Each year, the Colby Museum presents an exhibition dedicated to Colby College students who have spent four years working toward capstone projects in studio art. On view from the end of the spring semester to Commencement on May 25, this show celebrates the culmination of the graduating seniors’ artistic practices at Colby.
Stan Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver, Canada) works in photography, film, installation, and interactive augmented reality. Within his practice, he investigates the context of history, considers alternative narratives, and examines the intersection between race, class, and power. He gained international acclaim in 1992, when he premiered his first multichannel video installation, Hors-champs, at Documenta.
Roughly hewn from raw and painted salvaged wood and inflected with a gentle humor, the imaginative sculptural creations of Bernard Langlais (b. 1921, Old Town, ME; d. 1977, Cushing, ME) are a ubiquitous Maine feature. Ranging from mosaic-like abstractions to large-scale renderings of animals, these works grace the seaside bluffs of Ogunquit on the southern coast, dot forests and fields up to Aroostook County, welcome travelers at the Portland airport, and enliven museums, libraries, and other places of gathering across the state.
This retrospective exhibition—the first nationally touring presentation of Abercrombie’s art—celebrates an artist who has been historically marginalized due to who she was and how she lived and worked. She created a universe that broadens our understanding of American art and identity. Abercrombie observed, “The whole world is a mystery,” a statement that asserts expansive possibilities for liberation and self-discovery through art.
Since the 1960s, Chicanx artists have used graphic arts to educate and agitate, presenting a vast array of political and social themes designed to challenge the status quo. Their artworks are declarations of political advocacy, cross-cultural solidarity, and an effort to reclaim the past. Radical Histories: Chicanx Prints from the Smithsonian American Art Museum features 60 prints drawn from SAAM’s leading collection of Latinx art. It focuses on artists creating visual counter-histories—from ancient to contemporary times—that defy notions of American exceptionalism, heteronormativity, whiteness, and borders.
Some American Stories is a thematic presentation of works from the Colby collection in the museum’s Lunder Wing that leads visitors on a journey from before the founding of the United States to the present day. Each gallery represents a different topic within the broader narrative of American art and history, reflecting a great diversity of experiences.
This exhibition offers varied perspectives on home, domesticity, and placemaking. It includes artworks that examine our relationships with physical places—the buildings and landscapes we inherit—as well as the emotional resonances that form as we personalize where we live and how we share space.
Featuring promised gifts to the museum from a distinguished private collection in Maine, and accompanied by an arrangement of folk art and folk-art-inspired works from the Colby Museum’s collection, Into the Wind dives into the history of American weathervanes, exploring their symbolism, use, manufacture, and trade in the northeastern United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Surface Tension celebrates etching, which involves the painterly and deliberate application of powdered rosins, grounds, solvents, and acids, to show why the medium holds such extraordinary scientific and artistic distinction within the broader practice of printmaking. Drawn entirely from the Colby College Museum of Art’s collection, including several recent acquisitions, the show features leaders of the nineteenth-century Etching Revival as well as contemporary practitioners.
This exhibition brings together three contemporary artists who have never shown together before, but are all remarkable for their punchy, surreal installations. Gladys Nilsson and Catalina Schliebener Muñoz contribute original works, made on-site in the gallery. Their spirited, strange, cartoonish scenes are complemented by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s Mysterium Tremendum (late 1980s), a quasi-autobiographical tale illustrated across 125 aluminum lasagna pans.