Archives: Exhibitions

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.

This exhibition considers the early history of the Colby College Museum of Art, from its founding in 1959 up to 1973, the year the museum opened the Jetté Galleries, the first of five museum expansions. As a vision took shape for this teaching museum, the ambitions of those early years established the focus and direction for the collection.

The first exhibition to examine Alex Katz’s collaborative work for the stage, this playful, cross-disciplinary project will bring together sketches, paintings, photographs, film, set pieces, costumes, and ephemera. Alex Katz: Theater and Dance will explore the ways that Katz introduced tenets of postwar painting into dance aesthetics, and the deep inspiration he has drawn from a prolonged study of performance.

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.

Artists have long been preoccupied with the sky; through depictions of the atmosphere, they elicit new understandings of corporeality and transcendence. This exhibition presents Lorna Simpson’s video Cloudscape (2004) in dialogue with selected works from the Colby Museum’s permanent collection that reference weightlessness and presence through meteorological imagery.