In 2010 the Colby College Museum of Art received more than seventy works on paper spanning from the 1960s to the early 2000s by post-war American figurative artist Lois Dodd. For the first time, the drawings, watercolors, and prints of this extraordinary gift will be accessible to the public, providing visitors the opportunity to experience Dodd’s work through mediums other than the oil painting for which she is best known. Three main themes will be featured: the body, the landscape, and the cityscape. The delicate and the massive meet in these drawings, and Dodd’s formal approach to the architecture of figures, buildings, and natural forms offers viewers a meditation on monumentality, ephemera, and the lived human experience.

The Annual Senior Art Exhibition brings together artworks by Colby seniors who have completed extensive work in the following media: painting, printmaking, photography, and sculpture.

Curated by Diana Tuite

Alluding to artist Alex Katz’s preoccupation with the sociability of forms, be they figures or flowers, this second installment ofAssembly once again draws together a range of subjects in diverse media. This selection of paintings, works on paper, and cutouts attests to Katz’s concern with the interrelationships among individuals, including model and painter. It also demonstrates his understanding of the landscape, both built and natural, as a community of entities mixing with light.

Curated by Co-curated by Ahmed Abdalla and SMFA Curator Joanna Soltan for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Opening to coincide with the third anniversary of the first protests in Tahrir Square, Histories of Now: Six Artists from Cairo presents distinctive filmic visions of Egypt’s current political and social environment. Consisting of video and multimedia installations by some of the strongest and most engaged among contemporary artists currently living in Cairo,Histories of Now approaches the reshaping of Egypt not from an outside Western perspective but rather from within, offering a vision of the country’s current cultural and art-making practices. The six artists in the exhibition are Mohamed Abla, Ahmed Basiony, Hala Elkoussy, Shady El Noshokaty, Sabah Naim, and Moataz Nasr.

Curated by Michael A. Marlais, the James M. Gillespie Professor of Art

This exhibition contextualizes the Colby Museum’s recent acquisition of A Classical Landscape with Figures Conversing Beneath a Tree (1825), a neo-classical painting by Jean-Victor Bertin (1767–1842), offering a focused consideration of the French affinity for landscape painting from the Baroque period through the 19th century. Among the included works areWooded Landscape by Gaspard Dughet (1615–1675), a painter who helped make landscape a signature of French identity, as well as Marcoussis by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Bertin’s most famous pupil. The exhibition also includes several loans from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The wind is our most immediate predictor of weather, an endlessly fascinating phenomenon for human observation and discussion. The practice of gauging wind direction dates as far back as ancient Greece, and decorative weathervanes were common on churches in medieval Europe. Early settlers brought the tradition to America, where it evolved from its religious and scientific roots to become a thriving, creative industry and a means for self-expression. The works in this exhibition, drawn from a private collection in Maine, represent some of the finest designs and iconic forms of the late nineteenth century, the heyday of weathervane production.

“What could someone say to you that would make you feel completely loved (acknowledged, understood, respected, cared for, attractive, embraced, supported, safe, cherished…)?” Julianne Swartz recorded seventy-two answers to this question, and these voices emerge from the museum’s architecture in Affirmation. Swartz originally conceived of this piece for the Tate Liverpool in 2006, where she activated ten sites throughout the museum with sound.

Curated by Ankeney Weitz

Spaces & Places presents Chinese artworks from the rich holdings of the Lunder-Colville Chinese Art Collection at Colby College and the world-renowned collection of Chinese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. By featuring works that were displayed in the imperial court, private residences, temples, and tombs, the exhibition demonstrates how art enlivened these spaces and created meaning within four very different realms of visual culture. A wide range of objects drawn from all periods of premodern China—from paintings to ceramics, textiles to sculptures—allows viewers to appreciate and understand art’s power and varied purposes in specific contexts.

Nowhere but Here: Art from the Alex Katz Foundation, presents more than 40 modern and contemporary works given to the Colby College Museum of Art by the Alex Katz Foundation. Included in the exhibition are dynamic abstractions by Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Elizabeth Murray, which appear in the context of contemporary portraiture by Tanyth Berkeley, Ben Pier, Chantal Joffe, and Elizabeth Peyton, as well as a video by Dara Friedman.

In 2007 Peter and Paula Lunder, longtime benefactors of Colby College, promised their collection of more than 500 works of art to the Colby College Museum of Art. The Lunder Collection: A Gift of Art to Colby College, installed in the new Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion and the Lunder Wing, commemorates the formal transfer of this extraordinary gift to Colby. The exhibition presents more than 280 works from the Lunder Collection and showcases the collection’s strengths in 19th and 20th-century American and contemporary art. On view will be paintings and works on paper by American masters George Caleb Bingham, George Catlin, John La Farge, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, George Inness, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O’Keeffe, sculptures by Augustus Saint Gaudens, Frederick Remington, Paul Manship, Elie Nadelman, and Alexander Calder, and important contemporary works by Romare Bearden, Donald Judd, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, Jenny Holzer, and Maya Lin. The exhibition also includes more than 30 prints and paintings by James McNeill Whistler. These works are drawn from the Lunder Collection’s deep Whistler holdings, which comprise the largest single collection of work by this pivotal artist to be given to an American academic museum to date.  The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated book of collection highlights, with essays by noted curators and art historians.