A new outdoor bench at Winterthur connects communities through history, memories, and stories.

When you take a seat on the new, beautifully tiled mosaic bench on the patio of the Galleries Reception Atrium, there is much to reflect on.

There is The Ceiling, a gazebo-like sculpture with a glass roof that is part of Transformations: Contemporary Artists at Winterthur, which represents creator Stefania Urist’s interest in the intersection of people and nature.

There is a section of trunk from the Brown’s  Meadow Oak, a 300-year-old tree toppled by a tornado on the estate in 2020. The ancient giant inspired other works by Urist and another Transformations artist, Rob Finn, who painted its portrait in watercolor, a striking memorial to the stately tree.

Then there is the bench itself. 

Obviously contemporary, the bench has more connections to Winterthur’s world-class collection of traditional American decorative arts than meets the eye. On closer inspection, one can see references to the Winterthur collection in the many tiles that incorporate bits of ceramic dishware and in the bench design itself, which reflects a continuum of fine craftsmanship and design often associated with the museum objects inside. This is Winterthur reimagined in tile and concrete.

The mosaic bench is part of a new exhibition, Upcycled!, which asks viewers to consider how old things can be reused creatively while also creating a community by working with local nonprofit organizations to make and display works of art. The work of many hands, the bench is an expression of caring that unites Winterthur and project partner Creative Vision Factory with Duffy’s Hope Garden in Wilmington and the New Castle County Hope Center, which provides transitional housing for the homeless. Winterthur’s collaboration with these partners included support and supplies for Creative Vision Factory artists to create benches at Winterthur, Duffy’s Hope Garden, and the Hope Center, as well as support for a tile monument at the Delaware State Hospital’s historic Spiral Cemetery that memorializes more than 700 souls who died in state care without being claimed by family between 1891 and 1983. 

At Winterthur, the mosaic tiling on the bench includes fragments of donated dinnerware and other ceramics—even some pieces from Joe and Jill Biden’s vice-presidential home—all associated with the feelings, thoughts, memories, and homes of their donors and the experience of volunteers who made them into something new.

“All of this is about telling the stories of people’s lives, both in the past and the present, and connecting them, often by either using things to remember them by or by thinking about the things that surrounded their lives and what their lives were like,” says Catharine Dann Roeber, interim director of Academic Programs at Winterthur. “For example, the people living at the Delaware State Hospital, what were their lives like? How can we learn from that and improve them?”

The question is especially poignant at Winterthur. A former family home filled with 90,000 historical objects ranging from everyday domestic items to the finest examples of decorative arts, Winterthur co-sponsors two graduate programs with the University of Delaware, one in material culture studies and one in conservation. In both programs, students study, care for, and interpret the belongings and lifeways of people in the past. Every object—a bit of a plate or a fancy piece of furniture—can reveal clues to past lives.  

“That scholarship connects to thinking about people who are trying to set up a home in the Hope Center or someplace else, who just need that space to call home to be able to live their lives to the fullest,” Roeber says. “That is totally connected in a really exciting way to the things that we think about in a historical sense here.

“The process of making and craft is something that we study. There is a value not only from the aesthetics of things, but the actual process of making serves a purpose. Each tile has a story to tell.”

Two alumni of the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Material Culture, Benét Burton and Molly Mapstone, originated the effort as students by identifying partners in a community art project that would make people aware of Winterthur and strengthen community connections and caring.

They found Michael Kalmbach and Creative Vision Factory, whose mission is to foster the creative potential of individuals on the behavioral health spectrum in a studio art environment that cultivates integration with the local art community through exhibitions, workshops, and communal workspace. Creative Vision Factory in turn identified Friends of the Spiral Cemetery, Duffy’s Hope, and the Hope Center as partners and project sites. It also coordinated workshops where volunteers and clients could create the tiles. Eliza Jarvis and Jonathan Whitney of Flux Creative added additional support and community connections to the project.

“We did what we had hoped to do, create a ripple effect at every stage. It is a beautifully unfolding partnership,” Roeber says. “We’re connecting threads and beginning to set the stage for future collaborations.”

One future collaboration may be the tiling of a tunnel on the Jack Markell Trail that cuts through an extensive Potters Field near the existing Spiral Cemetery, which was disrupted during the construction of route I-295. The murals can bring attention to important history at the site and complement additional endeavors to create a place of memory for those who rest there.

Elissa Edwards combines historic music and sounds from nature to create a unique soundtrack.

While researching the wide range of historical scores in the Winterthur Library, Elissa Edwards found many pieces that celebrated the rich tradition of nature-themed music.

“I just wanted to look at everything,” Edwards says. “I dug deeply into the music collections and really took a lot of notes, documenting what was there because I was delighted to find this wonderful collection and knew I wanted to revisit it.”

Edwards is an operatically trained exponent of early music, who has a particular interest in historical music manuscript collections owned by women as well as historical music made by women, both of which she wants to raise awareness among modern audiences. Edwards breathed new life into forgotten works from the Winterthur Library by weaving parts of them with sounds from nature to create a soundtrack for the exhibition Outside In: Nature-inspired Design. Her musical creation is part of the Transformations installation of works by contemporary artists. 

Transformations highlights work by Winterthur’s Maker-Creator Fellows, who get special access to the collections and staff for research and inspiration. The installations in Transformations celebrate how Winterthur’s landscape and material culture moved the Maker-Creator Fellows to turn their impressions of the past into artistic and experiential representations that comment on the present. Outside In, with its display of bird nests, seashells, and other natural objects, explores how objects from nature inform design motifs of wallpapers, textiles, China, furniture carving, and more, and the ways those themes are integrated into interior designs.

To create the Outside In soundtrack, Edwards first selected the scores from the Winterthur collection that she wanted to record, intending to convey some sense of the breadth of the Winterthur collection. Dr. Basil Considine, a renowned musicologist and former Winterthur fellow, transcribed hand-written scores into modern editions, which made for an effortless collaboration between the musicians.

“I also knew that I wanted to work with female collaborators, then create a variety of different instrumental textures to express the playfulness of the different characteristics that you hear in the music,” she says. These included mimicking birdsong with a flute or plucking the strings of a harpsichord.

“I love the idea of using the harp because there is a beautiful early pedal harp in the Winterthur collection, and while we recorded on a modern harp, I think the sound of the harp has such an alluring quality and really highlights the sumptuousness of the collection,” Edwards says.

In various outdoor locations at Winterthur, Edwards and her husband, Jeremy Sheeler, of Awarehouse Productions, recorded the nature soundscape, capturing the burbling of Clenny Run, the buzzing of insects, and breezes blowing through the trees and meadows. He also recorded Edwards singing, embellished with baroque ornamentation techniques. They were all mixed into the soundtrack by Edwards’s brother, Ryan Edwards, of Coincident Sound. 

“I approached the project as if I were the listener, thinking about what would be emotionally gripping to someone who is experiencing all of this for the first time,” Edwards says. “I think the sensory experience of that Brandywine Valley area, being by the river, takes you out of your day-to-day self and allows you to come into a place with a more thoughtful approach to what you’re doing. It’s my hope that the music transports visitors to a place of heightened historical whimsy, this kind of pastoral romanticism, which is experienced whenever you walk the Winterthur grounds and garden. It’s an absolutely delightful place to experience, and I wanted the music to have unique surprises and to captivate the listener.” 

Hear Edwards’s composition in Outside In: Nature-inspired Design at Winterthur. See the work of the other Transformations artists in the galleries area.

The Winterthur landscape inspires Nottene’s redesign of the galleries lounge.

Kimberly Hall and Justin Hardison of the artist studio Nottene were looking for a way to expand their pattern design business when they decided to explore wallpaper. They both grew up in houses with wallpaper and had built memories around the images and motifs, and they carried those memories with them into the new venture. They liked wallpaper. They knew how it was made.

“But outside of that, we didn’t the history of it and why people had it,” Hardison says. “We wanted to know more.”

Online searches for more information revealed only one book. Then Hall saw a posting for the Winterthur Maker-Creator Fellowship at the Office of Research at Maryland Institute College of Art, where she is on the faculty. “The idea of being able to use the Winterthur archive and learn about old wallpaper was really appealing,” Hall says. “We found there was so much more to discover.”

Sample books and business records in the Winterthur Library quickly became key sources for understanding the history, design, and trade of wallpaper. Pennsylvania German art and Fraktur became important inspirations, as did frequent walks in the Winterthur Garden, which was a sanctuary to the young family during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“There were just endless things to discover,” Hardison says. “We spent tons of time in the research library, in the collections, going into the galleries, walking the grounds, in the storage areas. Everything felt inspiring.”

The result of their research is reflected in a redesign of the West Galleries Lounge, part of the Transformationsinstallation of works by contemporary artists. Transformations highlights work by Winterthur’s Maker-Creator Fellows, who receive special access to the collections and staff for research and inspiration. The work in Transformationscelebrates how Winterthur’s landscape and material culture moved the Maker-Creator Fellows to turn their impressions of the past into artistic and experiential representations that comment on the present. 

In the lounge, usually furnished in a modern style, Hall painted a folk art mural of the Winterthur landscape with depictions of Canada geese, blossoming tree limbs, leaves, twigs, and other objects that found their way into their sketchbooks and photo library while they wandered the grounds. Hardison decorated the shelves with woodblocks carved with similar natural imagery to acknowledge their work as printmakers.

“It almost seemed too obvious that we would do wallpaper in there,” Hardison says. “What are the other options? And because we were so inspired by the grounds and some of the other things in the collection and given the theme of the exhibition, we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to build a mural with a similar kind of aesthetic.”

The effect is as pleasing as that in any Winterthur room where wallpaper—some patterned, some mural-like—plays a key role in the design. 

Among what the couple learned at Winterthur, “I was impressed that, for some, wallpaper was very much a prized possession,” Hardison says. “I was very surprised to find out how wallpaper was transported, as opposed to the removable and disposable stuff nowadays. These were prized works of art that people would have pulled back down, carefully packaged, shipped across the Atlantic, and then reinstalled. That was really interesting.”

A close look at the Chinese Parlor at Winterthur, for example, shows how highly regarded the wallpaper was by Winterthur founder Henry Francis du Pont. Made in the early 18th century, du Pont discovered the paper, unused, in a warehouse in Paris. It was so old and so beautiful, he couldn’t bear to cut it to fit the walls of his parlor, so he had the ceilings coved to accommodate its full length.

“One of the things that is so special about the Maker Creator Fellowship is that it makes the collections come alive,” Hall says. “Artists and designers can use the collection to make new things. These objects are meant to be renewed. Learning the history of wallpaper made us feel stronger and more confident in what we were doing. So much of what artists struggle with is that our work is not valued in the way other things are valued. We’re carrying on a tradition that has a history and lineage. It’s culture.”

Nottene’s work, as well as the work of the other Transformations artists, is currently on view. See their lounge design in the gallery of Outside In: Nature-inspired Design at Winterthur.