Young Curators: Art in the Making

May 20, 2015 - July 12, 2015

William D. Adams Gallery, Museum Lobby

The Colby College Museum of Art is pleased to announce a pilot program, Young Curators, designed to offer Waterville and Winslow high school students immersion in museum practice through arts-centered learning and production. This installation will showcase the student’s research and art-making skills that directly relate to works on art in the Museum’s permanent collection. As part of this program students have both created and curated the works in this exhibition.

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Senior Art Exhibition

May 7, 2015 - May 24, 2015

Davis Gallery

The artists of the Class of 2015 came all the way down from Mount Olympus to put together a final showing of their work in the Museum’s Davis Gallery. They have spent countless hours in preparation for this glorious moment that each god and goddess earns at the closing moments of their college careers. We want to share this miraculous moment with our friends, family, professors, and anyone who would like to rejoice with a little food and drink.

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Terry Winters: Printed Matters

February 12, 2015 - May 10, 2015

Lower Jette Galleries

Terry Winters made his first print in 1982 and, to date, he has created more than 110 editions, including numerous multi-sheet portfolios, working with innovative fine art presses internationally. This exhibition considers Winters’s use of the printed image as a resource for experimentation, invention, and collaboration. He views prints as equal to paintings and drawings and avoids applying a hierarchy to his various modes of working. With an emphasis on recent editions, the exhibition includes the print portfolio In Blue and a closely related painting of the same title, marking the first time that they have been exhibited together. Also featured are Winters’s most recent editions, Clocks and Clouds and Atmospheres, as well as his Notebook collages, hybrid works that combine found imagery and drawing in ways that resonate with the layered compositions of his prints.

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Works by Bern Porter from Colby College Special Collections includes a selection of the original collages that the artist published in the irreverent compilations The Book of Do’s and Here Come’s Everybody’s Don’t Book. It also features several of Porter’s uniquely prescient artist’s books, one of which, 468B (1966), consists of bound computer printouts of codes that he provocatively suggested could be deciphered for their “psycho-visual” potential. Porter composed two other books, both dated 1961 and titled Aphasia (or the loss of ability to understand or express speech), from bound newsprint whose textual and visual densities presaged the content overload that is now commonly associated with Internet culture. The artist’s book Scandinavian Summer and a travel scrapbook represent Porter’s lifelong fascination with international travel, much of it aboard cruise ships. Additional publications and a selection of the artist’s writings are also available for visitors to peruse.

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Two Works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres

February 12, 2015 - June 21, 2015

William D. Adams Gallery, Museum Lobby

The theme of travel runs throughout the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban–born, American artist who immigrated, via Puerto Rico, to the United States in 1979. In conjunction with Colby College’s 2014–15 Humanities Theme of “Migrations,” the Colby Museum is presenting two of Gonzalez-Torres’s stack pieces, works composed of printed sheets of paper that visitors may keep, display, or give to others. In the two-part piece “Untitled”, 1989/1990, one stack of papers features the sentence “Somewhere better than this place.”, while the other reads, “Nowhere better than this place.” In “Untitled” 1992/1993, the sheets of paper are printed with a black-and-white image of a bird in the sky based on a photograph by the artist. Public programs associated with the presentation of these works will include a Noontime Art Talk.

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Black History Month: Artist Spotlight

February 3, 2015 - February 28, 2015

Teaching Gallery

The Colby Museum celebrates Black History Month by spotlighting a different work of art each week by African American artists in its collection: Joseph Norman (week one and two), followed by a single work each by Kara Walker (week three) and David C. Driskell (week four). Selected in collaboration with the Pugh Center, Students Organized for Black and Hispanic Unity, and the African-American Studies Program, these works of art offer visitors an opportunity to reflect on current and historical representations of race in the United States.

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currents7: Elizabeth Atterbury

January 27, 2015 - May 10, 2015

Upper Jette Galleries

For some time now artist Elizabeth Atterbury has been testing the authority and autonomy of the photographic image; she exploits its twin capacities for frankness and withholding. Indeed, many of her recent photographic prints could not be more explicitly incoherent. How far can one peel representation away from the thing it depicts without detaching it altogether? Frequently drawn to pliable but precarious materials such as paper and sand, Atterbury constructs ephemeral tableaus specifically for the purpose of recording and, in so doing, transfiguring them. For the seventh installment of the Museum’s currents series, this Portland-based artist extends her analysis of the photogenic properties of objects in new two- and three-dimensional work, creating a site-specific installation.

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Bernard Langlais

July 19, 2014 - January 4, 2015

Lower Jette Galleries, Upper Jette Galleries

Known for his monumental wall reliefs and sculptures of animals from the 1970s, Maine-born artist Bernard Langlais (1921–1977) produced a rich and diverse oeuvre in his 56 years. From modernist painter to visionary environment builder, Langlais created art driven by a deep sense of place, and an unrelenting search for materials and subjects that reconciled his rural roots with postwar artistic movements and ideologies. In celebration of an extraordinary bequest by the artist’s widow, Helen Friend Langlais, of her estate to Colby College in 2010, the Colby College Museum of Art will present the first scholarly retrospective of Langlais’s dynamic career. The exhibition is drawn primarily from the Museum’s Bernard Langlais Collection and also presents loans from several local museums and private collections, a testament to Maine’s deep holdings in the art of this native son.

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Alex Katz: Selections

July 1, 2014 - June 7, 2015

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

This installation features a rotating selection of artwork by Alex Katz (b. 1927). Among the most recent acquisitions on view is a double aluminum cutout entitled Juan and Choichun from 2013. Also displayed is an array of portraits that Katz produced in the 1950s depicting fellow artist Bernard Langlais, the subject of the adjacent retrospective.

 

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