Past Exhibitions

Throughout the Museum’s history the staff has produced a wide array of critically acclaimed exhibitions both with works from the permanent collection and with objects borrowed from other institutions.

In addition, we have hosted a number of nationally and internationally recognized exhibits curated by organizations that specialize in traveling shows. Some of our more recent exhibitions are archived here. Please browse the links to the left to view our past exhibitions by year

  • Wilfredo Lam, Retrato, 1982, lithograph

    No Ocean Between Us: Art of Asian Diasporas in Latin America & the Caribbean, 1945–Present

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    This exhibition—inspired by the permanent collection of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States—features approximately 70 important works by Latin American and Caribbean artists of Asian heritage. The exhibition demonstrates how this work emerged from cross-directional global dialogues between the artists, their Asian cultural heritages, their Latin American or Caribbean identities, and their interaction with major artistic movements.

  • Text ⇆ Image

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    Visual artists have explored the relationships between words, text, meaning, and imagery for millennia. This exhibition—organized in conjunction with the centennial celebrations of Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English—features some of those relationships.

  • Contemporary to Classical: Highlights from the New Collection Handbook

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    This exhibit features more than forty works from the museum’s new permanent collection handbook. Objects range from modern to ancient and include prints, photographs, paintings, and sculpture. Among the artists represented are Derrick Adams, Banksy, Judy Chicago, Robert Gober, Fairfield Porter, Medardo Rosso, Anna Stanchi, Paul Strand, Edmund de Waal, and William Zorach.

  • Into the Screen: Digital Art from teamLab

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    Founded in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko, teamLab is a Tokyo-based collaboration of more than 500 designers, engineers, and technologists with a shared mission to integrate art, technology, and nature. This exhibition highlights a singular immersive digital experience by teamLab and the traditional seventeenth- to twentieth-century screens and prints that inspired it.

  • A New Lens: Contemporary Video and Animation

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    This exhibition celebrates innovative recent video works by artists who use technology to push the boundaries of time-based media. Featured works highlight the process of the artists, inviting the viewer to consider the intersections between video and other art forms. A New Lens aims to ignite imagination, and to promote an embodied, reflective, and participatory viewing experience.

  • Art & Protest: Artists as Agents of Social Change

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    Many works of art, architecture, and design throughout history have expressly reinforced existing societal power structures. This exhibition highlights art created for the opposite purpose—to shed light on injustice and inequity, challenge hierarchies, and advocate for progress—and aims to offer a sense of the breadth and depth that protest art encompasses.

  • James Hope, A Marble Quarry, 1851

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    May 25, 2021
    At the time James Hope painted this view of Sheldon’s and Slason’s Marble Quarry, the marble business was poised to become one of Vermont’s leading industries. America’s first commercial marble quarry opened thirty miles to the south in Dorset, Vermont, in 1785. By 1890 Vermont contributed 62 percent of the nation’s marble production.

  • The Empty Wineglass, by Issack Koedijk

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    Genre scenes, commonly known as pictures of everyday life, like this interior of an inn, became popular in the decades after creation of the Dutch republic in 1609. They particularly appealed to an elite class of wealthy citizens who read moralizing messages into them.

  • Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey

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    Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey learned about daguerreotypy immediately after its invention in 1839 and soon mastered the new medium. In 1842 he set out on a three-year photographic expedition to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, producing over nine hundred daguerreotypes of landscapes, portraits, and architectural structures old and new.

  • Lost Luxuries: Ancient Chinese Gold

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    This exhibition explores the artistry and social meanings of Chinese gold objects produced between the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) and Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), as well as the more recent story of how they entered American museum collections. The ancient artifacts are accompanied by innovative digital features that bring to life recent excavations, traditional goldsmithing techniques, and the diverse peoples who owned and used them.