Historian Paul Monod unraveled some of the mysteries surrounding the museum’s two 15th-century Flemish panel paintings for an admiring audience of art aficionados on February 28. The exquisite paintings on wooden panels are attributed to the “Master of the St. Ursula Legend,” an unnamed artist working in Bruges between 1475 and 1500, and are currently on view in the museum’s Cerf Gallery. Read the full Dispatch on the Middlebury Magazine blog.

The First Commandment for museumgoers — thou shalt not touch — has been suspended this week for 13 Middlebury College art-history students. They’re drawing with crayons on a wall of the college’s Museum of Art. What would usually be considered totally transgressive behavior is actually an essential act in regard to the centerpiece of a show titled “Linear Thinking: Sol LeWitt, Modern, Postmodern and Contemporary Art from the Collection.” The students in Middlebury professor Edward Vazquez’s course on minimalism are completing a LeWitt wall drawing in accordance with instructions from the artist’s estate. Read the full story in Seven Days.

Linear Thinking was conceived in conjunction with several spring courses in the History of Art and Architecture. It includes prints and one sculpture by artists in the museum’s collection as well as a temporary wall drawing by Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #394, which was first conceived in 1983 at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux in France, is on loan to the museum from the artist’s estate and will be installed during the week of February 25 by students in Professor Edward Vazquez’s course “Minimalism: Art, Objects, and Experience.”

On the occasion of this year’s national presidential election the Middlebury College Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit of twenty political cartoons—and one bronze sculpture—created by the noted political cartoonist Patrick Bruce “Pat” Oliphant (b.1935). The exhibit features ten caricatures, acquired by the museum in 2010 and never previously exhibited, which provide historical insight into issues that preoccupied Americans during the thirty-sixth through forty-third presidencies—i.e., from Lyndon B. Johnson to George W. Bush—as well as ten caricatures pertaining to the current election which are on loan from the artist himself.