Go VIRAL

The museum’s collections are not just precious objects to be gazed at while walking through our galleries. As an academic museum, we exist to support the curriculum of the college and to fuel academic inquiry in any way possible. The museum is home to more than 6,000 works of art—most of which are in storage at any one time—from a broad range of cultures and time periods, and we actively encourage inquisitive investigation, both scholarly and extra-curricular, of our collections.

The projects that appear on this site—our hub of Virtual Inspiration, Research, and Learning—offer different examples of the sorts of academic engagement the students and faculty of Middlebury are having with the objects in our collection. We invite you to browse, enjoy, and learn something new. And if you find yourself inspired toward artistic investigation of your own, by all means visit our comprehensive online collection database and see what piques your interest. We’re more than happy to facilitate your exploration any way we can.

Projects

This page features recent student projects related to the museum’s collections, exhibitions, and programs. Enjoy!

Online Exhibit—The Light of the Levant: Early Photography and the Late Ottoman Empire

Organized into thematic sections that are chronologically arranged, the exhibition—curated by Pieter Broucke, Associate Curator at the Museum and Professor of History of Art and Architecture, and Sarah Rogers, Professor of History of Art and Architecture with help from students in the spring 2023 course “Orientalism and the Visual Arts”—features photographs that trace a century of photography in the Levant, and documents the various scientific, commercial, ideological, and personal uses of the new medium.

A detail of a black-and-white lithograph with color wash showing an aerial view of Jerusalem from the 1930s

Explore The Light of the Levant

 

Online Catalogue—Early Modern Dutch Prints at the Middlebury College Museum of Art

This catalogue features a selection of 16th- and 17th-century Dutch prints from the Middlebury College Museum of Art’s extensive collection of works on paper. Since paper is a light-sensitive material, these artworks cannot be on display in the museum galleries for extended periods of time. This digital catalogue, curated by Simone Edgar Holmes ‘20.5, Associate Professor Carrie Anderson, and the students in her Printmaking in Rembrandt’s Time courses, seeks to make these works accessible to new and wider audiences.

A detail of an engraving featuring Venus receiving flowers, fruits, and birds from nymphs

Browse our Dutch prints

 

Digital Research Archive—NW x NE: The Assyrian Relief in the Middlebury College Museum of Art

In the spring of 2020, the students in Professor Sarah Laursen’s “NWxNE: Digital Methodologies for Art Historians” class created a website dedicated to the study of Middlebury’s Assyrian relief. The site represents a continuation of the NWxNE project, which was initiated in 2019 by curators at Bowdoin College and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to investigate the Assyrian reliefs from the Northwest Palace that are now housed in collections in the Northeastern United States.

A detail of an Assyrian relief featuring a winged genie pollinating a date palm

Explore our Assyrian Relief

 

Online Exhibit—Land and Lens: Photographers Envision the Environment

Featuring 71 images spanning the mid-19th century to the present day, the works on view in Land and Lens, an exhibition originally on view at Middlebury in the fall of 2017, come primarily from the Museum’s rich holdings of historic and contemporary photography. Among the wide range of artists represented are historic figures Ansel Adams, Arthur Rothstein, Eliot Porter and Alfred Stieglitz, as well as many contemporaries.

A detail of a photograph of a Greenland ice sheet by James Balog

Experience Land and Lens

 

Online Exhibit—Untouched by Time: The Athenian Acropolis from Pericles to Parr

Originally on view in the spring of 2017, Untouched by Time—which brought together early archaeological publications, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, reconstruction images, and books all drawn from collections at Middlebury—chronicled the changing perceptions of the Acropolis over the last three centuries and bore testimony to the ever enduring fascination with these monuments.

A detail of an 1869 oil on canvas painting of the Parthenon by Sanford Robinson Gifford

Experience Untouched by Time

 

Contact the Museum

Interested in starting your own research project with items in our collection? Have some constructive comments or criticism? Want to learn more about or share some praise for the projects you see here? Awesome. Whatever it is, we want to hear from you, so feel free to use the contact form below to give us a shout.

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