Courtesy / Museum L-A
Rachel Ferrante
Updated: August 13, 2021
Museum L-A names former NYC museum staffer as new director
By William Hall
The new leader of a Maine museum devoted to Lewiston-Auburn’s working heritage comes from an institution geographically and perhaps culturally distant — the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
But Rachel Ferrante, who will succeed Audrey Thomson as executive director of Museum L-A on Sept. 7, is no stranger to the area.
“I went to college in Lewiston, and I met my husband here. I began my career as an intern at the Bates College Museum,” she said in a news release this week. “We have long felt that Maine was the place to raise our family and are thrilled to be returning to do that.”
Ferrante, 33, spent 10 years working at the Met, most recently as an exhibition manager. She also had stints in the museum’s marketing department and its office of the director. In addition to her Bates degree in art and visual culture, she holds an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Thomson said, “It’s been an honor to lead this very special museum. I know that the community will continue to support Museum L-A because the work that we do is so important. History is integral to this region’s identity, and the museum is the caretaker of that history.”
Museum L-A was founded in 1996, as production at the Bates Mill in Lewiston began to slow before closing in 2001. The museum started its collection by salvaging the machinery left behind when the mill operations ceased.
Inside the museum at 35 Canal St. in Lewiston, there are also now industrial artifacts, exhibits, portraits and oral histories of the men and women who worked in the area’s manufacturing sites.
“As the museum began to grow, there was a recognized need to tell not only the story of the textile mill workers, but also the workers from the shoe and brick industries that built the Lewiston-Auburn area,” the museum’s website reads.
Although they’ve faced difficult adjustments during the pandemic, like many Maine businesses, museums in the state may be seeing a renaissance.
Museum L-A has its eye on moving to new, larger digs at the former Camden Yarns mill site. The Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine in June opened its new, $15 million location on Thompson's Point in Portland. And the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor recently hired a new executive director, who’s working to expand the museum’s practices in documenting and interpreting Wabanaki history and experience.
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