning the region’s original synth nerd-god, David Wilson. Wilson dedicated two floors of his home in Nashua, New Hampshire to curating, cataloging, and repairing vintage synthesizers. He opened his home to the public, allowing synth obsessives from all over unbridled access to his machines. Wilson would personally set up these instruments, and allow museum-goers the unique opportunity to examine and even play most of his synths. To the shock and sadness of many, Wilson passed away too soon in 2010. His close friends, family, and casual museum patrons describe him as genial, a bit eccentric, and democratic with his appreciation for all people and synths, not just the “important” ones.

David Wilson in his home | Photo courtesy Matrix Synth

Years after Wilson’s passing, his collection remains in limbo. However, there is a resource where some of his synthesizers can be seen and appreciated: Synthmuseum.com, a Boston-based operation that offers “a centralized, organized, and authoritative resource for information about vintage electronic musical instruments.”

The online synth museum is the brainchild of Paula Chase and Jay Williston, who, in 1996, after visiting David Wilson at his in-home museum, decided that the internet would be a great place for a synthesizer archive fueled by user-submitted content. “There wasn’t one place where you could see synthesizers and find out about their features, find out about what existed and when it existed, what it looked like and who played it,” says Williston “This started with us going to visit Dave’s museum. We thought, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be great to put his museum in a nice building?’ But then we thought, ‘We can’t do that, it’s not our place.’ But we figured we could take his synths, and synths from everywhere, and put them online.

Moog Sonic Six | Photo by Kevin Lightner

“When we started this,” he continues, “we just asked people to send us pictures of synthesizers, brochures, and manuals. It’s basically getting everything you want to know about vintage synthesizers in one resource.”

Today, Williston is the only founder who continues the highly labor-intensive process of updating the website. Since the beginning, Williston and the founders hand-typed everything from manuals, magazine descriptions, or brochures, and still receive corrections, comments, and feedback from folks perusing the site. The website is clearly from the mid-to-late 1990s, and Williston isn’t bashful about pointing that out. For people poking around the site, its dated look lends an extra layer of meaning and congruity to the archive. After all, wouldn’t it be sort of weird to seamlessly click through a collection of late 1980s electronic instruments using a sleek, futuristic, Square-Space-like template?

[This] “Polyvox belonged to a trance-ambient band that played on same stage as we did in a festival last summer. In fact, it wasn’t really their’s either, they had borrowed it from a friend who got it from the janitor at a Russian school…. The band called themselves ‘Lhix’, and are a local but highly competent young band from Umea, Sweden….The picture was taken by me.” – Patrik Eriksson, Umea Sweden | Description from Synthmuseum.com | Photo by Patrik Eriksson

Perhaps someday David Hillel Wilson’s collection will be open to the public again, and perhaps someday Jay Williston will document and list every synthesizer ever made. Until then, we have Synthmuseum.com, and our piqued curiosity about what wild electronic reverberations lived in Wilson’s two floors in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Top photo Patched System 700 | Photo by Kevin Lightner 

The post Did You Know? New England’s Online Synth Museum appeared first on Take Magazine.