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

  • players dressed primarily in yellow wear large full-head lion masks and prowl on stage

    Apocalypse Road Show: On Tour with the Bread & Puppet Theater

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    As long ago as 1991 the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery, the predecessor to the Middlebury College Museum of Art, celebrated Bread and Puppet Theater, as part of its Vermont Bicentennial exhibition, Celebrating Vermont: Myths and Realities. Thirty-three years later, we’re once again celebrating Bread and Puppet with this exhibit of photographs by Garrett MacLean (Middlebury College, Class of 1999), a professional photographer who traveled with the company for more than three months in the fall of 2022.

  • a man stands in the sand in front of a leaning temple in Sri Lanka

    Hunter Barnes: A World Away

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    A World Away—based on Barnes’ book of black and white photographs taken in the Eastern Province among the Tamil people, and accompanied by his personal handwritten diary entries—offers a rare glimpse into a largely visually undocumented period in Sri Lankan history.

  • a small scale house with the front door open and warm light emanating from the door and windows

    Derrick Adams: Sanctuary

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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.

  • black and white image of a locomotive with steam billowing all around it

    David Plowden: Portraits of 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.

  • a view of the Sphinx with the pyramids of Giza in the background, c. 1870

    The Light of the Levant: Early Photography and the Late Ottoman Empire

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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.

  • a pastoral scene with brown cows grazing amid wheat grass on a hillside near a well or similar drilling tower; a dirt path leads from the foreground down the right side of the view into the distance; blue skies with billowing clouds fill the top two-thirds of the scene

    Recent Acquisitions: 2016–2023

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    Featuring more than thirty recent additions to the museum’s permanent collection, this exhibit includes work by Veronica Ryan, Sean Scully, Joan Snyder, John Steuart Curry, Fidelia Bridges and James McNeil Whistler, among others. Some of the works will be accompanied by short texts prepared by the 2022–2023 cohort of Robert Reiff museum interns.

  • various metal items welded together and displayed on a white wall

    Tossed: Art from Discarded, Found, and Repurposed Materials

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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.

  • Urban Cadence: Street Scenes from Lagos and Johannesburg

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    African cities are growing rapidly, and these two cities have experienced this growth in diverse yet fascinating ways. The street scenes in this exhibition represent the complex narratives of these urban areas: tales of migration, labor, desperation, success, hope, and imagination among others.

  • 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.