Tools for thought In Liberty, ‘What Needs to Be Retrieved’ exhibit celebrates a blurred line between implements of work and works of art

Two types of people visit Liberty Tool Co.

First, there are tool users: machinists, construction crews, woodworkers, boat builders, repairmen. Every day, their hands are blackened by the grease and worn by the activity of routers, hammers, sanders, drills and files. When they walk into Liberty Tool Co., which stocks hundreds of thousands of used tools, they see materials for work.

Artists – painters, sculptors, photographers, poets – also show up in the store, which stocks, in addition to tools, oddball kitsch and memorabilia. When the artists walk into Liberty Tool, they see shapes and forms, textures and types, colors and shading. In other words: material for art.

The combination of tools and art, as well as the cultural significance of both, is the subject of an exhibition at Davistown Museum, located across the street from Liberty Tool Co. in Liberty, a small hamlet about midway between Belfast and Augusta. “What Needs to Be Retrieved: The Marriage of Tools, Art & History,” which runs through the fall, juxtaposes contemporary art with historically significant tools that are part of the museum’s permanent collection. The title comes from Philip Booth’s poem “Eaton’s Boatyard” about making a life and living from seemingly useless clutter.

Designed to feature newer works – compared to the age of the average tool in the inventory – the Davistown show mingles with the museum’s modest but impressive collection of art, including photographs and paintings by George Daniell, pottery by Squidge Davis, and other paintings by less familiar but still accomplished artists. Adventurous visitors will view the second floor and then wander onto the top floor to see other artworks, visit the library or stop for refreshments in the museum’s recently opened cafe.

But the central attraction draws lines between the materials of industrial labor – tools – and the fruits of aesthetic impulse – art. The tool part dates back to American Indians. The art is by some of Maine’s best known artists, such as Alan Magee and Philip Barter, as well as by Bangor’s Annaliese Jakimides and other Maine-based artists including David McLaughlin, John Whalley, Donna Just and Melita Westerlund.

“Warrior” is a rusty wrench made into a war pendant and encased by a red box by Margo Klass. Jaye Schlesinger’s “Conversation,” a pastel work on paper, realistically depicts a grip and a coat hook in positions that make them seem to be whispering to one another. And Alan Magee’s “Diary” takes its name from the telling layers of color left on a paint scraper.

“When I am engrossed in making a piece, it becomes just a color palette or a handful of clay that happens to be there,” said artist Roger Majoriwicz in a panel discussion about participating in the show. “To me, they are verticals and not drill bits.”

Tools and art: Are the happily married in this show?

“A lot of very average tools make very interesting art,” said H.G. Brack, who is know to everyone as “Skip.” He is the founder and curator of the museum, and the proprietor of Jonesport Wood Company, the umbrella organization for Liberty Tool, as well as Hulls Cove Tool Barn on Mount Desert Island and Captain Tinkham’s Emporium in Searsport. He and his wife, Judith Bradshaw Brown, have been known to stay overnight in one of the museum’s seemingly endless number of hidden rooms.

“I sell tools to artists, and they’ve taught me a lot about tools as art,” said Brack.

As if to prove that point, his own assemblage pieces pepper the display area.

“These are things I find,” he said of the found-object works. “I don’t weld. I don’t make. My specialty is interactive environments. My most famous piece is Liberty Tool.”

Brack, who has collected and sold tools since the 1970s, has the look of an old hippie: bearded, Birkenstocked and balding. He wears jeans and suspenders, taught literature, protested the war, dodged the draft, and then moved a driftwood and bauble business from California to Jonesport. There was no money in those trades Down East. “Driftwood did not do well,” he said. So he turned to tools. “It was practical,” he said. “And it sold.” Within a year, business was booming.

These days, Brack doesn’t make a killing on tools, but he has, for 35 years, remained interested in the cultural history they represent and the art they spawn. His is a shoestring budget financing a passionate calling.

He curated the show to call attention to the “phenomenology of tools,” which is another way of saying Brack likes to look at tools as a way to interpret the world. It’s much like archeologists and anthropologists who use artifacts and material culture – arrowheads, pottery, jewelry – to reveal the past. Brack’s collection does, indeed, include a few artifacts from the earliest Americans, but mostly his tools say something about Maine and New England’s maritime culture.

Lately, his work has extended from phenomenology to iconography, which is where the art comes in.

“I sell tools to artists and they’ve taught me a lot about tools as art,” said Brack, who also runs the Davistown Museum Center for the Study of Early Tools. “The art has expanded my awareness of tools.”

Judith Bradshaw Brown, an educator who has organized the outreach arm of the museum, likes to say of her husband’s tool fixation: “It’s like a mania, only healthy.”

“What Needs to Be Retrieved: The Marriage of Tools, Art & History” can bee seen daily throughout the summer and on weekends only in the fall at the Davistown Museum, 58 Main St., in Liberty across from Liberty Tool Co. The show runs through Oct. 10. For museum hours, call 589-4900 or visit www.davistownmuseum.org.