The Parrish Art Museum in Southhampton is out with a very cool publicity initiative: It’s wrapping the Hampton Jitney — the buses that take Manhattanites back and forth to the Hamptons — in works from its collection. The display begins today, with William Merritt Chase’s 1895 painting The Bayberry Bush (Chase Homestead in Shinnecock Hills).
This is an audience development initiative, as the Parrish — about to expand — is trying to promote awareness of its collection and exhibitions to Manhattanites. Good idea to start now, long before the new place opens in spring 2012.
Chase’s painting is described by the museum:
The pastoral scene, which features an Impressionist landscape inhabited by nineteenth-century ladies picking fruit from a bush, is blown up to more than ten times its original size and demonstrates the kinds of remarkable works, from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries that are included in the Parrish’s important collection.
The picture will change just four times a year, which means only a handful of works will get this treatment, alas. That has to have something to do with costs.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other museums have tried wrapping buses — in fact, I’d like to hear about any other examples, and the results. Did it stir interest, drive attendance, merit press coverage?
While we’re talking about the Parrish, let me give a shout out to its current exhibition, American Still Life: Treasures from the Parrish Art Museum, more than forty paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from 1871 to the present.
Photo: Courtesy of the Parrish Art Museum