Earlier this year a group of students at the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf in Falmouth and their teacher, Julie Clark, collaborated with the Portland Museum of Art for its retrospective “A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr.” The students, dressed up as various sitters from Brewster’s portraits, sit or stand inside gilded frames and in front of backgrounds they have hand-painted to resemble those in Brewster’s works, and interpret for us the lives and times of the sitters they bring to life.
It’s an incredible collection of performances and, however small and quiet, a powerful component of this extraordinary exhibition. In his interpretation of one of Brewster’s more mysterious later portraits, the 1825 painting “Relative of Dr. Royal Brewster” — it is unclear whether the portrait is a relative of, the son of, or indeed Dr. Royal Brewster, John’s brother, himself — a young Baxter student wears an oversized tuxedo jacket to approximate the sitter’s impeccably fit double-breasted coat. Hair combed in 19th-century fashion, the boy signs these words, given in subtitle: “I think this man has a job. He reads a lot” (the young man in Brewster’s portrait holds a tiny volume between finger and thumb) — sizing up the fellow on the other end of this historical encounter, enacting his link to the history of intellectual and artistic and indeed political achievement that Brewster’s efforts were integral in opening up.
Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr. | at the Portland Museum of Art | through March 25 | Tues-Sun 10 am-5 pm; Fri 10 am-9 pm | 207.775.6148
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