Opening - Collective Affinities: Personal collections from the Bennington College community

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | "Collective Affinities" presents personal collections created and held by Bennington College faculty, staff, and alums, with contents ranging from monogrammed luggage to Paris Metro tickets, cat whiskers to nutcrackers, and belly-dancing records to pulp-fiction paperbacks. A celebration of the pleasures and social functions of collecting, the exhibition highlights the conditions under which collections happen (through chance as well as intention); the contexts in which they exist; and how the act of collecting mirrors our engagement with objects and our surroundings.

Inspired by the writings of German philosopher Walter Benjamin, "Collective Affinities" has a direct link with the curriculum: students in a seminar about Benjamin, taught by Usdan Gallery director and exhibition curator Anne Thompson, will interview participating collectors and write exhibition texts connecting Benjamin's ideas with installations on display. A passionate collector himself, Benjamin wrote explicitly about collecting as part of his Marxist considerations of modernity, history, technology, and material culture. He saw the collecting impulse, at its core, as a desire to reconcile the chaotic “dispersion” of things in the world. “The collector,” he wrote, “brings together what belongs together; by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually furnish information about his objects.”

Participants in "Collective Affinities" include Brenda Corman Alpar, ’62, and Joseph Alpar, music faculty; Karen Leslie Burke, ’84, and the math and science discipline area; Olivia Biro, Jennings Music Library and music faculty coordinator; Maurice Hall, provost; Erin Ellen Kelly, ’24; Mary Lum, retired visual arts faculty; Vanessa Lyon, visual arts faculty in art history; Farhad Mirza, visual arts faculty, ’12; Karen Prime, budget manager; Sue Rees, visual arts faculty; Chris Rose, music teaching fellow; Olivia Saporito, visual arts technical instructor in sculpture, '20; Charles Schoonmaker, retired drama faculty; Donald Sherefkin, retired visual arts faculty; Anne Thompson, visual arts faculty and Usdan Gallery director; and John Umphlett, visual arts faculty and Usdan Gallery deputy director.

Image: Detail of belly-dancing records collected by Brenda Corman Alpar, ’62, and her son, Joseph Alpar, Bennington music faculty