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

  • Thinking Through Art

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    Presenting art from around the globe, this year’s Thinking through Art exhibition invites school students and teachers—and all visitors—to engage in conversations about their relationship to the surrounding world.

  • 10 Years: The Cameron Print Project

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    Since 2008 the Studio Art Program has hosted an annual week-long visit of a Cameron Visiting Artist who creates a print or series of prints with students enrolled in Professor Hedya Klein’s silkscreen class. This exhibition includes all of the works produced under this extraordinary collaborative program. Prints by students working with Mark Dion, Derrick Adams, Tomas Vu, Kati Heck, and Rona Yefman, among other artists, will be on view.

  • The Soviet Century: 100 Years of the Russian Revolution

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    The 1917 Russian Revolution ushered in a new era of human history. The objects featured here showcase four different moments in Russian and Soviet history, demonstrating how material culture served as a space in which governing forces, both Tsarist and Communist, sought—sometimes unsuccessfully—to gain legitimacy and shape the country’s moral fabric.

  • Land and Lens: Photographers Envision the Environment

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    Photographs drawn primarily from the Museum’s rich holdings make up this comprehensive survey of photography and the environment. The exhibit, which is organized in categories spanning cosmological time to the present day, presents seventy images through the lens of environmental appreciation, concern, or activism.

  • A Story of Art: Gifts from the Collection of Charles S. Moffett ’67 and Lucinda Herrick

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    This exhibition, organized by Assistant Professor of History of Art Carrie Anderson and students in her January 2017 course, tells a story of artistic production from its conception to its afterlife. The eclectic selection of drawings, photographs, paintings, and sculpture come from the generous bequest of Impressionist scholar and alumnus Charles S. Moffett ’67 and his widow.

  • The Lovings, An Intimate Portrait: Photographs by Grey Villet

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    Drawing its title from the publication of photos by Grey Villet with a text by his colleague and widow Barbara Villet, Middlebury Class of 1952, this installation includes photographs of the aptly named Virginia couple whose interracial marriage was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1967. The photographs expand upon Grey Villet’s LIFE magazine article about the couple, which inspired the 2016 Academy Award-nominated motion picture “Loving.”

  • Sabra Field, Now and Then: A Retrospective

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    On the occasion of Sabra Field’s 60th Middlebury reunion, this retrospective exhibition explores the depth and diversity of her six decades as a printmaker.

  • Young America: Roy Lichtenstein and the America’s Cup

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    In 1994 Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was invited by PACT, a syndicate created to compete in the America’s Cup trials the following year, to create a design for the hull and spinnaker of their boat. It was one of his largest and last works. This exhibit recounts the history of that commission and the history of the America’s Cup races before and since.

  • American Faces: A Cultural History of Portraiture and Identity

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    Since the arrival of the first itinerant portrait painters in the colonies, Americans have created portraits to commemorate loved ones, glorify the famous, establish national myths, and honor shared heroes. Whether on canvas, in stone, in bronze, on film, or in binary code, we spend considerable time creating, contemplating, and collecting our likenesses. This exhibit, which brings together ninety portraits from more than twenty collections, explores and explains Americans’ 300-year fascination with images of themselves.

  • Untouched by Time: The Athenian Acropolis from Pericles to Parr

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    Constructed in the 5th century BCE, the Periclean building program on the Athenian Acropolis is the most celebrated architectural expression of the High-Classical age. This exhibition brings together early archaeological publications, antiquarian paintings, drawings, and prints, as well as photographs, books, and more recent images that are all drawn from collections at Middlebury. Together they bear testimony to the fascination with the Acropolis that has prevailed from the Enlightenment to the present.