The Museum produces six to eight temporary exhibitions each year, in addition to its display of works from the permanent collection.
Temporary exhibits are often curated by Museum staff using works from the collection. Other exhibits are borrowed from other museum collections or from institutions that specialize in traveling shows. Exhibitions are carefully chosen to support both the curriculum of the College and the needs of the Museum’s education programs. See below for current and upcoming exhibits.
This installation of Middlebury’s art collection invites visitors to join a conversation sparked by objects created throughout time and around the globe. Arranged thematically to highlight similarities as well as differences across cultures, the reinstalled galleries represent steps in the ongoing journey toward a more inclusive and accessible presentation of the many stories art can tell.
Historically, museums in the United States have prioritized art made by White men. As a result, the important contributions of many artists have been absorbed, marginalized, overlooked, or ignored—especially those of women and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) artists. While the present display features more diverse personal and artistic identities than ever before (with the highest increase among Black, women, and LGBTQIA+ artists), much work lies ahead.
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This exhibition highlights the important role of the Levant region in early photography. In its broadest historical meaning, the area of the Levant, controlled by the Ottoman Empire during all or part of the nineteenth century, encompassed contemporary Greece, Turkey, and most of the Arab world.
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Comprised of nearly twenty works that make use of discarded materials, Tossed, which is curated by the museum’s longtime exhibition designer Ken Pohlman, explores themes of thrift, aesthetics, social / political commentary, and cultural reference juxtaposing contemporary works—by artists such as Swoon, Richard Stankiewicz, El Anatsui, Romuald Hazoumè, Melvin Edwards, and Betye Saar—with artists’ statements and contextual insights about our throwaway society.
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This exhibit consists of 50 works of mixed-media collage, assemblage on wood panels, and sculpture that reimagine safe destinations for the black American traveler during the mid-twentieth century. The body of work was inspired by The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual guidebook for black American road-trippers published by New York postal worker Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1967, during the Jim Crow era in America.
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The exhibition is arranged around the major themes that dominated the artist’s body of work: locomotives, steam ships, steel mills, bridges, small towns, and the agricultural landscapes of the Midwest. Collectively, these photographs form a sort of “portrait” of some key aspects of life in the United States and Canada in the second half of the twentieth century, a period of great economic, social, and environmental change.
