Every year we solicit nominations from the local community for students, artists, and art benefactors whose support of the visual arts merits distinction, and we select several to honor at our Annual Dinner. The winners get feted and appreciated for an evening, and each receives a certificate. Articles in the paper, all that sort of thing. We let the world know that this crop of arts heroes has done something special, and we hope that each feels appropriately celebrated for his or her talent. Then we go about another year of wash, rinse, and retweet until the specter of the next Arts Awards season makes us wonder where all the time has gone and what happened to last year’s winners and whether we made a difference in their lives to the extent that it would be worth trying to do it again this year.
Built Invitations
(photo via https://www.facebook.com/middartmuseum) I associate the physicality of Vito Acconci’s work to that of a premier danseur. He is the Nijinsky of built forms, aware of the elasticity of every wall, and how far he can bend a concept—an incredible flexibility—before he must spring forward. It is an irresistible, magnetic kind of physicality, needing an audience…
Another Summer in the Books
Summer comes and goes very quickly here in Vermont—blink and you’ve missed it, as some would say—and like the season itself, our summer exhibits vanish with a similar haste, like a Fumé Blanc that you wish would have lingered just a bit longer on your tongue. As I watch the works come off the wall and go back into storage or back to their lending institutions, I often find myself wishing that I had spent more time with them, and inevitably I turn to the exhibit’s comment book to absorb others’ insights about the show as a way of allowing it to hang a little longer in my mind’s eye.
Fabergé: The Social and Political Implications of Russian Decorative Arts
The Middlebury College Museum of Art possesses a remarkable collection of Russian artifacts and family keepsakes made by the firm of the famous jeweler, Carl Fabergé. This essay by Adrian Kerester ’15, adapted from her April 2013 lecture and reproduced here with permission, explores Russia’s social history at the turn of the last century through an examination of and conversation surrounding Russian decorative arts and the culture of Russia’s ruling aristocracy.
Rackstraw Downes, Unfinished
“The artist who searches for subject matter is like someone who can’t get out of bed without understanding the meaning of life.” –Fairfield Porter When I think about pencil drawings my mind inevitably wanders to Robert Frost’s Mending Wall. “Something there is that doesn’t love a pencil drawing,” I tell myself. It’s a perplexing association…
Lovely Filth
It’s not often that I get to make direct connections between an exhibition in the galleries and the collection of public art that we have on permanent display around the campus. The opportunity is probably there more often than I’m aware, but during my tenure anyway, the times when the similarities have been palpable have been rare. This spring, with Environment and Object • Recent African Art on view in several of our galleries there’s a theme that’s begging to be explored both inside and out. And it’s totally rubbish.
Life is Like a Bowl of Chocolate
This always happens. We put up a fantastic exhibition; the public enjoys it, raves about it even; and then I wake up months later as the show is about to come down and realize that I have yet to spend any appreciable time with it. It was always there, waiting for another day when there…
Being Richard Dupont
As I watched our preparators put the finishing touches on the installation that now occupies the museum’s upper balcony—four heads by New York artist Richard Dupont, generous and timely loans from a private collection—my mind was overrun with clichés about heads. They shouted at me like kids in the backseat: “get your head around this…
Last Sunrise Over So Inclined
Stick Huts, Twig Hats, Giant Cones, Whoville Houses. Regardless of what you like to call them, the nine conical interweavings of red maple saplings and grey dogwood that form Patrick Dougherty’s 2007 temporary installation So Inclined will be removed next week and turned into mulch. And I’d be hiding the truth if I didn’t admit…
Four Minute Warning to Quilted Destruction
During the 2010–2011 academic year Mica Schlosser ’13 approached the museum with a request that caught my attention. She was hoping to study a photograph in our collection—a gelatin silver print of an Atomic Bomb Explosion by Harold Edgerton from 1952—and to sew a quilt inspired by its imagery. Right on. I was fascinated by…
