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

  • How Did I Get Here?

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    During the spring 2011 semester students in the History of Art and Architecture course Art Museums: Theory and Practice were invited to select a recent acquisition from the Middlebury College Museum’s permanent collection as the focus of their research. Just as each student who matriculates at Middlebury has a story to tell about the journey to campus, every object that enters the museum’s collection comes with a history. In addition to displaying the objects, this exhibition discusses the context from which they come and the significance of their addition to the collection.

  • Multiples: 20th- and 21st-Century Art

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    Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection of prints, this survey includes recently acquired lithographs and silkscreens by John Baldessari, Sarah Sze, Sam Francis, and John Wesley, among other artists.

  • Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports

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    Christian A. Johnson Gallery and Overbrook Gallery
    This exhibit focuses on artists from the mid-1990s to the present who question the notion of the male athlete as the last bastion of uncomplicated, authentic identity in American culture during the preceding decades.

  • Celebrity

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    Paintings, prints, and photographs from the Permanent Collection are the basis of this exhibition focused on the idea and the presentation of celebrity.

  • American Paintings and Prints from Shelburne Museum

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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.

  • The Art of Devotion: Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy

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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.