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

  • 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.

  • Post Pop: Prints of Keith Haring

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    Art star of the 1980s, Keith Haring was an indefatigable presence on the world stage until his premature death from AIDS in 1990. His Pop Shops sold his designs on clothing, toys, posters, skateboards, and other merchandise. Haring also created more than 50 public murals in cities around the world, for charities, hospitals, children’s day care centers, and orphanages. This exhibition presents selected limited editions on loan from the Keith Haring Foundation, which provides funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and charities supporting underserved youth.

  • Bloom and Doom: Visual Expressions and Reform in Vienna 1900

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    Drawn from the holdings of the Sabarsky Foundation in New York City, this exhibition features lesser known works by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, along with prints, drawings, and posters created by other members of the Viennese Secession and those on the fringes of the Viennese avant-garde. Bloom and Doom illuminates how these individuals challenged the artistic and social establishment by rejecting the traditional academic system and turning to new means of expression, often attempting to reunify art and life in a “total work of art,” before giving into cultural pessimism and withdrawing from public life.

  • Landscaped: Altered Environments in the Photography of Timothy Case

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    Center Gallery, McCullough Student Center
    Landscaped presents work by local Vermont photographer Timothy Case, whose doctorate in geography informs his vision of nature. Case is acutely attuned to the built and manufactured order that humans have imposed on the earth. Where some might see rolling hills and granite cliffs, he is inclined to see the evidence of human intervention.

  • Perseverance: Japanese Tattoo Tradition in a Modern World

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    Curated by master tattoo artist and author Takahiro Kitamura and created and photographed by artist and author Kip Fulbeck, this exhibition explores the craftsmanship of traditional Japanese tattooing and its roots in the arts of calligraphy and ukiyo-e woodblock printmaking. The exhibit is comprised of more than one hundred full-scale photographs showcasing the splendor of modern works by seven internationally-acclaimed Japanese-style tattoo artists.

  • Paul Strand in Vermont: 1943–1946

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    The photographer Paul Strand (1890–1976), who has been described as “one of the greatest photographers in the history of the medium,” is perhaps best known for his pictorialist studies from early in his career, his machine photographs of the 1920s, and his 1955 publication Un Paese: Portrait of an Italian Village. But some of Strand’s most compelling works were taken in Vermont during the years 1943–1946, when he had just returned to still photography after almost a decade of making films. The twenty-five photographs gathered here tell us a great deal about the artist at mid-career and the two projects on his mind at the time: the 1945 retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, and the book A Time in New England (1950).

  • First Folio! The Book that Gave us Shakespeare

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    A rare original copy of William Shakespeare’s First Folio—the first complete collected edition of his plays and one of the world’s most influential books—will be on view at the Middlebury College Museum of Art for the month of February. The exhibit, First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare, on tour from the Folger Shakespeare Library marks the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death. Along with the month-long exhibition, the College will host performances, a workshop, speakers, a film screening, family events, and a folio festival that features Renaissance music, gallery talks, and a live theater performance.

  • Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920–1945

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    This is the first exhibit dedicated to Japanese Art Deco to be held outside Tokyo. Its nearly 200 works provide dramatic examples of the spectacular craftsmanship and sophisticated design long associated with Japan, and convey the complex social and cultural tensions in Japan during the Taishô and early Shôwa epochs (1912–1945). In these pre-war and war eras, artists and patrons created a Japanese modernism that signaled simultaneously the nation’s unique history and its cosmopolitanism.

  • Naked Truth: Approaches to the Body in Early-Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Art

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    Transcending accusations of “pornography,” Gustav Klimt’s work paved the way for artistic explorations of the nude body as the site through which questions of freedom, desire, beauty, nature, culture, power, and their antonyms could be represented and negotiated. Taking these ideas as one critical point of departure, this exhibition explores the conceptions of the human body and the manner of its visualization in the period leading up to and following the First World War, which changed the world’s notions of flesh and blood forever.