Press Release Archives
MuseumWorks Offers Students Rich Opportunities
2018 marks the fourth summer that the Middlebury College Museum of Art has run MuseumWorks, an intensive internship and professional development program for Middlebury students interested in pursuing careers in the cultural sector for the public good. Since its founding in 2015, MuseumWorks has helped 18 motivated Middlebury College undergraduates take their first steps toward successful and ethical careers in the arts.
Elizabeth Catlett, Black is Beautiful
Elizabeth Catlett is among the most distinguished African American artists of the twentieth century, yet her work is somewhat less well known than her peers’ in part because she made the decision in 1947 to move permanently to Mexico. Both a print maker and a sculptor, she was repeatedly attracted to the themes of race and gender drawn or sculpted in a seductive blend of modernism and naturalism.
Kongo-Vili Power Figure
This past January the museum acquired through Sotheby’s an important nineteenth-century Kongo Power Figure, from the Loango region of west Africa (Republic of Congo and the Angolan enclave Cabinda) that borders the Kongo River. Standing just over twenty-four inches high and carved of wood, it is a type of figure that fulfilled a ritualistic role in Kongo communities.
Provocative Exhibit Flashes Back to 1968
1968 was a year of upheaval and transformation. It was a year in which national and international events spawned intense vocal expression and protest. This summer the Middlebury College Museum of Art, through the lens of art, music, and literature, looks back fifty years to consider the issues then transforming American society.
The Children of Summer
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.
Scylla about to Hurl a Rock
This small Etruscan bronze depicts Scylla, the mythical marine monster that is part female and part fantastic animal. Scylla features ferociously in Homer’s Odyssey, when she snatches six of Odysseus’ men from his ship and devours them.
Power & Piety Exhibit Opening Delayed by Building Issues
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.
Exhibit Looks Back on Ten Years of Visiting Print Artists
Ten Years: The Cameron Print Project displays 29 works of art produced over the past decade in a series of annual collaborations between visiting artists and advanced printmaking students at the College. Prints by students working with Mark Dion, Derrick Adams, Tomas Vu, Kati Heck, and Rona Yefman, among others, will be on view.
Keith Haring, Silence Equals Death
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.
Spanish Colonial Art Lands at Middlebury
Power and Piety: Spanish Colonial Art opens at the Middlebury College Museum of Art on Friday, January 26. The exhibition is drawn from the private collection of Patricia Cisneros, and the Cisneros Foundation, established in the 1970s to enhance appreciation of the diversity, sophistication, and range of art from Latin America, and to advance scholarship of the material culture of the Ibero-American world, ranging from the ethnographic to the contemporary.