Robert Adams: Turning Back

February 2, 2016 - June 5, 2016

Lower Jette Galleries, Upper Jette Galleries

Begun in response to the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Turning Back is an exhibition of 164 photographs by acclaimed photographer Robert Adams. For what he subtitled A Photographic Journal of Re-Exploration, the photographer headed East from the Pacific Ocean, photographing the evidence of irresponsible stewardship and unmitigated greed that he found in the forests along the way. He continued until he came upon a reason for hope in the orchards, pastures, and cottonwoods of Halfway, Oregon, about four hundred and fifty miles east of the Pacific.

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Alec Soth: Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree

February 2, 2016 - June 5, 2016

Upper Jette Galleries

Accompanying Robert Adams’ Turning Back is a 2012 video by Alec Soth (American, b. 1969) entitled Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree. This was conceived as a response to Summer Nights, a 1985 book of photographs taken by Adams during nocturnal rambles near what was then his home in Colorado. According to Adams, “What attracted me to the subjects at a new hour was the discovery then of a neglected peace.” Twenty years old when he first encountered the Adams book, and in search of a comparable “romantic solitude,” Soth also began shooting at night.

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Alex Katz: A Singular Vision

October 29, 2015 - May 1, 2016

The Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz

This installation features highlights from the museum’s permanent collection, including several recent acquisitions on view for the first time. Many of the artworks on display in A Singular Vision touch upon themes of pairing, doubling, and repetition. In some cases, these are formal devices, with Katz coupling figures off or depicting a subject multiple times within a single canvas. Elsewhere this entails his return to particular models or motifs over the course of his career.

 

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Peter Soriano: Permanent Maintenance

September 24, 2015 - August 21, 2016

William D. Adams Gallery, Museum Lobby

An accomplished sculptor, Peter Soriano began making wall drawings in 2012. Rather than shaping, carving, or casting three-dimensional forms, he now assembles and arranges visual experience, using what captures and holds his attention to generate orchestrated constellations of marks. Commissioned by the Colby Museum, Permanent Maintenance is Soriano’s largest wall drawing to date.

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Aesthetic Harmonies: Whistler in Context

September 17, 2015 - January 3, 2016

Lower Jette Galleries

Aesthetic Harmonies explores the many artistic, social, and historical contexts in which we can situate the artist James McNeill Whistler. Drawing from the museum’s rich collections of European, American, and Asian art, the exhibition reexamines Whistler’s relationship to the Etching Revival in Britain, French Realism, American Impressionism, and transatlantic Aestheticism. It also places the artist’s experiments with color, form, beauty, and nature in dialogue with early American modernism, mid-twentieth-century abstraction, and contemporary art. 

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