Heidi Brake Smith Celebrating the New Bruce

Heidi Brake Smith,

by Greenwich Sentinel | By Anne W. Semmes

Heidi Brake Smith is much invested in her community of Greenwich. She’s brought her personal interest in public spaces – “how they function, how people react in public spaces,”  to the Bruce Museum. She had a vision for developing downtown Greenwich into a cultural center in her work with the Greenwich Center for the Arts, thus was drawn to realizing “the transformative project” of the New Bruce. She Co-Chairs the Campaign for the New Bruce Committee, along with fellow Trustee John Ippolito and Museum Council Co-Chair Susan Mahoney.

“Museums have the ability to bring people together,” Smith says, “of all ages, all backgrounds, all interests into a public space that brings joy, or understanding of the science, or exploration, or artistic endeavors under one roof. The New Bruce will make a very big difference to downtown Greenwich as a whole, and also the region.”

 “This new Museum ties to the existing Bruce Park and the downtown area coming off of Steamboat Road. People who are on lower Greenwich Avenue will realize that the Bruce is very close. It’s a visual link on what is a continuous street that has been bifurcated by the railroad and the highway that feels like two sections. The New Bruce has this ability of joining those areas.”

Smith shows a downtown schematic of how the Bruce sits in the center of a circle of surrounding streets. What the New Bruce brings, she says, “is that it’s walkable. It’s reachable. The New Bruce building project re-orients the entrance toward Bruce Park and creates a much more accessible Museum.

“Visitors will enter straight into the Museum’s public spaces from this new, ‘park level.’ They can then either take the elevator or the stairs to the galleries, which will open up a lot of opportunities for people who struggle in the physical format of the Museum today. From a functionality point of view, this takes the Museum to where it should be as a public institution.”

Wherever Smith travels, she visits public spaces. “They are the front door to a community,” she says. “You begin to understand what people are interested in in those communities, what they value.” What amazed her on a recent museum visit in her travels was seeing “multi-generations on a Saturday morning getting excited about an exhibition. Most people play sports on a Saturday morning, and it was teeming with little kids in strollers and parents. Those kids want to go every week. And when you see that kind of excitement, you’re like – those are special places.”

“A museum fits lots of people at different points in time,” says Smith. Her two grown children, she shares, had much benefited from the Bruce. “There are times in your life that you’re very active in your local community, and times when your kids are little and you go to Tod’s Point. Then they’re older, and you’re at the sports field.” But as she viewed recently at the Bruce, “on a super-hot, or rainy day – guess what? They’re at the Bruce!” 

Smith believes, “As a community member it is important to support our greatest assets. We have seen this time and time again that Greenwich stands on its beach, Tod’s Point, on the Byram Park and Pool, the Greenwich Hospital. When you have those key institutions that are strong, that are resilient, that keep up with state-of-the-art technology, that are ready for the next 50 to 100 years in their programming, those institutions, those intangibles, benefit everybody. It’s a sense of pride for someone to say, ‘I live in Greenwich,’ and, someone else says, ‘Oh, I hear you have a really beautiful Museum!’” 

Cricket and Jim Lockhart Champion the Bruce Museum, Greenwich Sentinel | Anne W. Semmes

Jim and Cricket Lockhart

At the Bruce Museum, Cricket and Jim Lockhart are often cited as one of the Museum’s “first families.” Their love for the Bruce is shared by their Greenwich children and grandchildren. On a recent visit, their oldest grandson, age seven, was fascinated by the Museum’s annual iCreate exhibition of work by high school artists. “He was looking at each painting, analyzing each, picking out his favorite, and wanting to know how old the artist was,” notes Grandfather Jim. Treated to a requested pad and colored pencils from the Museum store, “He was drawing in the car going home.” 

Museum-going is a Lockhart legacy. Cricket had grandparents living near the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Every trip to see them brought a tour of the Met. When visiting his Westchester-based grandparents, Jim was taken to the Bruce. “It’s in the blood,” he notes. “We’ve lived in a lot of different places, and we’ve always gone to museums.” 

Today, Jim serves as the Chair of the Museum’s Board of Trustees, while Cricket serves on the Campaign for the New Bruce Committee and is one of the Co-Chairs of the Campaign launch event, Bruce ConsTRUCKS on Sunday, September 8, a community-wide celebration of the Museum’s transformative renovation and construction project. They are both championing the giant step the Bruce is taking in its expansion. 

“It’s the aesthetics,” says Cricket. “You’re going to have it looking out toward the Sound – the entrance, with a big sculpture pathway.” 

“We’re going to have much larger permanent art galleries – in fact, four of them,” adds Jim, “and one big giant changing gallery so we’ll be able to do larger-scale exhibitions. We’ll be able to fill that up with the many great art collections in Town that are being promised. Expanding the science wing will be extremely important as well.”

“It is very rare to have a combination science and art museum,” cites Cricket. “We’re fortunate to have a dual mission like that, with all the educational elements combined.”

“The core of the Museum is education,” notes Jim, “because that’s where we’re really helping the community, not just Greenwich, but Westchester, all of Fairfield County, and New York City, too. We have about 25,000 kids come through a year. We’re hoping to double that with a much expanded education area.”

“We are going to have a whole new program called Engineering Tomorrow, an incredible engineering program for high school students,” says Cricket, “It’s a first of its kind.” 

“But there are also programs for children as young as age two; programs for people of all abilities, people with memory loss and their caretakers. So, it’s a very comprehensive program that the Bruce has, and they’re going to enhance it tremendously. Then we have the Brucemobile program that goes out to schools and also the Bruce’s Seaside Center at Greenwich Point Park, which is absolutely amazing.”

Meanwhile, the Lockhart’s daughter, Grace Djuranovic, is cultivating a younger generation of Museum members, the Bruce Contemporaries. “It’s growing by leaps and bounds,” says Cricket. “They already have 85 members. They tour people’s collections, they do crawls of different galleries on Greenwich Avenue and in Stamford, and support the Seaside Center’s science and natural history programs with ‘Sips on the Sound,’ a wonderful event each summer.”

“I’ve always loved the science,” says Jim. “Our Science Curator, Dr. Daniel Ksepka, has done a great job, and his plans for the new science galleries are going to be really good.” 

“He’s doing an installation from the Ice Age in the new permanent science gallery,” notes Cricket, “What this area looked like, going back in time. They’ll have dioramas – very student- and child-friendly. It’s going to be tremendously interactive.” 

“It gets kids away from their little iPads. It’s not only history and science. It’s civilization. Things that are new and contemporary,” says Cricket. “We’re even going to have a feathered dinosaur,” adds Jim. 

“If you wander through here in the morning, you see these kids listening to someone explain the painting, or something in science, the shark exhibition at the moment, and the kids really love it. That’s the next generation. That’s what a lot of our donors are looking at, the idea of an expanded education opportunity here.”