The Museum Opens on May 10!
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Come to Community Day!
Saturday, May 10, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Celebrate the start of the 2025 season with a day dedicated to welcoming the community with free admission, musical performances, gallery talks, nature walks, drop-in art making, and more. Plus new exhibitions including Sound, Art, & Ink: Higher Ground Gig Posters; Herd: Karen Petersen’s Bronze Horses; Dahlov Ipcar: The Possibilities of Pattern; Blueprint of a Collection: Cyanotype Photography by David Sokosh; Porcelain Love Letters: The Art of Mara Superior.
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Sound, Art, & Ink: Higher Ground Gig Posters
Shelburne Museum celebrates a creative collaboration among an independent music venue, a visionary design studio, and a corps of dedicated printmakers that memorialized the musical moments that shaped lives and nurtured nostalgia through that ephemeral medium—the gig poster.
Image: Designed by Mikey Laviolette, Margaret Glaspy & Julian Lage, May 17, 2008. Silkscreen print on paper, 15 x 15 in. Courtesy of Alex Crothers, Iskra PrintCollective, and Solidarity of Unbridled Labour.
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Herd: Karen Petersen’s Bronze Horses
Herd transforms the Museum’s grounds into a pasture for Karen Petersen’s striking equine sculptures. Stripping away details like manes, tails, and ears, Petersen distills the horse’s form to its essence, revealing primal yet elegant and powerful shapes.
Image: Karen Petersen, Stallion, 1986. Bronze, 76 x 70 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist. Photography by Andy Duback.
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Dahlov Ipcar: The Possibilities of Pattern
Dahlov Ipcar’s work combines elements of modernism, social realism, folk art, and a fascination with the natural world. This exhibition examines how printed textiles shaped her multidisciplinary practice—from paintings and illustrated books to collage and sculptural forms—highlighting the artist’s lifelong commitment to imaginative creativity.
Image: Dahlov Ipcar, Okapi 6, 1990. Cotton, wire, and buttons, 16 x 13 x 4 1/2 in. Rachel Walls Fine Art. Photography by Andy Duback. © Dahlov Ipcar.
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Blueprint of a Collection: Cyanotype Photography by David Sokosh
David Sokosh reimagines objects from Shelburne Museum’s collection through the 19th-century cyanotype process. This immersive exhibition invites viewers to consider American material culture in new ways, blending historical and contemporary perspectives.
Image: David Sokosh, Mermaid/Moon, 2023–24. Cyanotype, 38×30 in. Courtesy of David Sokosh.
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Porcelain Love Letters: The Art of Mara Superior
A retrospective of Mara Superior’s acclaimed porcelain art. Originally trained as a painter, Superior found her true medium in porcelain, combining intricate painted imagery with sculptural forms to explore themes of art history, environmentalism, and domesticity. Her pieces, often described as love letters to the world, invite audiences to engage with their timeless beauty and layered meanings.
Image: Mara Superior, Only One Planet Earth, 2019. High-fired porcelain, ceramic oxides, underglaze, glaze, and gold leaf, 16 x 16 x 11/2 in. Courtesy of artist and Ferrin Contemporary. John Polak Photography.
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Webinar: Dahlov Ipcar’s Whiskers, Wings, and Whispering Things
Wednesday, April 23, 6:00–7:00 p.m.
Born in Windsor, Vermont, in 1917, Dahlov Ipcar is best known for her vibrantly illustrated children’s books. The upcoming exhibition The Possibilities of Pattern highlights the artist’s expansive work in textiles that combines elements of modernism, social realism, folk art, and a fascination with the natural world, including embroidery, fabric collage, “soft sculptures,” and related ephemera. Join Katie Wood Kirchhoff, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen Curator of American Decorative Arts, for a preview of the exhibition and a conversation exploring the ways that Ipcar translated her imaginative narratives into whimsical visual forms.
Image: Dahlov Ipcar, Leopard and Tiger, 1974. Wool on linen ground, 36 x 60 in. Private Collection. Photography by Andy Duback. Dahlov Ipcar.
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