The Colby College Museum of Art announces various exhibitions and events with press releases, which are archived below, beginning with the most recent.
Please note that only selected galleries will remain open while construction of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion is underway. Click here for a list of exhibitions currently on view.
Building construction of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion at the Colby College Museum of Art begins in October. The 26,000-square-foot expansion will include 10,000 square feet of new exhibition space, making Colby's the largest museum in Maine. The museum will close for construction Oct. 3, and selected galleries will reopen Nov. 8.
Designed by Los Angeles-based Frederick Fisher and Partners, the $15-million Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion was initiated in response to Peter and Paula Lunder's 2007 promised gift of art. The project will include a sculpture terrace and a classroom for museum education and outreach. Art Department studios will occupy the top floor of the addition, which is anticipated to achieve LEED-silver certification. The new space will open during Colby's bicentennial year, and the opening exhibition in July 2013 will present works from the Lunder Collection.
Conceived as a glass pavilion that will reflect its natural and architectural context, the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion will create a unique identity for the museum at the corner of Mayflower Hill Drive and Bixler Drive. The main entrance to the museum will continue to be through the Schupf Courtyard, where Richard Serra’s sculpture 4, 5, 6 is on view. A secondary entrance will be available from Mayflower Hill Drive via a stairway to the sculpture terrace.
The Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion is named in recognition of a gift from the Harold Alfond Foundation and the partnership and friendship between Harold Alfond and Peter Lunder. It celebrates the deep commitment of the Alfond and Lunder families to Colby and the state of Maine, and it reflects the Lunders' desire that their collection be available to Maine people.
Site work associated with the project is currently underway. Though pedestrian and vehicular traffic patterns have been altered, the full museum remains open to visitors through Oct. 2. Exhibitions on view include American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White, which the Maine Sunday Telegram called “one of the most significant and powerful photographic exhibitions on view in the nation." Visitors may park in the Roberts Lot and enter through the Bixler Art and Music Center.
On view beginning Nov. 8 and during construction will be an exhibition dedicated to the pavilion's design, rotating highlights from the permanent collection, and works from the Alex Katz collection. Starting Nov. 8 visitors will enter through a temporary entrance adjacent to the Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz. For additional information, including directions, parking instructions, and hours, go to www.colby.edu/museum.
Photography Dominates Colby College Museum of Art This Summer
Photography
from various periods in American history comes together in separate but
related exhibitions at the Colby College Museum of Art this summer.American Modernshowcases
photographs from the 1930s by American masters Berenice Abbott,
Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans with loans from major
collections including the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery of
Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent photographs by Andrew
Moore illustrate Detroit’s challenges, and a selection of works from a
recent gift highlights images by notable photographers such as Berenice
Abbott and Ansel Adams.
Also
on view will be a selection of prints by James McNeill Whistler,
presented in honor of the late curator and print scholar David P.
Becker.
This summer’s exhibitions at Colby will close Oct. 2,
just prior to the groundbreaking for the museum’s new addition, which is
scheduled to open in summer 2013. Following a brief closure in the fall
of 2011, select galleries will remain open throughout the construction
process. For more information visitwww.colby.edu/museum.
American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White July 9–October 2
In
the 1930s, photographers pushed the genre of documentary photography to
the forefront of public culture in the United States and onto the walls
of newly opened museums and art galleries. That historic development is
explored in this exhibition focusing exclusively on the work of
American photographers Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Margaret
Bourke-White. Organized by the Amon Carter Museum and the Colby Museum,
the exhibition comes to Waterville after its display at the Art
Institute of Chicago.
Andrew Moore: Detroit Disassembled June 2–October 2
Organized to coincide withAmerican Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White, this exhibition presents seven works—all recent gifts to the Colby collection—from Andrew Moore’sDetroit Disassembledseries.
Made in 2008 and 2009, these highly detailed color photographs capture
the citywide impact of Detroit’s industrial decline and the gradual
encroachment of nature on the city most associated with American
mobility.
Celebrating a Gift: The Norma B. Marin Photography Collection Through October 2
Norma
B. Marin began collecting photographs in 1970, gradually acquiring
works by such major practitioners as Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz,
Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Sheeler, Lee Friedlander, Harry
Callahan, and André Kertész. For several years, through a long-term
loan, the Colby Museum has integrated works from the Marin photography
collection into its exhibitions and teaching programs. In the spring of
2011, Norma Marin promised her collection to the museum, dramatically
transforming the breadth and depth its photography offerings. This
exhibition presents selections from this generous gift.
Exhibiting Whistler: A Tribute to David P. Becker June 16–October 2
A
Bowdoin College alumnus and longtime resident of Portland, David P.
Becker (1947–2010) was also an internationally recognized print scholar
and curator. Selected from the Lunder Collection by guest curator Susan
Schulman, this tribute exhibition celebrates Becker’s passion for the
print medium, his impeccable connoisseurship, and his work as guest
curator, beginning in 2006, of several Whistler exhibitions at the Colby
Museum.
Also on view through October 2:
Inspired by Buddhism: Asian Art from the Permanent Collection Little Elegies: The Art of Nineteenth-Century Mourning
Selections from the Permanent Collection: Genre, Still Life, Landscape
The
Colby College Museum of Art is open Sunday noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday
through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is closed on Mondays and June
28-July 1.
Waterville, Maine—The
Colby College Museum of Art will offer a free copy of its 50th anniversary
catalogue, Art at Colby, Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the
Colby College Museum of Art, to the first 50 visitors as part of the
Association of Art Museum Directors’ (AAMD) Art Museum Day May 18. The museum
is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admission is, as always, free.
With more than 170
artworks and commissioned texts, including original poems, by 98 writers and
artists—such as Barbara Haskell, Bill Berkson, Carol Troyen, Michael Leja,
Rachael Ziady DeLue, Geoffrey Batchen, Sanford Schwartz, Anne M. Wagner, Ron
Padgett, Irving Sandler and Lydia Yee—Art
at Colby highlights artworks that represent the full scope of the museum's
superb holdings. The works span the entire history of American art (with a
particularly fine selection of painting from New York since 1960), and also include
examples of European and Asian works. Texts by a range of writers—scholars,
curators, critics and artists—are paired with reproductions of pieces from the
collection: James Cuno on Henri Fantin-Latour, Rackstraw Downes on John Marin,
Alex Katz on Winslow Homer and Richard Hell on Joe Brainard, for example.
Participation by AAMD member museums
emphasizes the lasting impact art museums have on their communities, highlights
the value of the visual arts in society, and provides new opportunities for
audiences to participate in the wide-ranging programs that art museums offer.
“We are so pleased to be able to actively participate in Art Museum Day as part
of the larger International Museum Day. We always look forward to sharing the
museum and its programs with the Waterville community and beyond,” said Sharon
Corwin, director of the Colby College Museum of Art.
Coinciding with
International Museum Day, Art Museum Day will focus on the theme of museum and
memory. “Art Museum Day is an opportunity to celebrate the collective memory of
human creativity, both past and present, that art museums hold in the public
trust,” said Kaywin Feldman, president of AAMD and director and president of
the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. “AAMD believes that art should be accessible
and relevant to all, and we are so pleased that Colby College Museum of Art is
joining with us and the global community of museums to create new opportunities
for audiences to engage with museum collections and programs.”
Member
museums—located across the United States, Canada, and Mexico—include smaller
regional museums as well as large international institutions. International
Museum Day is organized annually around the world by the International Council
of Museums (ICOM). AAMD’s Art Museum Day is an opportunity to focus attention
on the role of art museums in North America, as part of ICOM’s global
celebration of museums. A comprehensive list of participating AAMD member art
museums will be available online at www.aamd.org/newsroom.
The Colby College Museum of Art is open Sunday noon
to 4:30 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and until 8 p.m. on
the first Thursday of each month during the academic year. It is closed on
Mondays.
The
recent removal of the Maine Labor Mural
Cycle documenting key labor events in the history of our state,
commissioned from artist Judy Taylor in 2008 and installed until last weekend
in the headquarters of the Maine Department of Labor in Augusta, raises issues
of critical importance to those of us who believe in the importance of public
art. Among these issues are censorship, historical revisionism, and artists’
rights.
We
deplore censorship in any form, but we particularly deplore the censoring of
art. Those who may claim that the Maine
Labor Mural Cycle is merely being transferred to another, more appropriate,
locale, and neither destroyed nor censored, miss the point. Destruction takes
many forms, vilification (even by innuendo) being one of them. Marshalling, as
evidence of the mural’s ostensible offense, one anonymous letter equating the
Maine labor mural with North Korean propaganda demonstrates a disregard for
consensus, due process, and transparency. Moving the work from the site for
which it was made to a site for which it was not made is simply destruction by
another name, its “dislocation” intended to strip it of its force, immediacy, and
relevance.
The
situation has been exacerbated by the clandestine nature of the mural’s
transference to an originally undisclosed, and still uncertain, location.
Removed without, to our knowledge, the supervision of either a trained art
handler or a museum registrar (or, for that matter, the artist herself), we
neither know nor are able to assess its current condition. Given that the care
and conservation of works of art are among a museum’s central roles, we are justly
concerned. Until an independent assessment can be made, assurances that it is
safe do not reassure us.
The
desire to silence the provocations of art by those who find those provocations
offensive has a long and dispiriting history. The Colby College Museum of Art, Bates
College Museum of Art, and Bowdoin College Museum of Art, dedicated as we are
to the preservation and interpretation of the past through its cultural
artifacts, to the often discomfiting dialogue between the past and the present,
and to art’s immutable power, are heartened by the passionate response by
Maine’s lively and committed arts community to the mural cycle’s removal. We unreservedly
add our voices to theirs.
Sharon
Corwin
Carolyn
Muzzy Director and Chief Curator
Colby
College Museum of Art
Dan
Mills
Director
Bates
College Museum of Art
Kevin
Salatino
Director
Bowdoin
College Museum of Art
The Colby College Museum of Art is pleased to announce a special installation of the exhibition Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break that will include a group of works by other artists and artisans displayed in conjunction with works from Lockhart’s Lunch Break project. The opening of the exhibition will coincide with the release of the Lunch Break Times, a special-edition newspaper conceived of by Lockhart for the Maine communities involved in the making of Lunch Break. Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart creates films and photographs that are at once rigorously formal and deeply humanistic, meticulously observing the details of everyday life while also exploring the limits and intersections between the two mediums. In 2008, Lockhart spent the year in Maine, a state she associates with her childhood and where much of her family lives. During this year, she visited factories, farms, and industrial sites. One of these sites was the Bath Iron Works, where for a period of several months she observed and engaged with workers, forging collaborative relationships throughout the shipyard. The films and photographs that Lockhart produced from this experience focus on these workers during their midday break.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the film Lunch Break, which consists of a single, slow-moving tracking shot down a long and seemingly endless interior corridor. To create the film, Lockhart recorded a ten-minute walk-through—her first use of a mobile camera—then employed digital technology to stretch the film’s length to eighty minutes. The result is a meditative reflection, devoid of sentiment, on life in the factory during a midday break. By contrast, the second film, Exit, utilizes a static shot divided into five sections—one for each day of the workweek—and depicts workers as they depart the shipyard at the end of their shifts.
The first of the three series of photographs centers on workers’ lunch boxes, emphasizing the ways in which stickers, labels, contents, and minute details of wear and tear suggest the personalities of their owners. A second series consists of carefully composed images of workers lingering around lunch tables, at once recalling and revising historical traditions of group portraiture. The third series is devoted to the independent businesses that exist within the factory—makeshift booths where workers sell hot dogs, coffee, and other items to their colleagues. These photographs express the humor and camaraderie of the workplace, as well as the values of trust, self-sufficiency, and independence, so central to the working life of the shipyard.
For the presentation of the exhibition at the Colby Museum, Lockhart, in collaboration with the architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, has selected works by other artists and artisans that will be displayed in conjunction with works from the Lunch Break project. Additions to the exhibition are drawn from the Colby Museum’s collection, other Maine museums, and private lenders. Works from the Colby Museum’s collection include paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and folk art depicting the Maine landscape, the factory town, maritime themes, and people at work and at leisure. The historical and contemporary objects by Maine artisans consist of tools, containers, such as spruce gum boxes and earthenware, signs, and decorative objects. The dialogues that emerge from this evocative constellation of works offer viewers the opportunity to question conventional conceptions of art, craft, and work and their relationships to each other and to everyday life. Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break is organized by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Presentation of the exhibition at Colby College is co-organized by the Colby College Museum of Art and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
The adaptation of the exhibition for the Colby Museum is overseen by Elizabeth Finch, Lunder Curator of American Art. Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2011.
Special Events On July 10 from 2 to 4 p.m., the Museum will celebrate the opening of the exhibition. Included in the festivities will be a screening at 2:30 p.m. of Sharon Lockhart’s film Maine (2008, 30 min.), sponsored by the Maine International Film Festival (MIFF), followed by a discussion between Lockhart and some of the people featured in this new work.
Lunch Break Times In connection with the exhibition, Sharon Lockhart has created a newspaper, the Lunch Break Times, with contributions by workers who participated in the Lunch Break project and articles from a variety of contributors including Lockhart, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Julie Ault, Sabine Eckmann, Katy Siegel, and Lane Relyea, among others. Lockhart will personally distribute copies of the newspaper, co-edited with John Alan Farmer and Jane Neidhardt and designed by Conny Purtill, to communities throughout Maine. The Lunch Break Times will also be available for free at the Colby Museum.
Catalogue A fully illustrated color catalogue, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes essays by Sabine Eckmann, Mark Godfrey, and Matthias Michalka, as well as an interview by filmmaker James Benning, in which Sharon Lockhart discusses her creative process, and an interview with architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, conducted by András Pálffy.
An additional publication is planned, to be published by the Colby College Museum of Art, documenting Lockhart’s selections from and installation of the Museum’s collection in conjunction with her Lunch Break works and loans from Maine artisans and history museums.
This summer the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, will present never-before exhibited early drawings by the iconic American artist Will Barnet, a collection-based overview of the work of Winslow Homer, and the contemporary artist Sharon Lockhart’s selections from and installation of the collection to accompany her Maine-made Lunch Break works. The Colby Museum’s ongoing exhibitions dedicated to the work of James McNeill Whistler continue with a special exhibition of works by Whistler and his aesthetically minded peers. Also on view will be numerous new acquisitions including recently acquired works for the Lunder Collection and gifts from the Alex Katz Foundation.
Tibetan sand artist Losang Samten will create a sand mandala in the Colby College Museum of Art April 4-13. As in his previous visits to Colby, he will give a public lecture, lead a meditation, and conduct a dismantling ceremony. All events are free and open to the public.
A museum-wide exhibit, Art at Colby: Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Colby College Museum of Art,
will be on view July 11, 2009, to February 21, 2010, to mark the
founding of the museum in 1959, a half century ago. A 376-page book of
the same title, featuring 202 color illustrations, will be published to
accompany the exhibition.
The Colby College Museum of Art announces the launch of its new Web Kiosk, a searchable online database. The kiosk features information about more than 6,000 objects from the permanent collection, almost 2,500 of which include digital images. Highlights include the majority of works from The Alex Katz Collection, The Lunder Collection (including the Whistler and Colville Collections), The John Marin Collection and the Terry Winters Collection.
The Colby College Museum of Art
will receive, from the Alex Katz Foundation, a collection of six
paintings by the American modernist painter Marsden Hartley, Museum
Director and Chief Curator Sharon Corwin announced Jan. 21.
The Colby College Museum of Art presents two video exhibitions this fall that explore the sense of place. Shows by London-based Hiraki Sawa, whose work was called "enchanting" in the New York Times, and Glasgow-based emerging artist t s Beall, will be on view through January at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Installation artist Amy Stacey Curtis is at it again, placing thousands of pieces into a grid, then asking viewers to interact with her art. Curtis, who is known for her work in abandoned factories around Maine, presents her first-ever museum show this month at the Colby College Museum of Art.
This fall the Colby College Museum of Art introduced a series of new programs-tours, lectures, and children's activities-ongoing throughout the school year. The events aim to attract more visitors from central Maine.
Artist and former Buddhist monk Losang Samten made an impression on more than 2,000 museum visitors when he created a sand mandala at Colby in the fall of 2005. He's coming back, and this year his mandala -- an elaborate circular "painting" made by pouring colored sand -- will be larger and more detailed. He will also lead a meditation and speak on a panel with members of the Colby faculty. All events are free and open to the public.
will present never-before exhibited early drawings by the iconic American artist Will Barnet, a collection-based overview of the work of Winslow Homer, and the contemporary artist Sharon Lockhart’s selections from and installation of the collection to accompany her Maine-made Lunch Break works. The Colby Museum’s ongoing exhibitions dedicated to the work of James McNeill Whistler continue with a special exhibition of works by Whistler and his aesthetically minded peers. Also on view will be numerous new acquisitions including recently acquired works for the Lunder Collection and gifts from the Alex Katz Foundation.