The Middlebury Landscape

When some friends from the Vermont Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation and the University of Vermont came to my winter term class to see our group project on Emerald Ash Borer, one of the things that impressed them the most was the diversity of experience in the classroom. We take it for granted at […]

Towards the end of the term the observant on the north end of campus would have noticed a sod box on the south end of Battell Beach, about 7′ high and 5 ‘ wide. Constructed by Cha Tori and Hannah King for Professor Sanford Mirling’s The Artist Collective class, the sod hut joins a long […]

A blog post, and a recent visit to my alma mater, UVM, has me thinking again about public art, and contexts. My question is this: Can a spectacular painting be ruined by the wrong frame? Probably. I wonder how many paintings I’ve seen appraised on Antiques Roadshow, where the appraiser raves about the painting, then […]

Public Safety called our department this last fall semester. They were concerned about potential vandalism to one of the trees near Johnson. For once, I was one step ahead of them (hard to do, they do a great job on campus). I’d already stopped one day and introduced myself to Lydia Jun. Lydia was a […]

The Class of ’97 Trail, part of the Trail around Middlebury, winds through young woods. Forests age, and this section is in its toddler years, skinny Sugar maple and oak showing potential, but with an invaisive understory of buckthorn and barberry clawing at your legs, asking to be held. Among this youthful energy lies a […]

Everybody has been talking about it, and I know I’m late to the party in posting a picture of the mural on the back of Wright Theater. What I wanted to post, though, was not the best picture of the mural out there, but a picture of the mural in the context of the greater […]

While I’ve already proven my failure as an Art Critic, I still enjoy the end of the term, when outside art projects start appearing overnight, and I feel like I should share them with you. Very rarely do we in the department ever find anything out about the works-we don’t even know the class or professor. […]

A couple of days ago, I wrote about an art piece I liked around the large Black Willow next to Battell. Well, this weekend, the tree fell on it.

Around the end of the term, our department starts seeing all sorts of outdoor art appear out of nowhere. It generally seems to involve trees, with varying degrees of consternation on our part. (yeah, I worry too much) Truthfully, most of the art is very respectful of the trees, and the environment, and disappears as […]