Wheaton News

Alumna helps museum rewew its mission and connection to community

When Coco Moseley ’08 walked into her office at the Henry Sheldon Museum for the first time, the 140-year-old institution was searching for a new direction.

The museum, located in the center of Middlebury, Vt., attracted visitors mostly for art exhibitions and community gatherings. Its permanent exhibitions of Vermont furniture, paintings, jewelry and household objects had not changed in years.

Moseley’s appointment as the museum’s new executive director in late 2023 marked a turning point for the institution.

“I was hired at a transitional time for the institution,” Moseley said. “The museum’s board of trustees knew that the Sheldon needed to be revitalized for the future. Its operations had come to be based on gallery cocktail parties and a generation of donors and volunteers who were growing older.

“The question was, ‘Where does this museum fit in our community today?’”

The answer to that question—as a place for the community to share stories about the past and present that inspire curiosity and spark connections—emerged from a public outreach campaign that Moseley launched to engage Middlebury residents and the communities throughout Addison County in a discussion about their interests and hopes for the Sheldon.

“This is a community museum,” she told a local newspaper at the time. “I’m really interested in how a museum can be a place where people can make connections to themselves and to others.”

Moseley said the museum’s ability to connect the past to the future starts with its rich, varied and eclectic holdings. Its collection began with the curiosity of its namesake founder Henry Sheldon (1821–1907), a local businessman and entrepreneur who was an inveterate collector of local arts, crafts, letters and objects. The varied collection, when viewed with an awareness of contemporary concerns, contains riches that shed new light on the past as well as the present and future.

“We have an incredible archive,” Moseley said of the Sheldon, which is the nation’s oldest community-based museum. “It’s a phenomenal little gem of a museum that I don’t think has been fully appreciated in the broader museum world and even in the community.”

For example, the museum organized a community conversation using aerial photographs of Addison County in the 1920s from its collection. Those images were paired with contemporary aerial photos, focusing on flood-prone areas in a region that has suffered multiple damaging floods in recent years, due to the intense storms caused by climate change.

“It really stimulated a lot of conversation and discussion about the patterns that we see, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us as we shift from what used to be 100-year floods to maybe 10- or 20-year floods.”

The museum’s collection also contains a treasure trove of the letters and records of one of the nation’s earliest documented lesbian couples, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, who lived together, operated a tailor shop and taught Sunday School at their church during the first half of the nineteenth century. The museum has mounted an exhibition about the couple and created a middle school curriculum that has been piloted by several nearby districts. An award-winning author and cartoonist, Tillie Walden, has worked with the museum to create a graphic novel due out in early 2026.

“We have this concept of Vermont history that is actually pretty misleading. The state’s history is more dynamic and diverse than we imagine,” said Moseley who said the museum’s collection also contains insightful material on immigrant communities who moved to the area throughout the nineteenth century. “It really allows us to envision a much more complicated and nuanced view of Vermont’s history than I think.”

The museum’s ability to tell those stories got a major boost earlier this year from a $665,000 grant by the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. The award aims to support “a fuller, more complex telling of American histories and lived experiences by deepening the range of how and where our stories are told and by bringing a wider variety of voices into the public dialogue.”

The grant may be the largest that Moseley has ever received, but it’s far from the first. She got her initial taste of grant-writing success as an undergraduate, authoring a successful Projects for Peace award to underwrite the construction of a small classroom building for a remote rural village in Tanzania.

“I came back from that project to my senior year at Wheaton with an entirely new perspective,” Moseley said. “The opportunity to secure a grant and implement it in a place far away gave me this view of life beyond New England. But it also reinforced the value of working in your own community and realizing we can make an impact right where we are.”

In fact, she has made a career of community building. After earning a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Moseley returned to New England where she has worked for several small community organizations—as a program coordinator at a teen center, legislative liaison for the agricultural advocacy organization Rural Vermont and director of the public Lawrence Memorial Library in Bristol, Vt.

Grant writing has been a constant as well. In a recent visit to Wheaton, Moseley spoke to a class studying grant writing with her Professor of Art History Kim Miller (who advised her in writing the Projects for Peace grant and reviewed drafts of the successful Mellon proposal), and she told the students that writing grant proposals has been part of nearly every job she has held, not to mention a few volunteer positions as well. And while not every proposal earned a grant, she estimates that her efforts have garnered more than $2 million for the organizations with which she’s worked.

Moseley credits her Wheaton education, and faculty mentors like Miller, with helping her develop the ability to develop mission-based programs and the successful grant proposals that help turn those ideas into reality.

“The skills that you gain in the arts and humanities—critical thinking, deep research and writing skills—have allowed me to put the theories about equity and access that I learned about into concrete action,” said Moseley, citing professors Miller, Leah Neiderstadt, Donna Kerner and Gabriela Torres.

Beyond building professional skills, she said, study of the “humanities enriched my life, provided a lot of meaning, and connected me with people and institutions that are thinking about our shared future and doing something to make it better.”

I’m so grateful for my time at Wheaton. I didn’t grow up in a household that talked about women’s studies and feminism,” she said. “I took my first women’s studies course here. It opened new ideas to me, and it changed the trajectory of my life.”