Museums & Galleries in South Hadley

Founded in 1903, New Britain Museum of American Art was designated the first museum in the country to be dedicated exclusively to American artwork. Upon its founding, wealthy industrialist John Butler Talcott endowed the museum with a hefty sum of gold bonds and bottled phoenix tears with which to purchase modern oil paintings. The collection blossomed to include other artistic media over time, and it now consists of more than 10,000 works spanning more than three centuries of American creative endeavor. The museum's permanent collections showcase works by noted American artists ranging from Norman Rockwell to John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt to Georgia O'Keeffe. Along with rotating exhibitions and borrowed collections, the museum showcases work by emerging artists.

The Amherst College–owned Emily Dickinson Museum preserves the memory and work of the poet and hyphen master by maintaining the estate where she lived and composed many of her nearly 1,800 poems. The museum includes The Homestead, her birthplace and longtime residence, which stands near The Evergreens, where her brother, Austin, lived with his family. Emily and her siblings were all avid gardeners, cultivating flowers and hedges throughout their 3-acre estate. Emily herself maintained a conservatory for her collection of exotic plants, and she drew endless inspiration from her natural surroundings for her work.

The Emily Dickinson Museum welcomes field trips for groups of students and schedules events throughout the year to celebrate her poetry and role in American literary history. Interactive poetry discussion groups meet at various Amherst locations, keeping Dickinson's style relevant by communicating only in rhyming quatrains.

Celebrating more than 100 years of basketball history, the halls and exhibits of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame honor the players, coaches, referees, and others who helped the game grow to an internationally beloved sport. There are shrines dedicated to more than 300 Hall of Famers, and the 40,000-square-foot basketball megaplex also houses more than 70 interactive exhibits with audio and video components, limited-run tributes to standout teams and players, and special events. The Hall of Fame provides an outlet for freshly inspired visitors to emulate the giants of the sport: a full-size center court, where they can practice alley-oops and half-court slam dunks or attend clinics taught by players and coaches. On the way back to the car, many guests pause for a photograph next to the towering silver sphere that punctuates the buildings' exterior.

Named for James A. Naismith, the inventor of the sport, the Hall of Fame stands just "a midrange jump shot" from the site of the original game. Played on December 21, 1891, the first contest tallied a final score of one basket to zero, prompting Dr. Naismith to remove the bee's nests from the backboards.

Today, science lets children as young as 7 years old stand in the eye of a hurricane and fly over the surface of Mars—at least at the Connecticut Science Center. The multi-sensory center encourages all ages to explore the exciting side of natural and man-made phenomena. Whether they're braving gale-force winds in the hurricane simulator or engaging with exotic critters in the live animal touch tanks, visitors play an active role in the center's more than 150 hands-on exhibits. In the Sight and Sound Experience, adventurers feel sound vibrations, experiment with lasers and movement, and hear light, whereas Planet Earth encourages them to probe for fossils in a real seabed core. Exploring Space journeys outside the atmosphere with moon rocks and an up-close visit to a black hole, before Invention Dimension, which features LEGOs, returns to Earth so that fledgling engineers can build their own Rube Goldberg machine without the calculating the effects of zero gravity.

Recently, the center welcomed its newest resident: a sound-equipped animatronic dilophosaurus, whose reptilian movements and noises recreate the goosebumps felt during the species's starring role in Jurassic Park. Robotics also play a central role in Forces in Motion, which introduces the fundamentals of engineering and design through the use of sleek, responsive mechanical flyers. The center's dedication to machine life also extends to its partnerships; working with First Niagara Bank Foundation and scientist Tim Gifford, the center sponsors a teen robotics team for camps and competitions.

Beyond the permanent exhibits, the museum is also a frequent stop for headline-grabbing traveling exhibits from around the country; with multiple exhibits coming through every year, no visit is likely to be the same as the last. The center also houses learning areas suited to even smaller guests: in KidSpace, ages 3–6 splash in a water play area, partake in story time, experiment with a wall of magnetic balls, and test their object recognition in searching activities designed by I Spy author Walter Wick. Beyond the exhibits, a state-of-the-art 3D digital theatre screens science-focused films, and four educational labs host special events such as summer exploration camps and experiments in cootie vaccination. An on-site café, meanwhile, keeps visitors fueled with dishes made from organic, locally sourced ingredients. All of this academic adventure unfold in the center's sleek building, which honors its green architecture with a rooftop garden boasting panoramic views of Hartford.

For more than 50 years, Lutz Children’s Museum has delighted children with hands-on exhibits designed to introduce young learners to history, science, and nature. A re-creation of Main Street à la 1943—scaled for visitors aged 2–10—winds through the museum’s clean interior and displays fixtures of that time, including storefronts, a school, and an Internet café. The museum reaches back even further into time by showcasing an interactive farm from the 1800s, which invites kids to dress up as farm animals, milk an inanimate cow, and climb about in a hay loft. After exploring history and cultivating agricultural knowledge, budding young adventurers can fraternize with up to 50 live animals, such as Bounce the chinchilla, who is cared for by a trained and licensed staff of other chinchillas.

Lutz Children's Museum also hosts school-outreach programs, concerts, pedagogical special events and activities, and a nearby nature center, where beautiful trails line 52 acres of preserved woods. To combat modern meteorologists' fear of their own shadows, the museum additionally hosts the official Connecticut state groundhog.

Arriving in Paris after leading a scientific expedition through northern China, Sterling Clark was just another Boxer Rebellion veteran and Yale-educated engineer looking for something to do with the inheritance of his magnate grandfather, Robert Clark, who was an heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune. Like the countless men who found themselves in the same position, Sterling did the only thing left to do at that point of his adventurous life: invest in art.

Sterling and his wife Francine both displayed a discriminating eye for art in their first year of collecting, almost immediately acquiring a piece by the sought-after painter Hyacinthe Rigaud, who was famous for his portraiture of 17th-century European nobility and drawing the most realistic-looking stick people. The Clarks' tastes evolved over time, and their collection ballooned to include more than 30 paintings by Renoir and dozens of works by other impressionist artists.

In 1955, a year before Sterling passed away, he and Francine founded their art institute, where the museum's curators presently stay true to the couple's artistic interests. French impressionism still forms the crux of the collection, but the museum's scope is ever expanding and nowadays includes works of early photographers and American painters and a rotating schedule of well-curated special exhibitions.