This summer, the Henry Sheldon Museum presents a series of lunchtime gallery talks, held every other Wednesday, between June 14 and August 23, 2023, that will highlight its current exhibition, Artists in the Archives: Unseen Neighbors. Each presentation will focus on a particular artist’s collage that explores themes with which members of our community have grappled historically, including race, difference, sexuality, and gender.

Eva Garcelon-Hart, the Sheldon’s Archivist, and William Hart, Professor Emeritus of History at Middlebury College, will offer the first presentation on June 14, 12 noon -1pm, “A Fly in the Buttermilk: The African American Presence in Historic Middlebury.”  Their talk will illuminate the unexpected presence of African Americans who both lived in and visited Middlebury during the 19th and 20th centuries, including Frederick Douglass, Louise Manning, and Middlebury College students of color. Jeanna Penn’s collage, “Fly in the Buttermilk,” uses the Black folk expression to convey the visibility, vulnerability, and isolation experienced by Black individuals while living in a predominantly White community. 

Eva Garcelon-Hart has been the Sheldon archivist since 2011. She holds Master’s Degree in History of Art and MLIS from the University of California at Berkeley. She has curated several exhibitions at the Sheldon and elsewhere.  Her interests focus on bringing to public attention the Research Center’s overlooked stories and its visual collections.

 

William B. Hart, Professor Emeritus of History at Middlebury College, taught American, African American, Native American, and Atlantic-World history courses at Middlebury between 1993 and 2020.  He is the author of “For the Good of their Souls”: Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country (2020).  Bill is currently writing a cultural biography of Alexander Twilight, the first identifiable person of African descent to earn a college degree from an American college – Middlebury in 1823.