Collective Affinities: Personal Collections from the Bennington College Community
September 17–November 23, 2024
Collective Affinities brings together idiosyncratic collections of Bennington College faculty, staff, and alums to highlight and examine the pleasures and social functions of collecting, with contents ranging from monogrammed luggage to Paris Metro tickets, cat whiskers to nutcrackers, and belly-dancing records to pulp-fiction paperbacks.
A central theme is 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.
In considering the act of collecting, Collective Affinities draws inspiration from the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). 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.” The exhibition also speaks to some of Benjamin’s personal fascinations and wide-ranging subjects as a writer, including things such as dolls, toys, books, and ephemera; activities such as urban wandering, shopping, and travel; and, philosophically, his sense of nonlinear time and his conception of history as a “constellation” of past and present that informs the future.
Extending the exhibition’s community focus into the curriculum, Bennington students will collaborate in producing the Collective Affinities catalog. Members of a seminar on Benjamin’s life and work will write about individual collections on display; students in a 2-D design course will create the publication.
Collective Affinities participants include Brenda Corman Alpar ’62, and her son, Joseph Alpar, music faculty; Karen Leslie Burke ’84, and the math and science discipline area; Olivia Biro, music library and program coordinator; Maurice Hall, Provost; Brent Harrington, husband of Karen Prime, budget manager, Office of the Provost; Erin Ellen Kelly, dance MFA ’24; Mary Lum, visual arts faculty in drawing, emerita; Vanessa Lyon, visual arts faculty in art history; Farhad Mirza ’12, visual arts faculty in design; Sue Rees, visual arts faculty in animation; Chris Rose, music teaching fellow; Olivia Saporito ’20, technical instructor in sculpture; Charles Schoonmaker, drama faculty in costume design, retired; Donald Sherefkin, visual arts faculty in architecture, emeritus; and John Umphlett, visual arts faculty in sculpture.
Collective Affinities is curated by Usdan Gallery Director Anne Thompson, who also is a contributor to the exhibition.
Exhibition photography by Alon Koppel for Usdan Gallery, Bennington College
(Image: Detail of transforming objects, collection of Sue Rees, visual arts faculty in animation, and video made by Rees for the Collective Affinities exhibition)
