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.

The Middlebury College Museum of Art is currently featuring three recently acquired black and white photographs by local photographer Tad Merrick (1951–2012). By acquiring these works—each from a different decade of his career—the Museum has committed to preserving a sampling of Tad’s artistic legacy for future generations. Tad’s photographs will be on view through August 11.

The Middlebury College Museum of Art has received a gift from the Serge and Vally Sabarsky Foundation in New York that will establish a three-year initiative to bring to Middlebury a series of exhibitions developed from the Foundation’s extensive collections of German and Austrian art from the period 1890–1940.

Edward Burtynsky, whose striking Vermont quarry photographs are currently on view in our Johnson Gallery in Nature Transformed, will receive a Doctor of Arts degree during the Middlebury College 2013 commencement ceremony on Sunday, May 26. Read more here.

In the more than 75 years since their creation, the majority of Edward Hopper’s Vermont works have been shrouded in obscurity, and some have not been on view to the public in nearly fifty years. This exhibition, assembled from museums and private collections throughout the United States, reunites Hopper’s Vermont works and displays them together, in Vermont, for the first time.