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. In a typical year these works would be displayed in the Davis Gallery at the Colby Museum, but this year has been anything but typical. Over the last few months the nineteen members of the senior cohort—our largest group in recent years—have adapted resiliently and still produced impressive culminating bodies of work.

The artist Jennifer Steinkamp (born 1958) makes digital artworks, often working on a larger-than-life scale. Engineered to mesmerize and delight, her animations and images have appeared on building exteriors and billboards and in museum galleries and parks, among other sites. 

Steinkamp has made more than two dozen animated trees dedicated to a few teachers she especially admires. Trees represent strength, shelter, and fruitfulness; deciduous species, or trees that shed their leaves, manifest the changing seasons and, by extension, the cycle of life. This particular digital animation honors Judy Crook, who taught Steinkamp color theory in art school.