RepGuardian

Lowell, Massachusetts, is where the Industrial Revolution really took hold in the United States in the 19th Century.  Known as the Mill City, Lowell in the 21st Century now features a National Historic Park, turning several mill buildings into museums that thoroughly explores that historical era.  You’ll find such museums as the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, which explores the Boott Mills and its one hundred and twenty year life, which ended in 1955 (you’ll find here original mill equipment, allowing visitors to both feel the vibrations of these machines and hear their constant, thrumming roar).  While the American Textile History Museum is currently closed to the public, you can certainly see the National Streetcar Museum as well as the New England Quilt Museum.
 
More interesting to me, though, is the Revolving Museum in Lowell.  This facility is designed to be a kind of “evolving laboratory of creative expression,” intended to serve people in different ages and abilities and backgrounds.  The idea is to allow people to express themselves and experience art’s power as an experience of transformation.  How is this done?  By exhibiting public art displays, both at the Museum and other locations, using educational programs, working with Lowell’s residents and students.  Just three years ago, in 2007, the Revolving Museum won the Massachusetts Culture Council Commonwealth Award, an award intended to honor how the Museum integrates the arts, the sciences, and the humanities in Lowell. 
 
The museum’s founder, Jerry Beck, operates from the principle that “art can be made anywhere at anytime with anybody.”  At first, the Revolving Museum was centered in Boston, some thirty miles away from Lowell, from 1984 to 2002, moving from location to location. Finally, the museum made a permanent home in Lowell in the historic Lowell Gas & Light building, constructed in 1859.  Since its time in Lowell, only a few years, the museum has held fifteen major exhibition, promoting social values with Lowell’s youth as it does so. 
 
If you should happen to stay in one of Lowell’s hotels, take the time to check out this intriguing museum and its work for the community.

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