Curated by David Simon

Founded on the belief that a museum is a platform for new ideas from diverse perspectives, Rediscoveries, an ongoing exhibition series, presents rotating selections from the permanent collection chosen by members of the Colby College community. Representing a wide range of disciplines, interests, and areas of expertise, guest curators include Colby faculty, students, staff, and friends of the Museum.
Rediscoveries 1 has been curated by David Simon, Ellerton and Edith Jette Professor of Art.

In the 1930s, photographers pushed the genre of documentary photography to the forefront of public culture in the United States and onto the walls of newly opened museums and art galleries. This exhibition, focusing exclusively on the work of American photographers Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White, provides new insights into that historic development. Organized by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and the Colby Museum, the exhibition comes to Waterville after its display at the Amon Carter and the Art Institute of Chicago.

A Bowdoin College alumnus and longtime resident of Portland, David P. Becker (1947–2010) was also an internationally recognized print scholar and curator. Selected from the Lunder Collection by guest curator Susan Schulman, this tribute exhibition celebrates Mr. Becker’s passion for the print medium, his impeccable connoisseurship, and his work as guest curator, beginning in 2006, of several Whistler exhibitions at the Colby Museum.

Organized to coincide with American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White, this exhibition presents seven works—all recent gifts to the collection—from Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled series. Made between 2008 and 2009, these highly detailed color photographs capture the citywide impact of Detroit’s industrial decline and the gradual encroachment of nature on the city most associated with American mobility.

The annual Senior Art Exhibition which brings together art by Colby seniors who have completed extensive work in their medium. 

Featured artists: Maegan Beinoras, Patrick Burns, Katherine Gagnon, Madeline Gordon, Elizabeth Hathaway, Hopestill Kraft, Heather Liu, Samantha Richens, Michelle Russell, Jenna Sood, Allison Stroud, and Emily VanWyk

Norma B. Marin began collecting photographs in 1970, gradually acquiring works by such major practitioners as Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Sheeler, Lee Friedlander, Harry Callahan, and André Kertész. In the spring of 2011, Norma Marin promised her collection to the Museum, dramatically transforming the breadth and depth of its photography offerings. This exhibition presents a selection from the collection, which is distinguished by its vintage prints and its wide range of subjects.

After noticing a street in Berlin called Judenstrasse (Jews Street) in 2002, the artist Susan Hiller spent three years attempting to document all the places in Germany whose names still showed evidence of their former Jewish inhabitants. The J. Street Project includes an installation of 303 photographs, a 67-minute video, and a map and book documenting these sites.

The Colby College Museum of Art presents five world-class works of art from The Joan Whitney Payson Collection, on biennial loan from the Portland Museum of Art, exhibited in conjunction with works from the Colby Museum’s collection.  This impressive collection includes paintings by Gustave Courbet, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Alfred Sisley.

Selected from the Alex Katz Collection, this exhibition offers an overview of Alex Katz’s drawing practice, from ink sketches to carefully finished graphite drawings constituted by the effects of light and pose.

In 1947 and 1948, Clemens Kalischer (b. 1921, Germany) photographed World War II refugees from Europe as they awaited immigration processing in New York City. These photographs became Kalischer’s Displaced Persons series, one of his first assignments as a young photojournalist. Having entered the United States via the same route in 1942, Kalischer understood his subjects well. Drawn from the Lunder Collection, this selection from the series shows travelers in varying states of weariness and expectancy at the threshold of a new life.