Museum livens up its image-New sculpture exhibition geared toward families.

The circus will spend the summer at Fruitlands Museum in Harvard as part of the museum's 90th anniversary year. The clowns, ring master, juggler, program barker, trapeze artist, lion, seal -- 25 pieces in all -- were created by Linda Hoffman of Harvard from objects such as fallen trees, hay, stones, fencing, and old farm implements.

The sculpture exhibition, Fruitlands' first, will open on June 18 with a reception for invited guests, including all Harvard residents. Most of the pieces will be scattered in the yard outside the museum's old farmhouse where "Little Women" author Louisa May Alcott lived briefly as a child; the other eight sculptures will be inside the building

"So often people have the perception that we don't change because we are a history museum," said Joanne Myers, director of education. "This is an opportunity to see something very new, different, unexpected, and whimsical."

The exhibition is just one way the museum is infusing freshness and vitality into its focus on the land and the inspiration it has provided. New Englanders and their land are common threads connecting the diverse exhibitions displayed in four separate buildings and two outdoor areas. The sculpture garden has been added temporarily to the mix.

"We chose Linda because her work is so much about the land," said Maud Ayson, Fruitlands director. "We look at the historical relationship between people and the land, and her work just epitomizes that."

It would be hard to ignore the land at Fruitlands. The museum buildings are on 210 acres on Prospect Hill, and there is an unobstructed 35-mile view of trees and gently rolling terrain.

"The view kind of stops you in your socks. You just go, 'whoa,' " said Kim Becker of Ayer, who serves on a volunteer advisory board. "The land is the first thing you see. It kind of hooks you, and then you discover what Fruitlands is about."

One of the museum's taglines has been, "The view is just the beginning," Becker said. However, explaining what comes after the view is tricky and one of the tasks the museum has been tackling recently. "The funny, hard thing about Fruitlands is there's no one descriptive word for it," she said. "It's a museum of art, history, and landscape."

The name "Fruitlands" was coined by a group of town-dwelling transcendentalist philosophers, including the Alcotts, who moved to the countryside in a failed attempt to live off the fruits of the land. Louisa May Alcott was 10 in 1843 when her family moved to the rented farmhouse, which was built around 1700. After seven months, the Alcotts gave up and moved in with another family nearby. They eventually relocated to Concord."They were looking for a better way of life," Myers said. "They believed everything you needed to know was inside you, and if you were in the right environment, it would come out."

Clara Endicott Sears, a wealthy Bostonian and arts patron who also enjoyed doing her own landscape photography and watercolor paintings, bought Fruitlands in 1910. Sears wintered in Boston and summered in a house at Fruitlands that has since been razed.

"She was a visionary," Myers said. Sears restored the original farmhouse and opened it as a museum in 1914. After Harvard's Shaker community closed, Sears moved one of its buildings to the museum grounds and began exhibiting Shaker artifacts there. In 1927, she added a small building with a collection of Native American artifacts, and in 1945 she completed a picture gallery for her collection of 19th-century Hudson River landscapes.

She also built a tearoom, fashioned after ones she had seen in Europe. Today, Fruitlands visitors can have tea and lunch on a canopy-covered terrace with a view of Mount Monadnock.

Sears died in 1960 at the age of 97. "She amassed the collections, and until 10 years ago, the exhibits had not changed since Clara installed them," Myers said. In recent years, the museum has been reorganizing the displays to make them more understandable and appealing to modern visitors. Native American consultants were enlisted to ensure the displays about their heritage are accurate and in appropriate context.

The museum has added two outdoor interpretive areas that are along the several miles of hiking trails open to visitors. One is on the site of a Colonial farmstead and the other depicts Native American hunting and gathering grounds.

Under Ayson's direction, the museum is working hard to develop family-friendly activities and foster the involvement of people in the surrounding communities, according to Becker, who has two children, ages 9 and 12. "It's a real peaceful place to bring the kids," she said. Becker, 43, grew up on a farm just down the road from Fruitlands and has fond memories of visiting the museum when she was a child.

Museum officials think the circus sculpture exhibition will be a hit with children and also carry on Sears' vision. "In its 90th year, the museum is carrying on the tradition of innovation by bringing a modern sculpture exhibit," Myers said. "It is not so much going off in a bold new direction as continuing her legacy."

Ayson said the circus exhibition will probably have an encore. "This is the first kind of big statement on the grounds. I think it will be the beginning of a whole series," she said.