CHADDS FORD — The Brandywine River Museum of Art reopened to the public this holiday weekend.
The iconic flagship destination in Southeastern Pennsylvania suffered an estimated $6 million in damages from floodwaters on September 1 during Hurricane Ida, which hit the region as a tropical storm.
“We’ve had floods before — but never like this,” said Virginia Logan, executive director and chief executive officer of the Brandywine River Museum of Art.
The Brandywine River Museum of Art had been temporarily closed after the remnants of Hurricane Ida brought historic flooding to Chadds Ford, impacting the museum and conservancy’s 15-acre campus, which includes acreage in both Delaware and Chester counties.
“Ida was like no other storm,” she said. “Floodwaters were four feet higher than the all-time record in the history of recorded floods in the Brandywine.”The museum sits along the banks of the Brandywine Creek.
The museum reopened to the public on Friday, inviting visitors to enjoy the Brandywine Railroad holiday train display as well as highlights from its permanent art collection featuring the works of the Wyeth family including iconic American artists N.C. Wyeth and Andrew Wyeth.
This holiday season, the museum is now open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. seven days a week. The venue will be closed on Christmas day.
The museum’s O-gauge model train display will be on view now through January 9.
Since 1972, the museum has featured each holiday its acclaimed Brandywine Railroad which features an array of toy and scale model trains made by Lionel, Williams, Atlas, Mike’s Train House, and K-line, among others. The trains run on a on 2,000 feet of track with more than 1,000 pieces, including locomotives, passenger and freight trains, and trolleys that pass through a small village, a farm, factories, a carnival and a drive-in movie theater, according to the Brandywine River Museum of Art in a press release on the venue’s reopening.
Visitors can also enjoy viewing traditional whimsical critter ornaments decorating the holiday trees in the museum’s atrium.
Volunteers have created the critter ornaments, composed only of natural materials such as teasel, pinecones, acorns, eggshells, flowers and seed pods, every year since 1971.
These handcrafted, artisan ornaments shall be available for purchase during an annual holiday critter sale at the Chadds Ford Historical Society from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on December 4 and December 5.
More than 8,200 critter ornaments were destroyed by floodwaters.
Although the art in the galleries at the Brandywine River Museum of Art were unharmed by the storm, the museum’s lowest level — containing a lecture room, classroom, offices — incurred significant flood damage. Ida’s floodwaters also damaged an additional 10 buildings on the Brandywine historic campus.
Logan said everyone has been working diligently and around-the-clock to repair and restore the museum and grounds in order to reopen the facility back up to the public.
“We’re thrilled,” she said of reopening the museum this holiday weekend. Logan began her leadership role at Brandywine in 2012.
Logan said the staff and organization have been resilient during the last three months working together to repair and reopen the facility to the public.
Logan said more than 700 people have donated to the museum to support its repairs and reopening since the storm brought more than $6 million in damages to the campus.
No sculptures on the grounds of the museum were damaged from Ida. “No art was damaged, inside or outside,” Logan noted.
Besides being home to an art museum, the campus includes the Brandywine Conservancy, dedicated to the conservation of cultural gems, such as American Revolutionary War sites, and protection of natural resources including land and water. The conservancy is an ongoing leader and steward of the area with staff working continuously to permanently preserve countless forests and wetlands, open space and flourishing creeks as well as historic farms while strengthening existing watersheds from the Christiana to the White Clay and beyond.
“Our campus is planted with native plants which are by nature resilient,” Logan said. “We expect things to be in full bloom with very little damage to the landscape by the time (the flora specimens) emerge in the spring,” she said.
The museum held virtual events during the last three months, as the organization also did in 2020 during the statewide shutdown of “non-essential” venues across Pennsylvania.
Yet ultimately art and nature are meant to be experienced in-person, not merely observed virtually.
“This organization has built itself in overcoming odds,” Logan said. “We are deeply committed to our mission including being able to have our doors open to the public and to our members.”
Art inspires
In addition to the museum doors now again open to the public to view great American works as well as the annual holiday train and ornament exhibits inside, the landscape of the Brandywine campus is itself a form of art.
As the poets wrote at the dawn of the industrial age: Nature, the essence of art.
Being in nature does something that on one hand is nurturing, said Logan, but also the opportunity to be “taking in the beauty and just taking a moment to be quiet and reflect and absorb the presence of what’s around you; nature.”
There’s also the benefit of breathing in fresh air while walking through a meadow or in a forest, a concept some call forest-gazing, Logan said.
“When we open up ourselves to that experience of nature, that can be quite similar to what people experience when they are in front of a great work of art,” Logan added.
Further, she said, “The way we experience art is as different as we are as people.”
Logan continued, “The ability to immerse ourselves in great works of art and in the beauty of unspoiled nature is at the core of what we do in our mission. And we think that it is important to people. The way people have been rallying from the woodwork to help us shows us that what we do matters to them. And that is very heartening to us.”
Nicole Kindbeiter, a spokeswoman for the conservancy and museum, said Chadds Ford Township Manager MaryAnn Furlong, along with township supervisors, and officials U.S. Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon, Pennsylvania Rep. Craig Williams, and State Senator John Kane were instrumental in helping the Brandywine Conservancy & Art Museum secure public assistance ahead of its reopening to visitors this holiday weekend.
