Colby Museum Winter/Spring 2011 News
March 3, 2011
Building the Museum’s Future
The
Colby Museum will partially close starting Oct. 3, 2011, for construction of a
new addition and renovations to existing museum spaces. Slated to open in the summer
of 
2013 in celebration of Colby’s bicentennial, the new wing will consist of an
additional 10,000 square feet of exhibition galleries, new art studios for
photography and foundations classes, additional classroom space, and an
expanded lobby and sculpture terrace. Designed by Los Angeles architects
Frederick Fisher and Partners, the addition will accommodate the extraordinary
Lunder Collection, promised to the College by Peter H. Lunder ’56, D.F.A ’98
and Paula Crane Lunder, D.F.A ’98 in 2007. The Museum will fully reopen in 2013
with a museum-wide exhibition of the Lunder Collection.
During construction, the Museum
will continue its outreach to Colby faculty and students, making the collection
available to classes across the curriculum. The Museum will also undertake
programming in local schools that will sustain and strengthen connections to
these communities until the reopening. The Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of
Alex Katz and part of the Lower Jetté Galleries will remain open to visitors
throughout construction.
A
Welcome Return
Following a two-year hiatus, the
Joan Whitney Payson Collection returns to Waterville for an exhibition that
will combine its strengths in Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and
portraiture with selections from the Colby Museum’s permanent collection. The
Payson Collection includes works by Gustave Courbet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and
Alfred Sisley, which will appear with Colby paintings and watercolors by Mary
Cassatt, Maurice Prendergast, and Rockwell Kent, among others. On view through
June 12.
Revisiting the Documentary
Photograph
The
Colby Museum is the third and final stop of American
Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White, an exhibition that offers new insight
into the flourishing genre of documentary photography in the 1930s through the work
of three American photographers. Organized by the Amon Carter Museum and the
Colby Museum, the exhibition comes to Waterville after a stop at the Art
Institute of Chicago. On view from July 9 through Oct. 2.
Robot
in the Museum
Last
spring a robot explored the Colby College Museum of Art. Developed by Colby
Computer Science Professor Bruce Maxwell and Professor William Smart from
Washington University in St. Louis, the robot was built and programmed by
Maxwell and his students to allow people to remotely view works of art in the
Museum. Maxwell’s student Bogumil Giertler ’12 received a student scholarship
from Apple for his work on the robot and was invited to show off its
gallery-roaming abilities at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2010 in
San Francisco in June, where participants were invited to control the robot's
movements and take a virtual tour of the Museum. Read more at http://insidecolby.com/article.php?articleid=339.
Image
credits:
East façade, Colby College
Museum of Art Expansion, © Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Confidences, c. 1874. Oil on canvas, 32
x 23 3/4 inches. The Joan Whitney Payson Collection at the Portland Museum of
Art, Maine. Gift of John Whitney Payson.
Berenice Abbott, Canyon, Broadway and Exchange Place,
1936. Gelatin silver print, 9 5/6 x 7 ½ inches. National Gallery of Art, Gift
of Marvin Breckinridge Patterson.
