Archives: Exhibitions

Come Closer: Selections from the Collection, 1978–1994 presents artworks from the Colby Museum’s collection that explore the relationship between the personal and the political. During this period, artists reflected upon urgent current events and social issues such as gender equality, racial justice, technological advancements, sexual freedom, and the AIDS crisis. The featured artists confronted these monumental and explosive issues with tenderness and intimacy while also formally experimenting and pushing the boundaries of their mediums.

Constellations: Forming the Collection, 1973–2023 celebrates a group of significant milestones for the Colby Museum and explores three thematic, overlapping strengths of its holdings: art by self-taught practitioners, portraiture, and art that connects the natural and the spiritual worlds. It offers a window into how museum collections are formed, particularly through the participation of patrons and artists.

At the Paul J. Schupf Art Center, Downtown Waterville

One of the most accomplished experimental filmmakers working today, Bill Morrison finds and redeploys lesser-known and forgotten moments from film history. He is deeply interested in celluloid as a physical, fragile material; the 35mm nitrate film he finds in archives and transfers to video is notorious for its extreme flammability, and tendency to decay. Morrison’s work thus operates between documentary and preservation. Given the predisposition to entropy of his physical sources, the films are a demonstration of faith in what is otherwise feared, and certainly doomed to perish.

Alex Katz transforms the people and places that comprise his two homes—New York City and Lincolnville, Maine—into powerful images that reflect his enchantment with modern life and his dedication to painting. This installation of the Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz highlights different strategies of repetition in Katz’s art, focusing on four words that describe this defining aspect of his artistic practice: reflection, recurrence, reduplication, and re-creation.

Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village centers Pueblo perspectives on the context that informed the social and cultural landscape of Taos from 1915 to 1927, when the Taos Society of Artists (TSA), a group of Anglo-American painters, was active. It also sheds light on issues that affect Native people today, in the Southwest and beyond. The exhibition puts paintings by TSA artists in dialogue with works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Native American artists to illuminate the varied, complex, and rich art histories of the United States Southwest, in particular the city of Taos and Taos Pueblo, New Mexico.

Seniors studying studio art have spent all year working on capstone projects in disciplines that include printmaking, photography, painting, and sculpture. This show serves as the culmination of their studies. An exhibition catalogue containing images, artists’ statements, and analyses of works in the show written by students in AR356 will also be available. (Image: Colby senior printmaker Erin Coughlin ’23 pinning up her artwork in her studio. Photo courtesy of the artist.)

At the Paul J. Schupf Art Center, Downtown Waterville

This exhibition brings together two extraordinary artists, Ashley Bryan (1923–2022) and Paula Wilson (b. 1975), whose passionate and open embrace of the world unites their multifaceted creative endeavors. Through their art they channel the beauty and spirituality to be found in humanity and nature, using texture, color, and light to convey magical lyricism.

At the Paul J. Schupf Art Center, Downtown Waterville

The museum is excited to welcome the first visitors to the Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery with a selection of video works by Erin Johnson, Paul Kos, and Jennifer Steinkamp. At the darkest time of the year, these luminous moving images will fill the gallery on Castonguay Square with wonder and light.

This exhibition encompasses two bodies of work by Naeem Mohaiemen, a 2020–21 Lunder Institute senior fellow and the inaugural recipient of the Alfonso Ossorio Creative Production Grant. Naeem Mohaiemen: grace includes new works as well as the artist’s 2020 film Jole Dobe Na (Bengali for “those who do not drown”).

In recent decades, Alex Katz has expanded his support of visual artists through the work of the Alex Katz Foundation, which has placed nearly 500 outstanding artworks with the Colby College Museum of Art. This installation of the Katz Foundation Collection explores the idea of visual polyphony. On view are artworks that experiment with opposing formal elements that create unexpected unities; richly material gestures that produce multisensory, bodily experiences; and explorations of dancers and choreography that put patterns of movement into action.