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
–
This exhibition showcases a selection of the Piranesi’s artistic output and contextualizes it within the cultural debates of his time. It is curated by Pieter Broucke, professor of architectural history, with labels written by Middlebury students in a course taught at Middlebury College in January 2025.
–
This exhibit unveils a set of wooden carved panels from an 18th century Parisian interior, once displayed in Le Château, that have since been stored in the collections of the Middlebury College Museum of Art.
–
This exhibit highlights the range of media that inspired and challenged Andy Warhol at the height of his fame. Candid photographs, editioned screenprints, and film offer insight into the artist’s fascination with people, his use of the snapshot in his artistic practice, and his desire to master a range of media.
–
The photographs of Lebanese Palestinian American artist Rania Matar—captured through car windows, in abandoned buildings, snow-strewn fields, or floating in the Mediterranean Sea—tell the stories of young women through portraits taken throughout Lebanon, France, Egypt, and the United States.
–
Each year, professors in departments ranging from Classics to Economics teach hundreds of students in the largest classroom on campus: the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Discussing art produced throughout history and around the globe offers students perspective on the topic at hand—and space to reflect on their own place in today’s complex world.
–
This exhibit addresses questions about where and how awe is most readily experienced. Older paintings and prints are displayed in conversation with contemporary objects, scientific equipment, and interactive work that compels the viewer to think of how awe is experienced through senses other than sight and to expand their own understanding of where awe lives now.
–
As long ago as 1991 the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery, the predecessor to the Middlebury College Museum of Art, celebrated Bread and Puppet Theater, as part of its Vermont Bicentennial exhibition, Celebrating Vermont: Myths and Realities. Thirty-three years later, we’re once again celebrating Bread and Puppet with this exhibit of photographs by Garrett MacLean (Middlebury College, Class of 1999), a professional photographer who traveled with the company for more than three months in the fall of 2022.
–
A World Away—based on Barnes’ book of black and white photographs taken in the Eastern Province among the Tamil people, and accompanied by his personal handwritten diary entries—offers a rare glimpse into a largely visually undocumented period in Sri Lankan history.
–
This exhibit consists of 50 works of mixed-media collage, assemblage on wood panels, and sculpture that reimagine safe destinations for the black American traveler during the mid-twentieth century. The body of work was inspired by The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual guidebook for black American road-trippers published by New York postal worker Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1967, during the Jim Crow era in America.
–
The exhibition is arranged around the major themes that dominated the artist’s body of work: locomotives, steam ships, steel mills, bridges, small towns, and the agricultural landscapes of the Midwest. Collectively, these photographs form a sort of “portrait” of some key aspects of life in the United States and Canada in the second half of the twentieth century, a period of great economic, social, and environmental change.
