By: Richard Saunders, Museum Director and Professor of History of Art and Architecture In the past year the Museum was able to acquire a stunning neoclassical marble portrait tondo carved in 1862 in Rome. What is particularly notable about the relief is that it is among the first identified sculptures of its kind by a…
Meaningful Juxtapositions: Reshaping our Permanent Collection Galleries
Since, as a result of pandemic safety measures, the Museum is physically closed to the public until March of 2021, our staff are taking advantage of the continued closure to rethink substantially the ways in which we contextualize and display objects and to reinstall our permanent collection galleries in a manner that advances more meaningful…
Refuge and Survival: Leaving it All Behind
The museum recently acquired a triptych of photographs by Canadian photographer Darren Ell. The images feature the piles of thousands of mostly orange-and-black life vests that had been abandoned at Molyvos on the island of Lesbos, Greece, by Syrian, Bengali, Yemeni, East African, and other refugees upon their arrival by boat from Turkey. Taken in…
Race in the Woman Suffrage Movement: What the Sources Reveal and Conceal
By: Amy Morsman, Professor of History This time last year, the Museum opened a new exhibition entitled “Votes…for Women?” I served as curator of that exhibit, but I had considerable help, not only from an extraordinary team of talented museum professionals and faculty/staff colleagues, but also from a whole seminar full of students—15 first-year students—who…
Label Talk: Museum Mosaics—One Object, Many Voices
During a 2019 re-installation of an Early Byzantine floor fragment, Museum staff invited three members of our community—an artist, an ecologist, and an archaeologist—to offer their perspectives on this mosaic. Recognizing that there are many ways to interpret a single work of art, we invite you to add your voice to this dialogue by sharing…
Portrait of an Inventor: Middlebury College Museum of Art welcomes daguerreotype of acclaimed local, John Deere.
19th century inventor, John Deere, sits proudly on top of his plow in this new edition to Middlebury College Museum of Art’s prominent daguerreotype collection. The daguerreotype is being prepped for it’s debut in the museum’s upcoming exhibition, American Faces: A Cultural History of Portraiture and Identity, on view February 17 – April 30, 2017,…
Behind the Scenes: Photographic documentation of two 18th century Japanese screens
It may be “lights out” in the galleries on Mondays at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, but some works of art have not taken the day to rest. While the museum was closed to the public on a Monday this November, a pair of 18th century Japanese screens were temporarily installed in the galleries…
Portrait of a Man: Govaert Flinck and the Rembrandt School
The following paper was researched, written, and presented as a public lecture by Carolina McGarity ’17, the museum’s 2014-2015 Robert F. Reiff Curatorial Intern. Introduction In his Portrait of a Man, [fig. 1] Govaert Flinck uses very Rembrandtesque elements and style. One such element is chiaroscuro, or the dramatic use of light and shadow to…
The Persistence of Memories: Art as Portkey
We humans have a habit of storing memories and feelings just about everywhere. The house, the car, the cat, articles of clothing, coffee mugs, lost teeth, and locks of hair. Really, anything will do as a repository for the moments in our lives that we would rather not forget. I have drawers and boxes full…
Steel Yourselves, Here Comes Youbie Obie
It’s been exactly twenty years since the Committee on Art in Public Places (CAPP) accepted Jules Olitski’s King Kong—a beautifully abstract, almost minimalist work in cor-ten steel, gifted to the College by Sophia Healy, daughter of former professor Arthur Healy—and sited it in front of the Johnson Building. This summer, as a serendipitous, unwitting tribute to the acquisition of King Kong, CAPP has accepted another gift in cor-ten steel, a monumental work by Middlebury alumnus J. Pindyck Miller ’60 titled Youbie Obie.
