PAST PROGRAMS
The Elephant in the Room: Exploring the Future of Museums (2021-22 Virtual Lecture Series)
What is “the elephant in the room” at museums?
What topics do museums and cultural heritage organizations shy away from, obscure, or feel ill-equipped to address?
Whose stories are collected? And whose are absent?
This far-reaching virtual lecture series, supported by Vermont Humanities, convenes national scholars, curators, and cultural visionaries to explore these questions. Our goal is ultimately to question the kind of history cultural heritage organizations perpetuate and to provide a framework for how institutions of all sizes and resources can engage in essential conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion in museum practice.
Living with Death: How Artists, Historians, and Museum Create Meaning in a Time of Loss by Dario Robleto and Ellery Foutch (10/6/21)
Historically, artists, museums, and everyday people have used objects and materials to create meaningful artifacts that shape our understandings of war, death, and loss. But what, specifically, is the role of artists and museums in any era of catastrophic loss? How do artists and museums help us make sense of seemingly senseless suffering and grief? In this shared conversation, artist Dario Robleto and art historian Ellery Foutch discuss what research and practices have revealed about the historical past and future paths of what we might call a "history of the creative response to loss."
Aesthetic Addictions: Psychological Perspectives on Collecting from Rudolph II to Charles Foster Kane by Graham C. Boettcher (11/10/21)
Collections are the foundation of museums, and behind every collection lies the story of a collector. Dr. Graham C. Boettcher, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art, discusses some of history's greatest collectors—actual and fictional—exploring what motivates these passionate gatherers and separates them from hoarders. Boettcher will also discuss how the ethics of collecting have changed, and touch on some of the new challenges and obligations collectors—both individual and institutional—face today.
Making History with Mrs. M-----’s Cabinet: Imagining a Feminist Period Room by Sarah Anne Carter (12/8/21)
In this lecture Professor Sarah Carter explores the creation and use of the "Mrs. M.-----'s Cabinet" period room project at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which she collaboratively created during her time with the Chipstone Foundation. This experimental exhibition hacks into the idea of the museum period room to ask, what does a museum do and who is it for, through the collection and space of an imagined nineteenth-century collector.
Picturing Difference: Photography, Democracy, and Race in the 19th Century by Michelle Smiley (1/12/22)
In this talk, Dr. Smiley discusses American daguerreotype portraiture, its uses as both as a scientific instrument and as a means of picturing loved ones, as well as the photographic portrait as a medium of democratic participation, particularly for African American, Asian, and women subjects. Dr. Smiley explores how nineteenth-century photographic portrait studios shaped conceptions of “self” and “other” and the sometimes-unlikely places where we may uncover these visual histories in museums and archival collections.
Mill Talk: Innovations and Connections—The Story of Isaac Markham and His Machine Drawings by Polly Darnell (6/16/21)
Innovation and personal connections led Isaac Markham from Middlebury, Vermont to Waltham, Massachusetts and the most advanced textile mill in the world. His story, mainly about how new ideas spread, also includes the possibility of women staging the first industrial strike in this country, a mystery, a tragedy, and a cautionary note. His drawings are rare documentation of the machines then in use or in development. Their rediscovery in 1981 made new connections, between the Henry Sheldon Museum and the Charles River Museum of Industry in Waltham, that eventually led to the 2010 publication of Visual Mechanic Knowledge: The workshop drawings of Isaac Ebenezer Markham (1795-1825), New England Textile Mechanic by David J. Jeremy and Polly Darnell.
Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Couple in Early Vermont by Eva Garcelon-Hart (4/12/21)
Drawing from the Sheldon Museum collections, archivist Eva Garcelon-Hart presents the story of two extraordinary women, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, who were accepted in early 19th-century rural Vermont as a married couple.
Never Meant to Last: Everyday Treasures of Ephemera by Eva Garcelon-Hart and Lucinda Cockrell (3/22/19)
Archivist Eva Garcelon-Hart and avid ephemera collector, Lucinda Cockrell, present a broad overview of the Sheldon archives’ colorful ephemera collection. The plethora of broadsides, trade cards, posters, catalogs and other formats will provide a unique glimpse into 19th-century local and national business advertisements, medical practices, sports, and entertainment.
EXHIBIT PROGRAMS
Henry at 200: Collector, Museum Founder & More
Henry Luther Sheldon, founder of the Henry Sheldon Museum, was born on August 15, 1821. In 2021, we celebrated his birthday and his collecting passions.
“ … I have spent all my leisure the past year trying to benefit future generations…” wrote Henry in his 1881 diary referring to his extensive collecting of local, regional and national historical materials. This exhibit explores his life, myriad of collecting pursuits, the establishment of what has become known as the oldest community-based Museum in the country, and an outstanding archive, the Stewart-Swift Research Center. Henry amassed one of the richest but little known historical collections in all New England, rendering Middlebury perhaps one of the best documented towns in the entire region. On view will be variety of historical documents, photographs, scrapbooks, autographs, Middlebury imprints, diaries, music ephemera, relics, a lock of Napoleon’s hair, and more.
History Happens Here by Glenn Andres (7/20/21)
Middlebury and Addison County have a remarkable history, importantly documented by the Henry Sheldon Museum, of persons and events from Revolutionary times onward that have had more than local, in many cases national and even international, significance. Glenn Andres explored stories of area contributions and contributors to the histories of education, manufacturing, architecture, politics, abolitionism, conservation, and same-sex marriage.
The Birth and Re-Birth of the Sheldon Museum by David Stameshkin (8/10/21)
Dressed as Henry Sheldon, historian Dr. David Stameshkin brought the history of Henry Sheldon and his museum to life in this entertaining talk. Henry Sheldon chartered one of the first community-based museums in the United States in 1882. After he died in 1907, the Museum—and his dream of sharing his many treasures with the world—was suspended for three decades, until a small group of energetic and creative Middleburians brought it back to life and made Henry’s dream come true.
Conjuring the Dead: Spirit Art in the Age of Radical Reform
The exhibition “Conjuring the Dead: Spirit Art in the Age of Radical Reform,” on view from September 20 through January 11, 2020, presented spirit photographs and original spirit artwork from the Henry Sheldon Museum’s collections acquired by Solomon Wright Jewett (1808-94). The exhibition was supplemented by ephemera, pamphlets, and objects that will provide a rich context to the rise of Modern Spiritualism.
Sinner, Prophets, and Seers: Moral Reform and the Second Great Awakening by Bill Hart (10/10/19)
No longer governed by a king, the new republic of the United Sates required its citizens to be virtuous and selfless. However, by the first decade of the 19th century, many Americans experienced personal stress and cultural disorientation. Westward expansionism, the rise of individualism, northern emancipation, and technological change led many Americans to question their institutions, beliefs, and values. Many sought to change their personal behaviors and social practices, which gave rise to a series of reform movements. Middlebury College Professor Emeritus of History Bill Hart discuss these movements whose goal was to perfect the individual, American society, and ultimately the world.
The Hutchinson Family Singers: Huzzas, Horrors, and Bumps in the Night by Dale Cockrell (11/7/19)
The Hutchinson Family Singers were the best-known, most-loved, and most-hated musicians in nineteenth-century America. Their passionate commitment to talking and singing about the sisterhood of social reforms garnered them notoriety on all sides of a wide range of divides (including spiritualism). American popular music specialist Dale Cockrell discusses the oft-overlooked family who bear primary responsibility for the ways in which American popular music was then made, heard, and appreciated, legacies still much manifest today.
By Seen and Unseen Hands: Spirit Artists and their Art in the 21st Century by Stephen Wehmeyer (11/14/19)
Since the earliest days of its history, the American Spiritualist movement has been closely tied to the visual arts. Renowned mediums like the Bangs Sisters and the Campbell Brothers trafficked in “precipitated” paintings – artwork purportedly produced by spirit hands – while the emergent technology of photography offered believers (and the occasional charlatan) a new tool for capturing visible records of an invisible world. Since the mid-1990s, Associate Champlain College Professor Stephen Wehmeyer has been exploring the artistic work of Mediums and Spirit Artists from Spiritualist communities in Western New York, Southern California, and New Orleans. This presentation explores the role and function of visual arts in the lives and work of these latter-day Spiritualists, whose vernacular visions of unseen worlds continue to intrigue, delight, and inspire.
Our Town: Love, Joy, Sadness, and Baseball — 100 Years of Photography from the Sheldon Museum
The exhibit features single and group portraits of Vermonters – both the celebrated and the ordinary citizen, village scenes capturing disasters and daily life, landscapes of Vermont’s treasured mountains and lakes. Stunning aerial landscape photographs were taken by George N. Lathrop (1900 – 1983). An extensive collection of Lathrop’s photographs and negatives of Addison County taken between 1930s and 1960s is part of the Sheldon archives.
Gallery Talk by Jim Blair (6/20/18)
James P. Blair, retired National Geographic photographer, discusses some of the 36 photographs from the Sheldon Museum’s collection now on view in the exhibit Our Town: Love, Joy, Sadness, and Baseball — 100 Years of Photography from the Sheldon Museum. In collaboration with Sheldon Museum Archivist Eva Garcelon-Hart, Jim selected these photographs from the thousands of photographs in the Sheldon’s archives.