Over the past fifty years the art collection at Middlebury has grown to nearly 6,000 objects that range from the antique to contemporary and include works in a great variety of media from different cultures around the world. This exhibit features fifty works—one from each year back to 1968—which chronicle the growth and evolution of the collection.
In the last year or so the Museum has continued to add high quality examples to its collection of ancient coins, and some of our most recent acquisitions have been related to Alexander the Great and the kingdom of Macedonia. Several highlights are presented here.
This fall the Museum will showcase the history and breadth of Islamic art in a landmark exhibit on loan from the Newark Museum. The more than 100 works on display in Wondrous Worlds: Art and Islam through Time and Place reflect aspects of faith, culture, and everyday life of Muslims across the world and throughout the ages.
2018 marks the fourth summer that the Middlebury College Museum of Art has run MuseumWorks, an intensive internship and professional development program for Middlebury students interested in pursuing careers in the cultural sector for the public good. Since its founding in 2015, MuseumWorks has helped 18 motivated Middlebury College undergraduates take their first steps toward successful and ethical careers in the arts.
Elizabeth Catlett is among the most distinguished African American artists of the twentieth century, yet her work is somewhat less well known than her peers’ in part because she made the decision in 1947 to move permanently to Mexico. Both a print maker and a sculptor, she was repeatedly attracted to the themes of race and gender drawn or sculpted in a seductive blend of modernism and naturalism.
This past January the museum acquired through Sotheby’s an important nineteenth-century Kongo Power Figure, from the Loango region of west Africa (Republic of Congo and the Angolan enclave Cabinda) that borders the Kongo River. Standing just over twenty-four inches high and carved of wood, it is a type of figure that fulfilled a ritualistic role in Kongo communities.
1968 was a year of upheaval and transformation. It was a year in which national and international events spawned intense vocal expression and protest. This summer the Middlebury College Museum of Art, through the lens of art, music, and literature, looks back fifty years to consider the issues then transforming American society.
Thanks to the magnanimous gift of Dr. and Mrs. Stephen Nicholas, the Museum now holds many hundreds of photographs of children. Drawn from every corner of the globe and representing a broad spectrum of social and economic circumstances, the images in this exhibit portray children in good times and bad, in states of blissful play or harrowing isolation, or just being kids in a world that either answers their expectations or exceeds their comprehension.
This small Etruscan bronze depicts Scylla, the mythical marine monster that is part female and part fantastic animal. Scylla features ferociously in Homer’s Odyssey, when she snatches six of Odysseus’ men from his ship and devours them.
As a consequence of the recent period of extended sub-zero weather followed by a thaw, the Middlebury College Museum of Art has experienced an unusual level of condensation in its stair towers. To enable the museum to properly address this issue, it is necessary to delay the opening of the spring exhibit, Power & Piety: Spanish Colonial Art. The exhibit opening has been rescheduled for Friday, March 2 at 4:30 p.m.
