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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Selected from the extensive collection of paintings at the Shelburne Museum, these thirty works represent the wide range of interests of American artists working in both urban and rural areas before 1900.
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The debate regarding the respective merits of ancient Greece and Rome that pervaded Rome during the Enlightenment is documented with Piranesi prints of ancient Rome and plates from Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens.
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At heart a collaborative venture, the creation of early fifteenth-century panel paintings in Italy depended upon a tight network of connections between patrons, painters, woodworkers, and gilders. The product of these interactions was an object that served both as a focus for devotion, and as an emphatic statement about wealth and status.
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This exhibition will highlight the illustrations of Winslow Homer, Thomas Nast, A.R. Waud, and several other talented but anonymous artists as well as showcasing a variety of related artifacts and daguerreotypes. The exhibit was researched and organized by the students of Professor Christopher Wilson’s First Year Seminar “The Art and Life of Winslow Homer.”
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In a career that spanned more than sixty years, the Italian-born artist Luigi Lucioni (1900–1988) devoted much of his attention to developing and refining a personal vision of the Vermont landscape. This exhibition of more than seventy oil paintings, etchings, and watercolors considers the leitmotifs of his vision: rolling hills, verdant valleys, majestic trees, and aging barns along with his painstaking devotion to still-life subjects and meticulously painted portraits.
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It is easy to dismiss the work of contemporary landscape painter Thomas Kinkade as kitsch and brush aside his popularity as only a successful marketing phenomenon. But to do so ignores his sincere zeal and the deep resonance his work holds for many people. This exhibition, guest-curated by Michael Clapper, associate professor of art history at Franklin and Marshall College, considers Kinkade in the context of work that ranges from Norman Rockwell to Komar and Melamid.
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Kara Walker’s Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), a recent gift to the Museum, provides a focus for understanding contemporary artists’ determination to probe the historical record.
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A newly acquired, iconic image of a tree and enlarged photomicrographs of snowflakes are featured in this installation of works by the Starn brothers, identical twins whose singular aesthetic practice demonstrates a passionate interest in history and technological exploration.
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Robert F. Reiff Gallery. This exhibition explores the practical and social uses of ceramics in Asia. Asian ceramics are the most varied in the world: they have been used for vessels, ritual objects, sculpture, and for even architectural ornament. They are also unrivaled in technical quality and in their sheer volume.
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This exhibition brings together two of the most revered traditions in Chinese art: paintings of nature, primarily landscape and flora, and bronze vessels and musical instruments used in antiquity to venerate the ancestors. Included in the exhibition are outstanding works by some of the most famous artists of the Yuan (1279–1368) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties, as well as remarkable bronze ritual vessels and bells cast between the thirteenth and fifth centuries B.C.E.
