Past Exhibitions
Showing 1-10 of 32 results
Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village
May 19, 2023 - July 28, 2024
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.
The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury
February 8 - June 9, 2024
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.
2024 Senior Exhibition
May 9 - 26, 2024
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.
A Lot More Inside: Esopus Magazine
February 15 - May 12, 2024
Published for fifteen years, from 2003 to 2018, and documented in a comprehensive archive held by the Colby College Libraries Special Collections, the celebrated alternative arts magazine Esopus remains “a thing of lavish, eccentric beauty.” A Lot More Inside: Esopus Magazine presents archival materials and original artworks associated with the abundant publication. It includes audio and video artifacts, photographs of studio visits and press runs, handwritten notes and diagrams, email exchanges, issue mockups, printers’ proofs, and artists’ notes, offering a behind-the-scenes vantagepoint on an innovative magazine committed to providing an unfiltered, unmediated (ad-free) experience of pure creative expression.
Playscape: Contemporary Art from the Colby Museum’s Collection
January 17 - April 22, 2024
Inspired by the 2023–25 Colby College Center for the Arts and Humanities theme of play, and sourced from the Colby Museum’s collection, this exhibition invites you to consider the role of play in contemporary art. Games and art have elements in common: both depend on rituals, practices, and rules, whether passed down through generations or conceived on the spot.
Bill Morrison: Cycles & Loops
August 18 - December 31, 2023
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.
2023 Faculty Biennial
November 9 - December 10, 2023
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.
Come Closer: Selections from the Collection, 1978–1994
July 8 - November 26, 2023
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
July 8 - November 26, 2023
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.
Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change
June 3 - October 22, 2023
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.
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