The Friends of the Middlebury College Museum of Art are seeking nominations for their 2014 Arts Awards recognition program, now in its sixteenth year. The Awards program, which was redesigned last year in an effort to reach out farther into the community, focuses this year, and in subsequent even numbered years, on recognizing teachers, volunteers, artists, and supporters of the visual arts in the county for their achievements. This year and every year the program will also honor a Middlebury College student whose achievement in the field of the visual arts deserves special recognition.

RoseLee Goldberg, author, scholar, curator, and founder of the Performance biennial in New York, will speak at Middlebury College on Thursday, February 27 at 4:30 pm in the Concert Hall of the Mahaney Center for the Arts. Her lecture will provide rich context and in depth analysis for Performance Now, an exhibition which she organized and is on view through Sunday, April 20 at the Middlebury College Museum of Art.

On Friday, February 7, the Middlebury College Museum of Art will open the exhibition Performance Now, a selection of works by artists who practice a variety of art making procedures featuring videos, objects, films, and installations that document ephemeral occurrences. RoseLee Goldberg, art historian and curator of the exhibit, showed in her groundbreaking book Performance Art: From Futurism To the Present (1979) that performance is central to the history of 20th century art. In 2005 she launched Performa 05, the first biennial of visual art performance, and predicted that performance would become “the medium of the 21st century.” Performance Now deftly demonstrates that this medium’s time has come.

On Tuesday, January 7 the Middlebury College Museum of Art will open an exhibition dedicated to the state’s buildings. Observing Vermont Architecture Exhibit features some one hundred photographs by Curtis B. Johnson selected to accompany the newly published Buildings of Vermont co-authored by Johnson and Glenn M. Andres. Curated by the authors, the exhibition celebrates an architectural heritage that has made Vermont the only state in the Union to be designated in its entirety as a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Vito Acconci’s Way Station I (Study Chamber) was a lightning rod for strong opinions while it was extant on the College’s campus, and the exhibition has garnered similar attention. Here’s a summary of what local and regional media outlets are saying about the reinstalled piece and the accompanying exhibit.

On Friday, October 18, the Middlebury College Museum of Art will inaugurate its newest addition to the campus’s distinguished collection of public art—a reinstallation of Vito Acconci’s provocative and seminal sculpture Way Station I (Study Chamber). The sculpture is located adjacent to the pond at the Mahaney Center for the Arts on Porter Field Road. The inauguration—which will include remarks about the history of the piece and its significance within the arc of the artist’s career, followed by the formal unlocking of the structure—is free and open to the public and will occur at 2:00 p.m.

On Thursday, September 12, the Middlebury College Museum of Art will open the exhibition Screened and Selected II: Contemporary Photography and Video Acquisitions 2006–2011. The 26 works included in the exhibition were all chosen for the Museum collection by Middlebury College students who participated in a winter-term course in Contemporary Photography.

This exhibition marks the 30^th anniversary of Acconci’s winter-term residency on campus and the 1983 construction of Way Station I (Study Chamber), the artist’s first permanent commission. An internationally celebrated performance and video artist before he came to Middlebury, Acconci went on to found Acconci Studio and has subsequently maintained an active and distinguished career as a designer of public places in this country and abroad.

Edward Hopper in Vermont has been a wildly popular exhibit, and as a result it has received a fair amount of attention from local and regional media outlets. Here is a sampling of what they have to say.

In 1634 Rembrandt was busy filling commissions as Amsterdam’s most sought-after portraitist. He was also painting religious works that pushed the dramatic stylistic devices of Baroque artists like Caravaggio and Rubens to their theatrical limits. In this print, as in those paintings, the artist presents small figures in a vast, dark setting; he uses gesture to convey drama and spotlighting to focus the viewer’s attention upon it. Consistent with Rembrandt’s contemporary painting, as well, is a high degree of finish, which drew the praise of his contemporaries for its attention to detail, variety of poses, and accuracy of emotion.