Cape Ann Museum Opens 'This Other Eden' on November 14: 60 Photographs of Stage Fort Park in Gloucester
The Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts, opened the special exhibition 'This Other Eden' on Saturday, November 14, at its Pleasant Street campus, showing 60 photographs taken over the past few years by photographer Anne Rearick.
The photographs were made at Stage Fort Park in Gloucester. The exhibition runs through March 21, 2027. The 60-acre oceanfront park is home to a historic settlement begun more than 400 years ago, along with beaches, picnic tables, shaded trees, enormous granite boulders, and a visitor center with rocking chairs on its expansive water-facing porch. The park has been open to the public since 1898.
Rearick is an award-winning documentary photographer. In the park she captured quiet moments by the sea as well as festive times when families gather to picnic, including weddings, historical reenactments, concerts, and visitors from many immigrant communities. On one day she came upon a group of Afghan men who had worked with the American military in Afghanistan, gathered on rugs on the rocks with a feast, and they invited her to join them.
Rearick said the families who trusted her with their photographs came from Syria, Puerto Rico, Palestine, the Dominican Republic, Türkiye, Afghanistan, and Guatemala, among other places. She wrote that nearly everyone she asked agreed to be photographed, at a time when immigrants fear being targeted by ICE and deported.
Museum Director Oliver Barker said Stage Fort Park is a familiar landscape of recreation, respite, and gathering at the edge of the sea, and that through Rearick's work the park becomes a lens for considering stories of place and the people who shape it, including questions of belonging, displacement, and shared space.
Rearick, a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, teaches photography at the Cambridge School of Weston and has published eight books of documentary work, including extended projects in the French Basque country and post-apartheid South Africa. She has lived in Gloucester for nearly 30 years.
The exhibition's title comes from Shakespeare's 'Richard II,' in which John of Gaunt on his deathbed calls his beloved England 'this other Eden.' Rearick wrote that the photographs are her love letter to a place that belongs to everyone.
Source: Cape Ann Museum
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于马萨诸塞州 Gloucester 的 Cape Ann Museum 建筑外观。来源：Daderot, CC0，维基共享资源。 / Photo: The Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Credit: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
