Letter from America Autumn 2025

By FoMA member and travel writer Christopher Deliso

Should you be visiting Massachusetts, don’t miss The Icon Museum and Study Center, an hour’s drive west of Boston in the quiet town of Clinton. Having opened in 2006 as The Museum of Russian Icons, the institution has since expanded its strategic vision to include a diversity of provenances (currently, Byzantine, Greek and Ethiopian icons number among its thousand-strong collection). The museum is also an excellent spot for cultural events, hosting occasional concerts, and can support iconography and art history students seeking to learn from its collection of sacred art and three-thousand books (many, hard to find outside of Europe).

I recently visited to better understand the museum’s exhibits, capacities for visitors, and plans for future gallery showings and special events. As the year 2026 will mark its twentieth year of activity, the museum is preparing several important events, to culminate in an international academic conference next October.

Among these exciting events is a new permanent exhibition (starting 16October 2025) of around forty Greek icons painted post-1453 and  displaying the unique fusion of Byzantine and Renaissance styles common the Venetian period. This major achievement is the result of academic institutional cooperation, long-term loans and donations from private collectors.

Two further upcoming exhibitions are similarly collaborative. First, running from 27 February-30 August 2026, the Icon Museum and Study Center will hold an exhibition in cooperation with the Oleg Kushnirskiy Russian Icon Collection—an exhibition entitled Icons: Old Believer and Their World. The second collaborative exhibit, Icons: Divine Beauty, organized with Germany’s Ikonen-Museum Recklinghausen, will feature thirty exemplary Byzantine, Greek, Cretan and Russian icons of the 15^th-19^th centuries. It will run from 16 October 2025-29 March 2026.

The museum occupies a three-level 19^th-century building with wide halls and galleries, with the displayed icons being well-lit. The entrance is on a flat and quiet central street, while stairs and an elevator access the various levels, making the museum accessible for most visitors. The building’s previous incarnation includes an erstwhile courthouse and police barracks from the 1850s, on the lower level where the auditorium and educational hall now stand. The barracks’ intimate brick-walled jail cells have become rather gentrified; now; they serve as study nooks, complete with modern desks, smooth lighting and Wi-Fi.

Among the first sacred art greeting me after entering were two bright, immaculately preserved icons by 16^th-century painter Georgios Klontzas, part of the upcoming Greek permanent collection. Other galleries revealed a tiny liturgical book (handwritten in 1831 by a Russian monk, as a spiritual labor), and enormous and vivid Russian icons. And there was the exhibition of George Kordis (26 June-14 September 2025), whose distinctive work embraces light tones and sparks a conversation on the definition of Orthodox iconography generally.

My guides were museum director Simon Morsink and the museum’s registrar, Laura Garrity-Arquitt. Their enthusiasm for their work and knowledge of it were obvious; comments on the subtle gradations of a centuries-old painting’s chosen hues, or informed responses to my questions about the auction world and processes of icon authentication made my day-trip a very rewarding experience.

Fascinating too was the story of how museum founder (Clinton plastics industrialist Gordon B. Lankton, 1931-2020) became interested in icons, while expanding his business to Russia soon after the Cold War. After two decades of dedicated collecting, Lankton chose to create a museum for the people of Clinton and the international scholarly community—a remarkable story of both community development and inter-cultural relations.

Since its 2006 founding, the museum has achieved two further decades of successful exhibitions and scholarly research projects. Now, it is embarking on a dynamic expansion of topical remit that its founder could scarcely have imagined when purchasing that very first simple icon of St. Nicholas, at Moscow’s Izmailovsky Market in the early 1990s.

Director Morsink apprised me of the museum’s new strategic plan for the future, underlining that the little museum is “a unique place, the only specialized museum in the United States.” Unlike universities and other museums that might have smaller icon collections (often, kept in storage) “we are focusing solely on icons.”

In the library, the museum’s registrar showed me two objects of Athonite provenance: an 18^th-century carved boxwood blessing cross, and a triptych featuring carved prophets and the Tree of Jesse. She added that now is “a very exciting time” for scholars visiting the museum, owing to the rarity of many of their volumes, and the fact that this library is now on WorldCat, in cooperation with the College of the Holy Cross in nearby Worcester, MA.

The Icon Museum and Study Center is thus in a unique position to gauge trends and developments in Orthodoxy, according to movements in sacred art. For example, Garrity-Arquitt recalled their 2021 commissioning of fifteen icons from fifteen different contemporary Orthodox cultures, an experience that “provided a really exciting look at where Orthodoxy is today.” One commissioned piece used no paint, but only crushed rocks and minerals for color. In the bigger historical picture, noting continuity and change in cases like 17^th century Russian iconography, the Old Believers movement, and the shifting preferences of Byzantine and post-Byzantine Greek icons, the registrar concludes that “new styles are nothing new.”

The museum’s role as a mediator in the visual arts at an experiential level, for not only people within the Orthodox faith, but also academic specialists and even those without any awareness of it, makes its presence here in a small Massachusetts town all the more remarkable. Seeing the museum in action, and listening to its enthusiastic experts at work, I could feel their sense of vocation at presenting the ongoing story of Orthodox sacred art for all three types of visitors. “It’s a story that’s almost two-thousand years old,” Director Morsink attests, “and a story that has to be told.”

TRIP DETAILS

The Icon Museum and Study Center

Address: 203 Union Street, Clinton, MA 01510

Hours of operation: Thursday-Sunday, 10am-4pm

–For driving directions, ticket price categories, and other information including museum membership, see the relevant webpage here: https://www.iconmuseum.org/plan-your-visit/