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
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The photographs of Lebanese Palestinian American artist Rania Matar—captured through car windows, in abandoned buildings, snow-strewn fields, or floating in the Mediterranean Sea—tell the stories of young women through portraits taken throughout Lebanon, France, Egypt, and the United States.
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Each year, professors in departments ranging from Classics to Economics teach hundreds of students in the largest classroom on campus: the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Discussing art produced throughout history and around the globe offers students perspective on the topic at hand—and space to reflect on their own place in today’s complex world.
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This exhibit addresses questions about where and how awe is most readily experienced. Older paintings and prints are displayed in conversation with contemporary objects, scientific equipment, and interactive work that compels the viewer to think of how awe is experienced through senses other than sight and to expand their own understanding of where awe lives now.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
