The rich, whimsical summer group exhibition—featuring works from Annie Leibovitz to Jamie Wyeth—offers a gentle promise of seasonal renewal and hope.
DayDream
Curated by James Salomon
June 6–August 11, 2025
Berkshire Botanical Garden
5 W. Stockbridge Road
Stockbridge, MA 01262
Telephone: (413) 298-3926
Website: BerkshireBotanical.org
“Hope is a waking dream.”
― Aristotle
Under a twinkling of stars and an amethyst night sky, three unexpected faces look out through the luminous windshield of a muscular, chrome-grilled Chrysler featured in Jamie Wyeth’s painting, Child Dream. One of them appears to be driving, the other two are passengers. As Wyeth tells the story of the piece, he dreamt that he and his brother played a game spotting seagulls on a family road trip to Maine for an annual vacation. When the Wyeths pulled up to a diner for a meal after driving all day, the boys set eyes on the grand car behind them and discovered that—instead of people—seagulls rode inside. Of course, Wyeth felt it “mandatory to paint” this surrealist scene of surrogates before the dream faded away from whence it came. This, and over forty other fanciful works on view in the new summer group exhibition “DayDream,” will take you inside the many meditative states of each artist represented—not only through vibrant visual forms but in analogous poetry and prose, too, as I learned when I picked up the intriguing companion catalog before seeing the show.
In that catalog, I noticed a thread woven through most of the artist statements that pondered the show’s title. Many of the “DayDream” participants alluded to their freewheeling formative years—that time when we played vigorously, our imaginations ran wild, and we rendered whimsy into shape. Like artist Marc Dennis, who reveled in sandboxes, fantasized the friendships of mice and sparrows, and “drew every day.” Artist John Gordon Gauld described his periodic pause from past broken home life by escaping into the forest, where he “would build a wall of pine needles like a fortress around” him, lying down, staring into the beauty of the night sky. And Donna Cooper wrote of an imagined ritual dance with fire—that striking, powerful, primary element—performed “for survival, for communion, for the sheer force of being alive.” Almost all ground their daydreams in our knitted natural world: that honest, bare, brutal, and inescapable place, “before fences, before borders, before names were carved into deeds,” as Cooper described. So, it is a suitable setting that the Berkshire Botanical Garden hosts the work of these and over three dozen superlative fine art makers of today and the latter twentieth century—from celebrated photographer Annie Leibovitz to minimalist painter Ellsworth Kelly.
Most of the works in the show are staggered salon style on the low white drywall and rustic wooden panels in the gallery. While this isn’t my favorite format to view art, here it helps to create an intimate, enjoyable, yet almost raucous dialogue among the works. Seeing Richard Pasquarelli’s Disturbance No. 12, a thought-provoking, minimal, perfectly square painting of a single green weed breaking out of a gray concrete grid, near Cynthia Wick’s fuzzy, washed, wonderous landscape of abstracted floral pink orbs in The Singing Bowl, was a loose study in high contrasts, making me marvel at each artist’s path to present the freedom nature embodies in their works.
There are some remarkable sculptural pieces in the show that beautifully break this traditional two-dimensional display form. Michele Oka Doner’s Terrible Chair, a glowing gilded seat of thorns, draws my eyes away from the wall works into the open gallery space, reminding me that there is no rest for the wicked—or even the obedient, like me. So, I heed the call and keep moving outside to the garden where I see Yoko Ono’s hopeful Wish Tree, from 1996/2025. Paper garment tags hang on a crabapple tree, its branches swaying in the breeze ever so slightly. The site-specific piece is completed by visitors to the garden, who inscribe their dreams upon the tags. The piece offers a parallel between the slow but steady growth of the tree and the humble-to-high hopes of each distinct participant.
The space to dream has waned of late, flooded by the continuous tide of digital clutter in a world where each news headline seems to steal another piece of our freedom. “DayDream,” nestled in the quiet grace of nature, on the other hand, feels like a necessary balm for the life we live today—perhaps offering a gentle promise of renewal reflected seasonally in such sanctuaries as the Berkshire Botanical Garden. A conscious journey to a place like this, away from the confines of city living—with its slavish workloads, congested commutes, and high velocity survival activity—will, I predict, help to sensitize our often-abated need for wonder and beauty. Of course, they are not solutions to life’s prolific problems but shows like “DayDream” help greatly: granting splendor, instilling possibility.
To really spend time with and enjoy these wondrous works in their wild element (well, in the Berkshire’s Leonhardt Galleries), I’d plan—like the Wyeth family—to make a trip of it. A leisurely two-hour drive from Boston will get you to the Garden by mid-morning to take a guided tour of seasonally blooming floral beds and lively topiary collections. Then, you can check out the “DayDream” exhibition in its entirety and later sit for some sweets or a savory late lunch at the Lost Lamb around the corner.
Sounds (looks and tastes) like living the dream to me.
“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
― Henry David Thoreau
