Pop Up Record Store at Usdan Gallery

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Vinyl collectors and music lovers of all kinds! Stop by Usdan Gallery for a special pop-up record store as part of our current exhibition “Collective Affinities: Personal Collections from the Bennington College Community”.

In keeping with the show's community theme, Belltower Records—co-owned by Crossett Library staff Andrea Belair—will set up shop outside Usdan during regular gallery hours. And during the pop-up, Grandmaster Incongruous (aka music technical instructor Curt Wells) will DJ from his personal vinyl collection.

On view through November 23, “Collective Affinities” brings together idiosyncratic collections of Bennington College faculty, staff, and alums to highlight and examine the pleasures and social functions of collecting. Contents ranging from monogrammed luggage to Paris Metro tickets, cat whiskers to nutcrackers, and belly-dancing records to pulp-fiction paperbacks cohere around a central theme of how collections come into being. While most collections are intentional—manifestations of professional or personal interests and obsessions—others are more inadvertent, happening to us through gifts, inheritance, or chance. With curiosity about the different and potentially shifting functions of collections, installations address topics including the custodial role of institutions, collecting as interaction with urban and natural environments, collections anchored in family narratives, and the diaristic aggregation of stuff over time. Various in origin as well as content, the sixteen collections on view invite reflection on how we engage with history, material culture, and our surroundings.

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