Hugh Gourley, recently retired director of the Colby College Museum of Art, recalls a party he attended in New York City shortly after coming to Colby in 1966. A woman asked what he did for a living, and he told her he was with the Colby art museum. "She said, 'Oh, so you're there in the summer,'" Gourley said. 'But what are you doing in the winter?'"

Today, few would place the Colby College Museum of Art on the edge of the art-world tundra.

Students turn the Museum of Art into workspace, a use of the museum Director Dan Rosenfeld wants to encourage in the future.

Two major wings have been added to the museum in the last decade, one exclusively for works by renowned contemporary artist Alex Katz. More recently Colby commissioned a Richard Serra sculpture for the museum's courtyard, acquired the complete collection of prints by American minimalist Terry Winters, bought a Robert Rauschenberg assemblage and added a prominent wall sculpture by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. These are artists usually associated with major metropolitan and university museums. The National Gallery and the Guggenheim. The Tate and the Museum of Modern Art. Stanford and Princeton.

And Colby.

Daniel Rosenfeld, the new Carolyn Muzzy Director of the Colby College Museum of Art, was hired after Gourley retired last year. Rosenfeld came to Colby from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and, before that, the Rhode Island School of Design. He says that when he went to New York last February for the Art Dealers Association of America Art Show, almost 40 years after Gourley's early trip, the Colby museum's reputation preceded him. "I introduced myself as the new director of the Colby museum, and the people I met were enthusiastic and positive," he said. "Some of them had never been to the museum, but they all had the notion it was a special and important place."

That's great for the museum and great for the College, Rosenfeld says. "It produces a way to realize this is a sophisticated, worldly place," he said. "It's hard scientifically to correlate the museum with the strategic plan of the College, but when students and parents look at colleges, these intangibles have an impact on their interest."