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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This exhibit is comprised of approximately 100 photographs of African Americans from the exhaustive yet little known collection of George R. Rinhart, one of the foremost collectors of American photography. Selected images range from daguerreotypes created in the 1840s to photographs of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Many of these images have never been previously exhibited.
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This summer, Middlebury College celebrates the centennial of the Language Schools that, each summer, transform the campuses in Middlebury, Vermont, and at Mills College, California, into global villages where virtually no English can be heard. The German school was founded in 1915. In subsequent summers French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, and Hebrew were added. Korean is being offered for the first time this summer.
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From outlaw status to the auction room, street art has become a global phenomenon. Its major practitioners—JR, Banksy, and Shepard Fairey, to name a few—have achieved rock star recognition. Surveying the phenomenon of street art, this exhibition presents the graphic art of nineteen street artists whose prestige has carried them from urban legend into high-profile international art museums and galleries.
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The Andy Warhol Foundation has recently made a gift of ten prints to the museum, thereby more than doubling our Warhol print holdings. Now, in addition to the artist’s iconic images of Marilyn Monroe, Mick Jagger, and Campbell’s Soup, the museum owns vivid portraits of Chairman Mao, Goethe, Sitting Bull, Ingrid Bergman, and Queen Ntombi of Swaziland (one of Warhol’s Reigning Queens of the mid-1980s).
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September 12–December 7, 2014
This exhibit highlights eighteen tangkas from the collection of Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum. So fragile that they have remained largely inaccessible to scholars and museum visitors for nearly six decades, these tangkas, primarily from Tibet, have recently been gently cleaned, stabilized, and repaired. Vibrantly colored, intricately patterned, and ranging in height from two to nine feet, each work rewards close study.
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This exhibit brings together select paintings, drawings, and etchings by some of Weimar Germany’s most prominent artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Käthe Kollwitz, to confront the viewer with representations of the highly visual culture in Germany’s first democracy, and the productive and sometimes problematic relationship between criticizing and participating in a culture that could not prevent its people from falling for Hitler’s Germany under the Swastika.
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In an artistic style self-described as “completely loose and out of control,” Greg Haberny uses an array of materials in his work while refusing to conform to a single medium. Melted crayons and Band-Aids add a vital texture to his work, while appropriated images of pop culture, like the iconic Mickey Mouse, create a tone of cultural and political critique.
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In acknowledgment and celebration of the centenary of Middlebury’s German Language School, the museum is featuring selections from its own collection of German art. This exhibition is organized by the museum’s Sabarsky Graduate Fellow and is generously supported by a grant from the Serge and Vally Sabarsky Foundation, New York.
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Magnum photographer Martin Parr is renowned for capturing people in their own private comfort zones and introducing them, in all their quirky eccentricity, to a global audience. This series of more than fifty photographs shot on beaches around the world offers an engaging and vivid social commentary on the varieties of human behavior to be found under the sun. This exhibition is organized by the Aperture Foundation, New York. At Middlebury it is supported by funds from the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Foundation.
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Porter’s photographs of Glen Canyon originally appeared in The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado, a coffee table book published by the Sierra Club in 1963. Creating an elegy for a canyon that was about to be submerged due to the construction of a large dam on the Colorado River, Porter hoped to raise awareness about the tension between nature and technology.
