The nineteenth century was an innovative period in the history of printmaking. Many artists rejected traditionally taught practices and principles and established a new aesthetic language for prints that focused on design and craft. This exhibition brings works by American artist Arthur Wesley Dow into dialogue with other printmakers from the collection, namely Mary Cassatt, Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, and James McNeill Whistler.

At the invitation of the Museum, the New Jersey–based artist Torkwase Dyson visited Waterville to consult archival materials related to Samuel Osborne (c. 1833–1904). Born into slavery on a Virginia plantation, Osborne migrated to Maine in 1865 and served as a Colby College janitor from 1867 to 1903. In the works she produced for Nautical Dusk, Dyson combines simple geometric forms infused with metaphorical associations found in obituaries of Osborne written by unnamed white authors.

For the eighth installment of the Currents series, Carly Glovinski has created a two-part exhibition on view concurrently at the Colby Museum and the Waterville Public Library. Presented alongside her installations of painted, cast, and woven sculptures is contextual source material, including artworks from the Lunder Collection and library books awaiting readers.

In the last years of the eighteenth century, the Spanish artist Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) conceived a series of prints guided solely, he professed, by his imagination. Los Caprichos, or the Caprices, is the whimsical title Goya gave to his project, yet the series’ images are far from lighthearted. For Goya, an artist beholden to the Spanish court, printmaking was a means of elucidating the human condition on his own terms during an era of revolution and tumult. Goya Prints from the Lunder Collection includes a bound volume of Los Caprichos, a new digital interface providing images of each of the etchings in the series, and a nineteenth-century commentary on the work accompanied by an English translation.

For more than five decades, Nancy Spero (1926–2009) pioneered a feminist art practice that fiercely defied the social expectations imposed on women. Using a lexicon of appropriated imagery, Spero envisioned, as she observed in 1987, “all manner of processions, conflicts, interruptions and disruptions.” Her hybrid artworks made in protest against war and in celebration of the liberated female body constitute Nancy Spero: Unbound, an exhibition organized in conjunction with a concurrent presentation of Francisco de Goya’s prints, which Spero first encountered as an aspiring young artist.

This exhibition celebrates the transformative gift of the Norma Boom Marin Collection of German Expressionist Prints. An extraordinary collection of twenty-eight prints, many of them brilliant or rare impressions, it spans the years 1907 through 1924, when artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were working at the top of their form.