Colby Books
With an essay by John Russell, this catalogue was published on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition of Alex Katz at Colby College in the Paul J. Schupf Wing of the museum in 1996. 66 works are illustrated. Paperback.
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.
Our Colby Coloring and Activity Book features 18 coloring pages, a Colby word search, a section for tic-tac-toe, and Colby trivia. Each illustration was custom drawn by local artist Lizzie Kane.
A sumptuously produced retrospective on the beloved and under-published Chicago-based Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, the "queen of the bohemian artists"
This book is the definitive scholarly volume on Chicago artist Gertrude Abercrombie, who was a critical figure in the midcentury Chicago art and jazz scenes. Abercrombie was a creative force of singular vision who, from the 1930s until her death in 1977, produced enigmatic paintings full of personal significance. With a deft hand, a concise symbolic vocabulary and a restrained palette, she produced potent images that speak to her mercurial nature and her evolving psychology as an artist. Cats, owls, doors, moons, barren trees, seashells and searching female figures all converge in her mysterious works, which suggest a life of purposeful introspection and emotional struggle. Drawing consistently on her dreams as source material, Abercrombie said, "The whole world is a mystery."
Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery accompanies the artist's first retrospective since 1991: an eponymous exhibition which begins at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh before traveling to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Gertrude Abercrombie was born in 1909 in Austin, Texas, and spent most of her life in Chicago, focusing on her art full time beginning in the early 1930s. Her work was in part inspired by jazz, and she was the host of legendary parties and jam sessions frequented by icons such as Dizzy Gillespie, who was a close friend. She died in Chicago in 1977, at age 68.
This book was published in conjunction with Carnegie Museum of Art; Colby College Museum of Art
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.
The first major monograph on an American painter known for her abstracted cityscapes
Martha Diamond (1944-2023) was among the most perceptive painters of the last five decades. Her work's formal concision and painterly bravado reflect an inner dialogue with generations of abstract artists, while her singular vision spotlighted her architectural and compositional fascinations. Comprising paintings, monotypes and other works on paper, this focused survey of Diamond's career proposes "deep time" as a new way of understanding her contribution to American painting. It emphasizes her unswerving commitment to capturing the emotional character of built space, tracking throughlines across mediums and methods to reveal a process that combines spirited experimentation with perceptive observation. Deep Time features rarely seen pieces: from the little-known "single-picture" images of the 1970s and the vertiginous paintings of her native New York City during the 1980s, '90s and '00s to the vivid abstractions that increasingly characterized her later work.
Written by College Historian and former Dean of the College Earl H. Smith, Mayflower Hill is a lively history of Colby College from its founding in 1813 to the present day. The book relates the history of the College within the greater contexts of both Waterville and of the social movements that have affected higher education in the past 200 years.
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.
An in-depth look at Whistler's city streets and storefronts, addressing the phenomena of urbanization and gentrification, past and present
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) created hundreds of works that depicted urban contexts undergoing rapid transformation. This handsome volume sheds new light on his picturesque representations of London's shifting urban landscape during the Victorian era. Despite Whistler's aversion to overtly political themes, his artworks reveal a long-term engagement with social change. Properties for the newly rich replaced historic buildings and shops, forcing many into squalid conditions. The images featured here, primarily drawn from the permanent collections of the Colby College Museum of Art and the National Museum of Asian Art, bear witness to the uncertainties of modern metropolitan life that Whistler saw firsthand. However, his streetscapes also reflect the modern practice of "artwashing," wherein the negative consequences of gentrification are hidden by aesthetic screens. This book asks the reader to consider the intention and function of these engaging images: to memorialize the new struggles of the urban poor or to romanticize poverty for a rising middle-class art market.
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."