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

  • Life’s a Beach

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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.

  • Eliot Furness Porter: Selected Photographs from the Glen Canyon Portfolio

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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.

  • Guerrilla Girls: Art in Action

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    Students in the January 2014 Museum Studies course “Art in Action” will create this exhibition centered on the museum’s Portfolio Compleat: 1985–2008, a compendium of posters and ephemera documenting the activities of the Guerrilla Girls. From their origin in New York in 1985 to their global presence today, the group continues to monitor the progress of women workers in the art world.

  • Performance Now

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    A selection of works by artists who practice a variety of art-making procedures, Performance Now features videos, objects, films, and installations that document ephemeral occurrences. Including works by Marina Abramovic, William Kentridge, Clifford Owens, and Laurie Simmons, among many others, the exhibition surveys critical and experimental currents in this historically significant, global development in art practice.

  • Shadow Lands: China through the Lens of Michael Cherney

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    This exhibition features the work of contemporary photographer Michael Cherney, who currently lives and works in Beijing, China. Cherney draws upon his education in Chinese history, literature, and art in order to produce works that combine photography, calligraphy, and book making. His art forces its viewers to question conventional definitions of Chinese and American, modern and traditional, photograph and landscape painting.

  • Observing Vermont Architecture

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    This exhibition is designed to coincide with the release of The Buildings of Vermont by Glenn Andres and Curtis Johnson. Part of the series Buildings of the United States, published by the National Society of Architectural Historians, the book pairs Johnson’s photographs with the authors’ commentaries to explore the exceptional quality of Vermont’s remarkably diverse built landscape, ranging from the Federal to the Post-Modern period.
     

  • Screened and Selected II: Contemporary Photography and Video Acquisitions 2006–2011

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    This exhibition celebrates the collaboration between the museum and donor Marianne Boesky, Class of 1989, who initiated a multi-year project through which Middlebury College students selected works of art for the permanent collection. The many works acquired with these funds span the past four decades and include art by Chuck Close, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Idris Khan, Shirin Neshat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Roe Ethridge, Ryan McGinley, Tracey Moffatt, Catherine Opie, and James Welling, among others.

  • Vito Acconci Thinking Space

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    This exhibition marks the inauguration on campus of a replica of Acconci’s Way Station I, which was constructed in 1983 near what is now McCardell Bicentennial Hall. The exhibition and its accompanying publication place the work in the context of Acconci’s ongoing, extraordinarily influential career. Supported in part by the Committee on Art in Public Places.

  • Hidden Away: 20th and 21st Century Works from the Permanent Collection

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    This exhibit showcases works from the collection that are rarely on view, including a mobile by Alexander Calder; sculptures by William Zorach, William King, and Harry Bertoia; glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Dale Chihuly; watercolors by George Grosz and Luigi Lucioni; and oil paintings by Arthur Davies, Edwin Dickinson, Ivan Albright, John Sloan, Grant Wood, Alice Neel, and Rackstraw Downes.

  • Edward Hopper in Vermont

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    This exhibit assembles for the first time many of Hopper’s twenty-three known Vermont watercolors and six known drawings. Of these particular works, relatively unknown to most and rarely on view, are subjects that depict details of the hill farms bordering the White River. Marked by nuances of distinctive color, light, and shadow, they are studies in artistic process, illustrating how Hopper’s vision of Vermont developed between the time of his first visit, in 1927, and his last, in 1938.