Contact: Colby Museum of Art
Phone: (207) 872-3228
Two Exhibits to Open at Colby Museum of Art
Two art exhibits will open in March at the Colby Museum of Art in Waterville. "Illuminating Words: The Artist’s Books of Christopher Gausby" will be on view from Friday, March 3, through Sunday, April 2, and Gail Spaien’s exhibition "Counting" will be on view from Sunday, March 5, through Sunday, April 9. Véronique Plesch, assistant professor of art history at Colby College, and Martin Antonetti, curator of rare books at Smith College, are co-curators of "Illuminating Words." On Friday, March 3, Antonetti will present the lecture "Things in Books’ Clothing: a User’s Guide to Artist's Books" at 2:30 p.m. in Given Auditorium, Bixler Art and Music Center. At 3 p.m. Plesch will lead a tour of the exhibition and at 3:30 p.m. a reception for Gausby will follow in the museum lobby.
For more than 15 years New York City book artist Christopher Gausby has used a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional media to create art works that use the book format. Inspired by the techniques of medieval manuscript illumination, Gausby blends philosophical reflections and passages from early Christian mystic texts with Dadaist compositional techniques. The resulting collages are formal and precise and, by breaking down traditional page layout patterns, they create a new language of line and color in space.
Gail Spaien’s exhibition "Counting" will be on view at the museum Sunday, March 5, through Sunday, April 9. An opening reception will be held at the museum on Sunday, March 5, from 3 - 4:30 p.m. The 25 acrylic-on-panel paintings in "Counting" center on Spaien’s personal experience with pregnancy and the comforting power of numbers and statistics.
Spaien has participated in exhibitions in California at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Crocker Art Museum, Claudia Chaplin Gallery, Gumps Gallery and the Walter Athol McBean Gallery. In Maine she has exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Robert Clements Fine Arts, June Fitzpatrick Gallery and O’Farrell Gallery. She received fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation Resident Artists Program (Woodside, Calif.), the Millay Colony for the Arts (Austerlitz, N.Y.) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
A faculty fellow in studio art at Colby, Spaien also teaches at Maine College of Art. She has taught at the University of Southern Maine, the University of Maine Augusta and Haystack School of Arts and Crafts. She received her B.F.A. from the University of Southern Maine in 1980 and her M.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute in 1987. Spaien resides in South Portland with her husband and daughter.
Also on exhibit at the museum is the Joan Whitney Payson Collection. The collection of 26 works, on view through June 18, contains paintings by world-famous Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists.
Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free, and the museum is accessible to persons with disabilities. For additional information, please call (207) 872-3228.
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