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.

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.

Keith Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. In the last year of his life he worked to produce imagery surrounding the social activism of the AIDS crisis. Silence = Death is an adaptation of a poster made by a collective of the same name that would eventually become the defining image for ACT UP, an organization created to fight for visibility and an end to the AIDS crisis.

In his ongoing, multi-chaptered series Black Maps, David Maisel’s aerial photographs of environmentally impacted sites explore the aesthetics and politics of radically human-altered environments, framing the issues of contemporary landscape with equal measures of documentation and metaphor. His series Lake Project depicts the desiccated Owens Lake in California. The lake, once approximately 200 square miles, now is the largest source of particulate pollution in the United States. Maisel’s talk, Tuesday, November 7, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 125 of Middlebury College’s Mahaney Center for the Arts, will highlight these and other projects.