Visions of the Vernacular: Architecture in the Masterworks Collection in the Butterfield Gallery. Until September 12.

Bermuda’s built landscapes are on view in the Butterfield Gallery at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art. Visions of the Vernacular: Architecture in the Masterworks Collection opened in May.

The exhibit draws from the museum’s permanent collection to highlight significant works not often on view. Exhibition curators, Sara Thom and Max Grainge, use the topic of Bermudian architectural singularity to display paintings, photographs, and posters by both native and visiting artists.

Such a “collection” show allows Masterworks to offer fresh artistic perspectives on the museum’s holdings. As Thom describes, these periodic exhibitions allow the museum to “show as much of its art as possible, through a new lens each time”.

The architectural lens used in this show goes beyond the customary presentation of picturesque cottages set within the landscape to focus more explicitly on architectural design.

By doing so, Thom and Grainge have considered not only the stepped-roof or moon gate, but also the social function of architecture and its relationship with the natural environment.

Visions of the Vernacular, therefore, reveals how Bermudian architecture is distinctly Bermudian, in both form and function. As a result, the exhibit provides novel insights about the island’s architecture, even though the forms themselves are so readily recognisable.

Thom and Grainge conceived of the curatorial framework as small groups of paintings, or ensembles, arranged to highlight particular forms, such as shutters, verandas, chimneys, and, of course, the characteristic white roofs.

As an introduction to these ensembles, the visitor is greeted at the gallery entrance by a group of works by Bermudian artist Bruce Stuart, who died at his home in Mexico in 2025.

His paintings of Bermuda include works from the 1980s and 1990s, which, according to Grainge, “are hybrid, combining naturalistic depictions of well-known houses with something more expressive, incorporating even a surrealist or magic realist element”.

The most recent work by Stuart, called 39 Steps, represents his later style, intensely colourful and abstract. Seen together, they introduce the viewer to multiple artistic responses to the same Bermudian environment.

Joining the homage to Stuart in the gallery’s entryway are two groups of paintings that consider how architecture responds to the natural environment to generate a particular Bermudian aesthetic.

There is Adolph Treidler’s iconic travel poster showing one of the island’s distinctive butteries in the distance, framed by oleander blossoms in the foreground.

In House with Rock Garden by Houghton Cranford Smith, the white roof grows out of the surrounding flora, like an outcropping of limestone.

The remainder of the exhibition concentrates on one of several elements represented by ensembles, including works by artists from a variety of backgrounds and time periods.

In the “Chimney” ensemble, Ashley House by William Chadwick from 1922 reveals the monumentality of the architectural form, a rising vertical visually transitioning between the island's palmetto trees and its descending rooflines.

By investigating individual forms, Thom and Grainge uncover contextual information about the development of Bermudian architecture.

“Historians don’t know why these chimneys started so big,” Grainge said. “They were huge.” Chadwick’s chimney is contrasted against others, including a rare painting by Florence Fish, revealing both the consistency and divergence in their appearance.

In Sharon Muhammad’s Old Devonshire Church, from 1998, the walls of the island become the focus. The white, limestone brick becomes a canvas for nature’s shadows, here another palmetto tree.

Like Tom Moore’s Tavern or Bridge House, pictured by Charles Lloyd Tucker in 1960, Muhammad depicts an iconic building, although the exhibition is less concerned with precise location and more with architectural practice.

This is apparent in the ensemble dedicated to shutters, where the function of the ubiquitous green-slatted forms translates into visual patterns. In works by Judith Mann and George Ault, the similarity between the foliage and the hue of the shutters demonstrates visual cohesion.

In Karen Kuleyk’s painting, Bermuda Window-View from Jalousie from 1997, she refers to the “jalousie”, a type of shutter common throughout the West Indies. The Bermudian depictions, like Kuleyk’s, show how they also function as porous barriers between the interior and the exterior.

Thom and Grainge investigate images of transitional space, between inside and outside, in the ensemble dedicated to verandas and porches.

Thom described how the exhibit reconsiders these spaces as both public and private, allowing a visual accessibility to visiting artists.

Grainge continued: “These spaces allowed the artist’s gaze to permeate the domestic space, and these works call attention to their gaze as much as the structures.”

In contrast to the accessibility the veranda allowed, the ensemble featuring walls illustrates how the increased desire for privacy during the Victorian Age, when, as Grainge described it: “Bermudians built additional barriers between themselves and their neighbours.”

Ogden Minton Pleissner’s 1950 watercolour Silk Alley depicts just such a boundary. The naturalistic stone texture integrates into the landscape and architecture and adds another social dimension to the image.

“Artists were observing these beautiful houses and capturing these details, but we also have some images that make it seem that the artist feels a bit excluded.”

Other times, the barrier is a more elaborate and ornate visual statement, as it is in Norman Irving Black’s Old Butterfield Gates from 1910. Thom explained: “When you take these forms, they become so iconic of the island, showing how essential the interaction between architecture and culture is here.”

The dialogue between the painted image and the lived environment resonates through the structures carefully curated by Thom and Grainge.

For younger visitors to the gallery, Kimberly Fisher has installed an architectural environment on the mezzanine level. Here, hands-on activities involving building, seeing, and play punctuate the visual study below.

In essence, this collection exhibition delivers a fresh view on what we see and how we live.

“The idea is not to just feature paintings as things,” Thom said. “We wanted to talk about artists saying something about how the culture of the place is forming these structures and how it speaks to the artist, creating a cultural dialogue between place and art.”