Community Day, Celebrating Art and History –  The Bennington Museum invites everyone to celebrate Community Day on February 4 to explore the permanent, as well as the changing exhibitions.  Admission is FREE for everyone.  Opening the year one of the main floor galleries is Holding the Line: Ceramic Sculpture by Stanley Rosen.   During the last 40-plus years Rosen has focused on his role as teacher (Bennington College 1960-1991) and maker of a unique, evocative body of abstract ceramic sculptures rarely exhibiting or publishing his work. As a result, his important body of abstract ceramic sculptures, almost all of them untitled, have been seen by few and his name has largely faded from the history books. This exhibition and accompanying catalog shines a much deserved light on an important body of work created between the late 1950s up to the last few years and seeks to reestablish Rosen as one of the leading lights of American ceramic art during the last six decades.

Buy Local: Photographs from Weichert-Isselhardt Collection of glass plate negatives opens the 2017 Regional Artist gallery.  Bennington was changing rapidly at the turn of the 19th century and local photographers captured the people and landscape using negatives on thin plates of glass.  The Bennington Museum has recently acquired nearly 2,000 glass plate negatives from this era that were held in the Weichert-Isselhardt Collection.  Many of the negatives in this collection were taken by Madison Watson (active in Bennington 1888-1899) and Wills T. White (active in Bennington 1899-1940).  The images on view celebrate shops and commerce found in Bennington during this period.