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First years enjoy a tour of the museum (photo: Jonathan Blake)
The Museum regularly issues press releases about current and upcoming exhibitions and programs as well as recent acquisitions, gifts, staff appointments, and other news. Below you’ll find a list of current and past news articles, while the links to the left will provide the latest information about the Museum’s programs as well as details on past news and events.
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The Middlebury College Museum of Art will reopen on Tuesday, September 4, with a fall exhibition highlighting three luminaries of American photography: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand, along with lesser-known artists in their circle. Camera Work: Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, and Company was organized for the museum by Charles A. Dana Professor of History of Art and Architecture Kirsten Hoving and students in her 2011 course “Camera Work: Alfred Stieglitz and Photography.”
As the Middlebury College Museum of Art approaches its twentieth anniversary, it has become apparent that portions of its original sprinkler system need to be replaced. Because this is a complicated process that affects numerous spaces, the museum will need to be closed for the entire summer beginning on May 14.
This February, responses to urban, natural, and economic environments by contemporary sub-Saharan African artists will be on view in a thought-provoking exhibition at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. From appropriated waste materials turned into site-specific installations and sculptures to eerily compelling photographs of ravaged and degraded environments, Environment and Object • Recent African Art will include works of art that scrutinize man-made environmental disasters, natural resource problems, deforestation, and other ecological issues.
These two panels, purchased at auction at Sotheby’s London, once served as the wings of a triptych, most likely commissioned by a private patron for personal devotion in a home. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the royal figure depicted in the right panel may well be a rare portrait of the English King Henry VI.
During the spring of 2011 six students in the History of Art and Architecture course Art Museums: Theory and Practice, taught by Museum Director Richard Saunders, were invited to select a recent acquisition from the Middlebury College Museum of Art’s permanent collection as the focus of their study. Over the course of the semester the students researched the history and meaning of their respective works, and their research culminated in the installation of these six objects in this fall’s exhibition How Did I Get Here?
New York artist Richard Dupont employs cutting edge technology to produce drawings, prints, sculptures and installations that explore opportunities for self-surveillance and the perception of identity in an increasingly digital world. In 2000 and 2004, he made full-body laser scans of himself that would serve as templates for future works. Four of these are on display at the museum.
Dr. Christopher R. Andres will speak about his discoveries and excavations at a Maya center in Tipan, Belize in an illustrated talk at 4:30 p.m. on Tues., Nov. 8 in the Robert A. Jones ’59 House.
A world-renowned collection of ancient Maya painted pottery, excavated by the University of Pennsylvania Museum nearly a century ago and reinterpreted in light of recent research in the field, provides the centerpiece for Painted Metaphors: Pottery and Politics of the Ancient Maya, which opens September 16 at the Middlebury College Museum of Art and runs through December 11.
Fairfield Porter’s elegant paintings were the subject of a 1983 retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston that at once permanently elevated his reputation and ensconced him into a period of modernist figuration that curators have been neglecting, in one form or another, for decades. Fairfield Porter: Raw at the Middlebury College Museum of Art afforded an unusual opportunity to see his work assembled in a serious way.
While in Middlebury to give a reading at the Breadloaf School of English, poet John Ashbery took a moment to explore the Museum’s current exhibition Fairfield Porter: Raw and to pose next to Porter’s untitled portrait of a man seated near a lamp, for which Ashbery was the sitter.