Collective Affinities: Personal collections from the Bennington College community

September 17–November 23, 2024

“Collective Affinities” brings together 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. Beyond the pleasures of collecting, the exhibit considers the different ways that collections happen—through chance as well as intention; the contexts in which collection exist; and what the act of collecting can say about how we move through a world of objects and engage with our surroundings.

Inspired by the writings of the German philosopher and cultural theorist 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 within 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.”

Exhibition participants: 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,’12, 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 from the 1960s and ’70s, collection of Brenda Corman Alpar, ’62, and her son, Joseph Alpar, Bennington music faculty)