Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art

Masterworks began in 1987 as a project to find and bring home works painted in Bermuda by visiting artists and dispersed abroad, and it has assembled a collection that includes Winslow Homer, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and Albert Gleizes among others, all of whom worked here. The museum opened in a converted arrowroot factory in the Botanical Gardens in 2008 and also shows contemporary Bermudian work. Arrowroot was a Bermudian export crop in the nineteenth century and the factory that processed it stood empty for decades before the museum took it over and converted it.

History

Tom Butterfield founded Masterworks in 1987, and since 2008 it has been in the Bermuda Botanical Gardens in Paget Parish, in an arrowroot factory of the mid-1800s renovated between 2004 and 2008 into a museum of 16,000 square feet. Its permanent collection holds more than 1,600 works from the 1700s to the present, among them Winslow Homer, Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley alongside many Bermudian artists (Wikipedia, Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art).

What you'll find

• The repatriated collection - works of Bermuda brought back from abroad since 1987.
• The visiting artists - Homer, O'Keeffe, Demuth and others who painted here.
• The arrowroot factory - the converted building the museum occupies.
• The contemporary programme - changing exhibitions of Bermudian work.

When to go

Year round; it is indoors. It closes on Sundays and some public holidays. Exhibition changeovers can close galleries.

Practical notes

The collection is modest in size and a couple of hours covers it. It closes on Sundays. The star works are not always on display.

Nearby

The Botanical Gardens surround it, and Hamilton is north.

Key facts