the Middlebury College Museum of Art blog
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
Read More Meaningful Juxtapositions: Reshaping our Permanent Collection Galleries
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,
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
Read More Race in the Woman Suffrage Movement: What the Sources Reveal and Conceal
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
Read More Label Talk: Museum Mosaics—One Object, Many Voices
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:
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
Read More Behind the Scenes: Photographic documentation of two 18th century Japanese screens
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
Read More Portrait of a Man: Govaert Flinck and the Rembrandt School
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
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.
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.
