Archives: Exhibitions

The 2023 Faculty Biennial features works in a diverse range of media explored by art department faculty members Bevin Engman, Gary Green, Amanda Lilleston, Audrey Shakespear, and Takahiro Suzuki.

One of the first exhibitions to explore Louise Nevelson’s sculptures and works on paper in dialogue with their historical moment, The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury illuminates the artist’s multidimensional command of form and attunement to postwar culture in the United States. It features more than sixty defining artworks by Nevelson, including wall works, installations, drawings, and prints.

This exhibition features works by artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) focused upon urban sites undergoing rapid transformation during the Victorian era. Despite the artist’s aversion to overtly narrative or political themes, his city subjects reveal a long-term engagement with social and economic forces. Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change invites us to consider the multivalent implication of paintings, drawings, and prints that silently witnessed the struggles of the working poor, at the same time romanticizing poverty for a rising middle-class art market.

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.