The Colby College Museum of Art reopened this week after being closed for a month for carpeting and construction. Exhibits currently on display include paintings by Garry Mitchell, paintings by Bevin Engman, The Charles Hovey Pepper Collection of Japanese Prints and works from the museum's permanent collection.

Mitchell's current body of work uses monoprinting techniques on paper, wood and canvas. He uses alkyd, oil and wax to produce his abstract constructions. The ideas for his paintings usually are found, he says, "on the way to making something else," and they often are "not at all what I expected."

In the Davis Gallery will be The Charles Hovey Pepper Collection of Japanese Prints, examples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "ukiyo-e," or "images of the floating world." Co-curated by art department chair Michael Marlais and student Marta Miko '99, these prints are being shown to the public for the first time.

Sharing the JettÈ gallery with Garry Mitchell's work will be paintings by professor Bevin Engman, whose still lifes of books are described by a New York Times critic as "elegantly composed." Both Mitchell's and Engman's work were most recently on view as part of the Portland Museum of Art's Maine Biennial show. They were two of 56 artists, chosen from among more than 900 submitters, to represent the current state of Maine art.

The remaining JettÈ gallery rooms will display a selection of work from the permanent collection. Upstairs, newly acquired contemporary works on paper will be shown; downstairs will be eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American portraits and photographs from the archives.

Opening in the fall of 1999, the museum's new Lunder Wing, designed by Los Angeles architect Frederick Fisher, will add 13 galleries and 8,000 square feet, allowing for the exhibition of approximately 150 more works from the permanent collection. The Lunder Wing galleries will trace the development of art in America from the middle of the 18th century into the early 20th century.