New museum features modern art

As befits an art museum in Sussex County, the Skylands Museum of Art in Lafayette invites visitors to explore the connection between art and the natural world.

It features paintings and sculpture in stone, metal, glass and mixed media, with exhibits inside and outside.

The museum, which opened in October, was co-founded by Ailene Fields, a sculptor who lives in Andover and New York City, and Neil Zukerman, who died in 2021. He was a curator, author and owner of CFM Gallery in Manhattan.

Many of the works on display came from Zukerman’s personal collection.

The museum highlights works by Spanish surrealist artist Salvatore Dali and Leonor Fini, a surrealist painter born in Argentina who later worked in Milan and Paris. Zukerman was a friend of Fini for the last 18 years of her life and he wrote three books about her.

There are works by sculptor Frederick Hart, who created the piece known as “The Three Soldiers” at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and such living artists as painter Anne Bachelier, fantasy illustrator and conceptual designer Brian Froud, sculptor and puppet-maker Wendy Froud, printmaker and painter Charles Klabunde, and painter and sculptor Michael Parkes.

Marion Grzesiak, art historian and retired director of Jersey City Museum, said, “The Skylands Museum is a new, beautiful and well-thought-out nonprofit organization sure to gain interest as it becomes recognized as an important venue for American as well as international 20th- and 21st-century art focusing on Realism.

“Located in rural Sussex County, its 5,000 square feet of exhibition space boasts a solid collection of modern surrealism with a sizable group of works by Salvatore Dali and Leonor Fini.”

The museum, 15 Route 15, is open from noon to 4 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays and by appointment at other times.

Suggested admission fee is $10 per person.

For information, call 212-563-2044 or send email to info@skylandsmuseum.org

A brief tour

As visitors enter the museum, they are greeted by two rooms devoted to representations in sculpture and painting of fairy tales, many widely known and some less so.

Also on the first floor is a room filled with dragons that illustrate what it might feel like to have them as friendly companions.

A great room is populated by “sacred spaces” carved from stone that were born in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

On the second floor, one room houses sculptures and paintings of real animals.

Another is dedicated to artistic depictions of heads and flowers.

Still another focuses on the human psyche.

The Baba Yaga room is based on a Ukrainian fairy tale about a witch who lives in a house made of skulls who walks the forest on chicken feet. According to legend: “If one happens to enter her house, she assesses your worth and if she finds you worthy, she insures your future, But, if she does not find you worthy of success, your fate is less pleasant.”

The top floor is inhabited by mythological creatures and scenes where visitors will find famous characters from the fables of ancient Greece and Rome as well as Nordic and other cultures.