The following transcription and translation of a 1960s Chinese Manual of Poetry and Painting in the museum’s study collection was created by Rebecca Li ’21 in connection with Professor Cynthia Packert’s spring 2020 course HARC 0347: Aesthetics of Asian Art. Object Credit: Manual of Poetry and Painting, c. 1962. Study Collection of the Middlebury College…
Resources and Reflections: World AIDS Day 2020 and Beyond
On November 30 Visual AIDS premiered TRANSMISSIONS, a program of six new videos considering the impact of HIV and AIDS beyond the United States. For those who were not able to attend the premiere those videos are now available to stream, and we encourage you to visit the TRANSMISSIONS website to watch the films (please…
Day With(out) Art / World AIDS Day 2020
Once again, the Museum and the Student Friends of the Art Museum are pleased to partner with GlobeMed, a student organization dedicated to improving global health, and the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs to offer what is becoming an annual series of events at Middlebury marking World AIDS Day. A video screening, a panel discussion…
The Annual Purchase Party Goes Virtual
The 2020 Friends of the Art Museum Purchase Party—our 51st annual!—will be a little different this year. Due to Covid, the entire program will be presented online via Zoom. Yet, as in previous years, museum colleagues will offer presentations of three recent additions to the museum’s collection, and at the end we will give members…
Carving the Collection
By: Sarah Briggs ’14, Sabarsky Fellow One of my favorite ways to spend time with a work of art, to look at it closely and understand something new about it, is to make art inspired by it. Sometimes that means bringing a sketchbook into a museum and drawing exactly what I see, and sometimes it…
Vergennes to Boston to Rome: A Neoclassical Marble Portrait by Vermont-born Sculptor Margaret Foley
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…
