Millbrook Art Center's Summer Exhibition Explores the City's Industrial Past

MILLBROOK, June 11 — The Millbrook Art Center opened its most ambitious summer exhibition to date on Friday evening, drawing a crowd of nearly 300 to the opening reception on Cortland Boulevard. The show, titled "Shift Change: Memory, Labor, and the Millbrook Mills," features work by 14 regional artists responding to the city's century-long textile and metalworking history — an era that reshaped the city's demographics, built its middle class, and then largely vanished between 1978 and 1995 when most of the mills closed. Curator Priya Vasan spent two years developing the exhibition with input from former mill workers and their families.

Art That Asks You to Touch Things

The exhibition is notably tactile and interactive for a fine art setting. One installation by sculptor Dana Breck invites visitors to handle reproductions of tools recovered from the shuttered Hartley Metalworks on the south side. Another piece, a large-scale photographic triptych by James Osei, layers archival images of mill workers over contemporary portraits of their grandchildren taken in the same neighborhoods. There is also a listening station where visitors can hear oral history recordings gathered from 31 former employees of the Calloway Textile Plant, which closed in 1991. "We didn't want this to feel like a history lesson," Vasan said at the opening. "We wanted it to feel like a conversation that's been waiting to happen."

Exhibition Details

Shift Change runs through August 17 at the Millbrook Art Center, 220 Cortland Blvd. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is $8 general, $5 for students and seniors, and free for children under 12. A public panel discussion featuring artists and former mill workers is scheduled for July 9 at 6 p.m. and is free to attend. The Art Center is also partnering with the Millbrook Public Library to host a companion display of original archival photographs throughout the summer.