Opening May 13, 2023!
Right Under Your Nose features selections from the collection of JJ Murphy and Nancy Mladenoff, a compendium of more than 3,200 children’s printed handkerchiefs and related ephemera gifted to Shelburne Museum in 2020.
Including automatons, mechanical banks, toys, and whirligigs, this online exhibition brings Shelburne Museum’s collection to life. Whether by turnkey, button, string, or breeze, these objects have been carefully reactivated, many for the first time in more than half a century. Featuring short digital videos, the exhibition captures these rare performances, allowing contemporary audiences the opportunity to watch these historical objects spring into action.
Commissioned to celebrate the Museum’s 75th anniversary, Nancy Winship Milliken: Varied and Alive, is a site-specific outdoor sculpture exhibition that embodies the Museum’s commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainability while also engaging in global and local ecological conversations, from climate change to Lake Champlain’s watershed history.
Maria Shell: Off the Grid features a selection of vibrant, contemporary quilts that push the boundaries of the traditional gridded format of the American quilt. This online exhibition is the precursor to an exhibition featuring fourteen works by Shell created between 2011 and 2022 on view in the Dana-Spencer Textile Galleries at Hat and Fragrance from May 15–October 16, 2022.
Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light highlights landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and related ephemera by painter and printmaker Luigi Lucioni, illuminating a body of work in conversation with early 20th-century American modernist painters, photographers, writers, and musicians. This online exhibition is the precursor to an exhibition at the Museum on view from June 25 to October 16, 2022.
Our Collection: Electra Havemeyer Webb, Edith Halpert, and American Folk Art is a virtual exhibition celebrating the friendship between two visionary women who thoughtfully assembled one of the world’s most revered collections of American folk sculpture for Shelburne Museum.
Mary Cassatt’s Impressions: Assembling the Havemeyer Art Collection explores the enduring friendship between Cassatt and the Havemeyers and highlights archival anecdotes and primary sources detailing their acquisitions of Impressionist paintings, drawings, and sculptures based on Cassatt’s advice.
Drawn from Shelburne Museum’s extensive permanent collection, Pattern & Purpose brings together twenty masterpiece quilts made between the first decades of the 1800s and the turn of the twenty- first century, ranging from carefully-pieced Lemoyne stars and embroidered “best quilts” to more recent “art quilts” by contemporary makers.
A. Elmer Crowell: Sculptor, Painter, Decoy Maker explores the artistry and innovation of the acclaimed carver’s ornamental birds. Drawing from Shelburne Museum’s renowned decoy collection, the exhibition features important milestones that chart the development of Crowell’s prolific artistic career, from the earliest miniature goose he carved in 1894 to the very last bird he made before retiring in the early 1940s.
Drawing heavily from Shelburne Museum’s permanent collection and supplemented by strategic loans from contemporary artists and private collectors, this exhibition will explore the creative ways animal forms have been adapted to create a wide range of beautiful and functional household objects. Ranging in date from the 18th century to the present day, the selected decorative art objects explore complex themes related to animal/human bonds, including domestication, emotional connections, and ethical treatment.
