Press Release Archives
An Influential Love Story in Black and White
On May 26 the Middlebury College Museum of Art opens The Lovings, an Intimate Portrait: Photographs by Grey Villet in its Overbrook Gallery. The exhibition, which features twenty photographs by Grey Villet drawn largely from his germinal 1965 LIFE magazine photo essay telling the remarkable and epochal love story of interracial couple Mildred and Richard Loving, takes its name from the recently published book, which presents that photo essay in its entirety for the first time.
Six Decades of Sabra Field, This Summer at Middlebury
On the occasion of Sabra Field’s 60th reunion the Museum launches a retrospective exhibition that includes some 70 prints that span six decades of the artist’s career. Nearly all come from the College’s repository of Field’s work, a gift to the Museum that has been growing as the indefatigable artist maintains her active production schedule. In addition to many of her signature Vermont landscapes, mythological suites, and portraits, the exhibition includes the revelatory 2015 documentary film Sabra by Dartmouth professor William Phillips.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Mermaid Comes to Middlebury
In 1994, PACT 95, a syndicate organized to compete in the America’s Cup trials the following year, invited Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein to create a graphic design for the hull and spinnaker of their boat. The syndicate, which included as skipper, Kevin Mahaney, a 1984 graduate of Middlebury College and the winner of a silver medal in sailing at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, is responsible for the implementation of one of Lichtenstein’s largest and last works. This exhibit includes the actual seventy-seven foot hull of Young America—on loan to Middlebury from Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY—as well as several related preliminary works by the artist and other works illustrating the history of the America’s Cup.
NESCAMA Releases Statement in Support of Arts Funding
The directors of the Northeast Small College Art Museum Association (NESCAMA) have collectively released a statement in support of continued federal funding for the arts and humanities.
American Faces Explores Our Obsession with Self
Americans have been celebrating themselves in portraits since the arrival to the colonies of the first itinerant portrait painters who created images to commemorate loved ones, glorify the famous, establish our national myths, and honor our shared heroes. Whether painting in oil, carving in stone, casting in bronze, capturing on film, or calculating in binary code, we spend considerable time creating, contemplating, and collecting our likenesses. This exhibit brings together ninety portraits from more than twenty collections to explore and explain why Americans have been fascinated with images of themselves for more than 300 years.
All Hail the Acropolis!
Constructed in the 5th century BCE, the Periclean building program on the Athenian Acropolis is the most celebrated architectural expression of the High-Classical age. This exhibition brings together early archaeological publications, antiquarian paintings, drawings, and prints, as well as photographs, books, and more recent images that are all drawn from collections at Middlebury. Together they bear testimony to the fascination with the Acropolis that has prevailed from the Enlightenment to the present.
Rokafella Breaks Out Hip Hop for Haring
In conjunction with the exhibition Post Pop: Prints of Keith Haring, pioneering feminist breakdancer Ana “Rokafella” Garcia will give a lecture demonstration in the Dance Theatre of the Mahaney Center for the Arts at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 27. Her presentation is free and open to the public.
Museum Receives Federal Grant for Collection Management
The Middlebury College Museum of Art has received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to improve the management of its collection. With the federal funding, the museum will purchase a new database system that will be more reliable and easier to access and navigate than its current outdated system.
Keith Haring’s Prints Pop at Middlebury
This fall, the Middlebury College Museum of Art features more than forty prints by celebrated artist Keith Haring. Full of playful energy and vibrant color, the exhibition follows the icon’s illustrious career from 1982, when he made his first silkscreen prints, to his death from AIDS related complications in 1990 and covers the full range of his graphic work.
This Fall, a Brief Flowering of Viennese Optimism
Co-curated by Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture Erin Sassin and the students in her spring 2016 course “Bloom and Doom: Visual Expressions and Reform in Vienna circa 1900,” this exhibition features lesser known works by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, along with prints, drawings, and posters created by other members of the Viennese Secession. Bloom and Doom illuminates how these individuals challenged the artistic and social establishment by rejecting the traditional academic system and turning to new means of expression, often attempting to reunify art and life in a “total work of art,” before giving into cultural pessimism and withdrawing from public life.