Colby Histories
With more than 170 artworks and commissioned texts, including original poems, by 98 writers and artists -- such as Barbara Haskell, Bill Berkson, Carol Troyen, Michael Leja, Rachael Ziady DeLue, Geoffrey Batchen, Sanford Schwartz, Anne M. Wagner, Ron Padgett, Irving Sandler and Lydia Yee -- Art at Colby highlights artworks that represent the full scope of the museum's superb holdings. The works span the entire history of American art (with a particularly fine selection of painting from New York since 1960), and also include examples of European and Asian works. Texts by a range of writers -- scholars, curators, critics and artists -- are paired with gorgeous reproductions of pieces from the collection: James Cuno on Henri Fantin-Latour, for instance, Rackstraw Downes on John Marin, Alex Katz on Winslow Homer and Richard Hell on Joe Brainard. Hardcover.
The present history seeks to portray the development of the College against the background of the changing times. Marriner (class of 1913) travels through all the history of Colby College, going into great detail in this large volume as he portrays the changes occuring in the world as Colby College grows into a fine institution.
Beloved Colby historian Ernest Cummings Marriner '13 documents Robert E. Lee Strider's nineteen years as president of Colby College. Marriner is also the author of the definitive History of Colby, which covers the period up to the Strider presidency.
College Historian Earl H. Smith tracks the growth of the museum, focusing more on people than on the art they helped collect. The names are familiar: Lunder, Cummings, Abbott, Katz, Schupf, Strider and Cotter, among others. Smith reveals their roles in the museum's evolution from the early years, when a collection of primitive portraits hung in Foss dining hall, to the present, when the gift of the Lunder Collection made national news. Supporters of the museum have created "a most remarkable masterpiece indeed."