Handwriting on the Wall

Catherine Courtenaye: Paintings Catherine Courtenaye ’79 Boise Art Museum (May 14–Oct. 16, 2011) Catherine Courtenaye’s abstract paintings are grounded in the vernacular penmanship of 19th-century America and are the outcome of her interest in handwriting manuals, ledgers, and documents. Using a variety of printmaking techniques, Courtenaye  transfers phrases, signatures, alphabets, and numbers from original manuscript […]

Writing the Final Chapter

The Jane Poems Ronald Moran ’58 Clemson University Digital Press (2011) Poet Ronald Moran’s latest collection is the climactic chapter of a love story. It is not passages filled with youthful passion or the ease of midlife, it is the denouement of devotion in which he reveals the essence of a relationship that lasted a […]

Kennebec Highlands Vista

  Maine landscape painter Matthew Russ ’96 exhibits recent work from the Kennebec Highlands and other areas surrounding the Belgrade Lakes beginning in August at the new Maine Lakes Resource Center in Belgrade Lakes village. A portion of sales from the exhibit will benefit the resource center. Russ paints in the field year-round, often backpacking […]

The Whole Truth

Foreign correspondent Gerry Hadden tells the stories behind his radio reports from Latin America and Haiti

To Timbuktu – and Back

Steven Weinberg and Casey Scieszka turn exploration into a charming and informative collaboration.

Documenting the Depression

by Brian Speer America in the 1930s was rife with change. Roosevelt’s New Deal created sweeping reform intended to pull the country out of the Depression. Corporate America was on the rise, as were labor unions. Socialism grew in response to Fascist regimes in Europe. And against this charged backdrop, documentary photography emerged as an […]

The Spirit of New Orleans

Childlike Chanda has spent her life on the uptown New Orleans estate where she was born. Both sheltered and molested (by her Uncle Aldo, for whom she seems to harbor no ill will), Chanda lives an oddly charmed existence well into adulthood. Her cloistered life ends when her companion, whom she knows as the Old […]

Art Ensconced in Rhode Island

A review of Lindsay Leard-Coolidge’s book, A Sense of Place: Painters of Matunuck, Rhode Island, 1873-1941,

Recent Releases

A selection of books and music from Colby faculty and alumni.

An Untamed West

Annie Proulx '57 finds that the hard places of her fiction are unbending in reality