Collective Affinities Opens at Bennington College’s Usdan Gallery
Exhibition reveals the personal collections of Bennington College community members September 17–November 23.
Bennington, VT: Collective Affinities brings together the unusual and idiosyncratic collections of Bennington College faculty, staff, and alums. Contents range from monogrammed luggage to Paris metro tickets, cat whiskers to nutcrackers, and belly-dancing records to pulp-fiction paperbacks.
“Coins, stamps, stickers, tea sets … so many of us collect something,” said Usdan Gallery Director Anne Thompson, who curated the exhibition. “My interest with this show is to explore how and why collections happen and to offer a way into academic inquiry about our own collections and those of people we know.”
The exhibition’s opening reception is 6:30–8:30 pm Tuesday, September 17, at the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery on the Bennington College campus. The gallery is open to the public 1:00–5:00 pm Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment through Saturday, November 23.
Highlighting the pleasures and social functions of collecting, the exhibition draws inspiration from the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. A passionate collector himself, Benjamin 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.”
A central theme of Collective Affinities is the different ways collections come into being. While most collections are intentional—outward manifestations of professional interests or personal obsessions—others are more accidental. Rather than emerging from us, collections can happen to us, through gifts, inheritance, or sheer chance. Other themes include the role of institutions in preserving collections; collecting as engagement with urban and natural environments; and the diaristic aggregation of objects over time. Various in origin as well as content, the fifteen collections on view inspire reflection on how we engage with history and our surroundings as we move through a world of things.
Extending the exhibition’s community emphasis into the curriculum, Bennington students will produce the Collective Affinities catalog. Participants in a seminar on Benjamin’s life and work, taught by Thompson, will research and write about individual collections and provide content for a publication designed and printed by visual arts faculty Farhad Mirza’s Introduction to Design course. Beyond inviting students to consider collecting in general, exhibition objects intriguingly reflect some of Benjamin's wide-ranging subjects and fascinations, including objects such as dolls, toys, books, and ephemera; activities such as urban wandering, shopping, and travel; and, philosophically, his understanding of nonlinear time and his conception of history as a “constellation” of past and present that informs the future.
Exhibition programming will include a record store pop-up event from Belltower Records in North Adams, Massachusetts, and a belly-dancing workshop. All events are open to the public.
Collective Affinities participants include Brenda Corman Alpar ’62, and her son, Joseph Alpar, music faculty; Karen Leslie Burke ’84, as donated to the math and science discipline area; Olivia Biro, Music Library and faculty coordinator; Maurice Hall, provost; Erin Ellen Kelly ’24; Mary Lum, visual arts faculty, emerita; Vanessa Lyon, visual arts faculty, art history; Farhad Mirza ’12, visual arts faculty; Karen Prime, budget manager, office of the provost; Sue Rees, visual arts faculty; Chris Rose, music teaching fellow; Olivia Saporito '20, visual arts technical instructor; Charles Schoonmaker, drama faculty, emeritus; Donald Sherefkin, visual arts faculty, emeritus; Anne Thompson, visual arts faculty and Usdan Gallery director; and John Umphlett, visual arts faculty and Usdan Gallery deputy director.
About Usdan Gallery
The gallery presents exhibitions of contemporary artists and ideas, engaging and advancing the College’s history of innovation within the arts and beyond. The 4,000-square-foot space is located on the main level of the Helen Frankenthaler ’49 Visual Arts Center. Anne Thompson is the Director and Curator.
About Bennington College
Bennington College is a liberal arts college in southwestern Vermont with a long and pioneering history in the visual arts. Bennington College was the first in the country to put the arts at the center of a liberal arts education and one that has long embraced—for more than 90 years—the idea that art can shape our way of thinking about everything, from aesthetics, philosophy, and literature to mathematics, environmental activism, and community development.
Bennington’s distinguished visual arts alumni have shaped the field of the visual arts as artists, curators, dealers, and gallerists. Notable alumni include Helen Frankenthaler ’49, Kathy Halbreich ’71, Sally Mann ’73, Dan Cameron ’79, Holly Block ’80, Matthew Marks ’85, Andrea Fiuczynski ’85, Odili Donald Odita MFA ’90, Carrie Moyer ’82, and Anna Gaskell ’92.