Collection Overview
Bennington Museum presents the finest collection of art and historical artifacts of Bennington and the surrounding region including eastern New York State, southern Vermont, northwestern Massachusetts, and southern New Hampshire.
The expansive collection includes the best work of local artists, photographers, inventors, craftspeople, businesses, and factories. Approximately 30,000 objects, 15,000 photographs, 1,600 rare books and over 120 linear feet of archival material represent the region’s diverse arts, rich history, and culture of innovation from the 18th century to the present.
Within the collection are four internationally important facets:
- extensive and unparalleled primary resources on display in the Military Gallery documenting a pivotal Revolutionary War battle, the Battle of Bennington;
- the largest collection of iconic 19th century Bennington ceramics;
- the 1863 Jane Stickle quilt – a prime example of American textile craftsmanship;
- and the world’s largest collection of art, personal objects, and ephemera of famed American artist Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses – a selection of whose work is always on view.
Bennington Museum also holds a collection of the work of contemporary self-taught (outsider) artists and the abstract paintings and sculpture created by a group of leading American modernists who gathered in Bennington in the 1950s through the 1970s.
Other Galleries include:
- the Gilded Age Vermont which reflects the industrial boom in Bennington from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. This gallery highlights the industrial and cultural innovation of our region’s Gilded Age through objects that were either made or owned in Bennington and the surrounding region or created by artists with connections to the area.
- the Early Vermont Gallery which presents life in Vermont from the time when the earliest European settlers arrived in 1761 with only the bare necessities to the early 1800s when Vermont craftsmen achieved a level of sophistication rivaling Boston and New York.
These significant collections embody a unique sense of place, and although they have been loaned throughout the world, they are best understood here, at Bennington Museum, in the context of the very environment in which they were created.