News and Events

This presentation will be a multimedia and multisensorial presentation in the African and African Diaspora tradition of “call and response” — with images, sounds, film, and movement. We will consider Sensiotics, an approach that centers the crucial importance of the senses, our body-minds and sense-abilities in understandings of persons, cultures, histories, and arts, with particular attention to the arts of Yoru`ba´-speaking people of West Africa.

On October 18, 1951, Robert Rauschenberg wrote a letter to his gallerist, Betty Parsons, announcing a new series of work “dealing with the suspense, excitement, and body of an organic silence.” Despite an initially negative reception, his White Paintings have since been recognized as a critical precursor to Conceptualism and Minimalism. Rauschenberg felt it essential to maintain the pristine, white surface of the paintings, and, as such, allowed the series to be repainted and refabricated.

Peter Lovell Memorial Lecture in Architecture and Design:

Kevin Chu, Executive Director of Vermont Futures Project gives a lecture on “Housing and the Economic Health of Vermont”. The lecture will be followed by a Panel Discussion and Q&A.

Please join us in celebrating the fantastic work of all Studio Art and Architecture students in Fall 2024 classes.  Small bites and refreshments will be served.

Reinstalling the Detroit Institutes of Arts Great Collection of American Art

Theresa Fairbanks Harris, Senior Conservator of Works on Paper at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, and Josephine Rodgers, Curator of Collections and Director of Engagement at the Middlebury College Art Museum, will lead a discussion on the conservation treatment and history of Edwin Austin Abbey’s (1852–1911) drawings at Yale University. The treatment was completed in preparation for the ‘The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876–1917’ exhibition now on view at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Hear from HARC majors about their experiences and why they decided to major in History of Art/Museum Studies and Architectural Studies.  You can meet the faculty and hear about the exciting WT & Spring 2025 classes offered.

Pizza will be served.

Open to Middlebury students only.

Professor Hilderbrand will discuss the origins and contemporary implications of an activist practice of landscape architecture, facing head-on the twin crises of our time: climate and justice. Co-Sponsored by the Cameron Visiting Artist Fund.

In his prints, sculptures, and films, multi-disciplinary artist Dario Robleto incorporates a deep fascination with science, history, sound, medicine, and human empathy. His 2024 film, “Ancient Beacons Long for Notice,” is currently installed at the Middlebury College Museum of Art in the exhibit, “An Invitation to Awe.” He will join Guest Curator Katy Smith Abbott in conversation, as they explore Robleto’s conviction that “awe is a courtship with the unknown.”

“Colonnaded Streets and Urban Theater in the Later Roman Empire”

Grand, colonnaded avenues proliferated as never before in leading cities of the later Roman Empire. These new urban thoroughfares were costly and complex investments that transformed the appearance and the experience of the cityscapes they adorned. Usually willed into existence by the ruling regime, they lent themselves to new forms of political theater intended to project and promote the more autocratic style of rule adopted by emperors from the third century CE.