A Day Trip to See the Stars in “DayDream” at Berkshire Botanical Garden

The rich, whimsical summer group exhibition—featuring works from Annie Leibovitz to Jamie Wyeth—offers a gentle promise of seasonal renewal and hope.

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By Stephen Wozniak

DayDream
Curated by James Salomon
June 6–August 11, 2025
Berkshire Botanical Garden
5 W. Stockbridge Road
Stockbridge, MA 01262
Telephone: (413) 298-3926
Website: BerkshireBotanical.org

“Hope is a waking dream.”
― Aristotle

EXCERPT

Under a twinkling of stars and an amethyst night sky, three unexpected faces look out through the luminous windshield of a muscular, chrome-grilled Chrysler featured in Jamie Wyeth’s painting, Child Dream. One of them appears to be driving, the other two are passengers. As Wyeth tells the story of the piece, he dreamt that he and his brother played a game spotting seagulls on a family road trip to Maine for an annual vacation. When the Wyeths pulled up to a diner for a meal after driving all day, the boys set eyes on the grand car behind them and discovered that—instead of people—seagulls rode inside. Of course, Wyeth felt it “mandatory to paint” this surrealist scene of surrogates before the dream faded away from whence it came. This, and over forty other fanciful works on view in the new summer group exhibition “DayDream,” will take you inside the many meditative states of each artist represented—not only through vibrant visual forms but in analogous poetry and prose, too, as I learned when I picked up the intriguing companion catalog before seeing the show.