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.

Harmon and Harriet Kelley are San Antonio, Texas-based collectors of African American art. Over the last thirty years, the Kelleys have assembled one of the most comprehensive holdings of works by African American artists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Loans from their collection are frequently exhibited in museums throughout the country. The Colby Museum is honored to have had twelve works from the Kelley Collection on display in our galleries through the 2019–20 academic year.

Using the SEED-O-MATIC is straightforward: all you need is 60 cents for seeds, 50 cents for soil, and a makeshift planter. Once you’ve planted one of the five seed varieties available in this analog vending machine, leave it on your windowsill and water it according to the instructions on the envelope. In two or three months, your greens will be ready to eat. As simple as it is to operate, SEED-O-MATIC provides a point of entry into complex issues of food justice. The work was designed in 2013 by artists Emma Dorothy Conley and Halley Roberts in concert with the Center for Genomic Gastronomy (CGG), an artist-led organization working internationally to “imagine a more just, biodiverse, and beautiful food system.” Brought to campus and sighted in Cotter Union by the Colby Museum, the machine will be at Colby through May 2020.

The artist James McNeill Whistler closely observed the commercial activity of the River Thames, and his depictions of the waterway reveal an economic network that intertwined empire, industry, and environment. River Works examines this network and places Whistler’s art within the industrial-imperial system of the nineteenth century—a system whose legacies continue to inform our world today.