Museum

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.

Presenting recently rediscovered drawings, Life and Death explores what it means for an artist to picture their own death, in both the context of Wyeth's late career and contemporary American art

This volume presents for the first time a recently rediscovered series of pencil drawings from the early 1990s, through which Wyeth imagined his own funeral. Chapters by leading art historians explore the significance of picturing one's own death in both the context of Wyeth's late career and contemporary American art. The book connects the funeral series to Wyeth's decades-long engagement with death as an artistic subject in painting, his relationships with the models depicted, and his use of drawing as an expressive and exploratory medium. It further inserts Wyeth's work into a larger conversation about mortality and self-portraiture that developed in American art since the 1960s, and includes works by Duane Michals, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, George Tooker, Janaina Tschäpe and Mario Moore. While his contemporaries posed a variety of existential questions in picturing their own passing, those that interrogate the universality of death as a human experience have become especially urgent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the national reckoning with racial inequality that emerged in 2020. Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death thus addresses ideas about loss, grief, vulnerability and (im)mortality that pervade the current moment.
American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) lived his entire life in his birthplace of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his summer home in mid-coast Maine. His seven-decade career was spent painting the land and people that he knew and cared about. Renowned for his tempera painting Christina's World (1948), Wyeth navigated between artistic representation and abstraction in a highly personal way.

Known for his monumental wall reliefs and sculptures of animals from the 1970s, American artist Bernard Langlais (1921-1977) created a diverse oeuvre of paintings, sculptures and environments that shifted regularly and freely between abstraction and figuration--a shift that reflects Langlais' constant effort to reconcile his rural roots (in Maine) and keen sense of place with postwar artistic movements and ideologies. Now, in celebration of a substantial bequest by the artist's widow, Helen Friend Langlais, the Colby College Museum of Art has organized a long-overdue retrospective of Langlais' career, which this publication accompanies. Alongside abundant illustrations, three essays trace the arc of Langlais' career, from his early experiments in painting and his transition to wood sculpture in the 1960s to his return to figuration and his exhaustive exploration of animal motifs.

Known for his monumental wall reliefs and sculptures of animals from the 1970s, American artist Bernard Langlais (1921–1977) created a diverse oeuvre of paintings, sculptures and environments that shifted regularly and freely between abstraction and figuration--a shift that reflects Langlais’ constant effort to reconcile his rural roots (in Maine) and keen sense of place with postwar artistic movements and ideologies. Now, in celebration of a substantial bequest by the artist’s widow, Helen Friend Langlais, the Colby College Museum of Art has organized a long-overdue retrospective of Langlais’ career, which this publication accompanies. Alongside abundant illustrations, three essays trace the arc of Langlais’ career, from his early experiments in painting and his transition to wood sculpture in the 1960s to his return to figuration and his exhaustive exploration of animal motifs.

Celebrating an experimental decade in the career of Alex Katz, this book introduces audiences to a relatively unknown body of his work. Coming of age as an artist in the 1950s, Alex Katz set out to reinvent representational painting in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. At first, Katz struggled to find an audience, destroying hundreds of canvases. This book surveys the artwork that survived from this momentous decade, one in which he first painted outdoors, innovated with collages, and met Ada del Moro, his wife and muse. The essays in this book contextualize Katz's painting, consider how he and his peers looked at one another, mined 19th-century portraiture, and borrowed from television, advertising, and cinema. The result is a fascinating study of a young artist laying the groundwork for an astonishingly successful career. Fans of Katz will be inspired by the radicality of his early work, and those being introduced to the artist will be struck by its freshness and relevance.

Over the course of nearly a decade, Sharon Corwin, former Caroyln Muzzy Director and Chief Curator at the Colby College Museum Art,  interviewed five painters with special relationships to Maine—Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, David Driskell, Yvonne Jacquette, and Alex Katz. Through these conversations, transcribed and collected in this publication, the artists share about their rich and lengthy careers, their artistic process, and Maine’s influence on their life and practice. However varied these artists’ engagements are with their surroundings, what emerge as common threads are a lifelong commitment to the medium of painting, as well as an appreciation of Maine as a crucial source of community, a seasonal home, and an artistic subject. Approximately 7 inches wide by 10 inches tall. 168 pages. 

An intimate look at one of the most radical and groundbreaking printmakers of all time, the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt

This book examines the radical experimentation and innovation of one of the finest and most creative printmakers of the 19th century. A collaborator with the Impressionists Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) made some of her greatest artistic achievements as a printmaker. Her prints reveal the personal and introspective side of an American artist who was at the center of the French art world.
Addressing themes of creativity, domesticity, motherhood, fashion, intimacy and privacy, Inside Out: The Prints of Mary Cassatt brings readers into close contact with an artist who used printmaking to consider issues of identity and selfhood in a changing modern world. This publication, which investigates the artist's exploration of the medium over a period of two decades, also features an original pattern design by contemporary designer Frances MacLeod.

Promised to the Colby College Museum of Art in 2007, the Lunder Collection comprises more than 500 works of art, including paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs, and is widely recognized as one of the most important collections of American art ever assembled by private collectors. The Lunder Collection: A Gift of Art to Colby College is a richly illustrated volume featuring more than 270 collection highlights. Conceived as the companion to the 2009 publication Art at Colby, the catalogue includes seven essays on the collection's major areas: ancient Chinese art; art through the American Centennial; the art of James McNeill Whistler; art of the Gilded Age; art of the American West; American Modernism and contemporary art; as well as 17 reflections on specific works or groups of work in the collection.

The Lunder Collection: A Gift of Art to Colby College features more than 270 highlights from the Lunder Collection, which is widely recognized as one of the most important collections of American art ever assembled by private hands.

Conceived as the companion to the 2009 publication Art at Colby, the lavishly illustrated book is divided into seven sections. Their titles demonstrate the range and depth of works included: Lunder-Colville Chinese Art Collection, Art through the American Centennial, James McNeill Whistler, Art of the Gilded Age, Art of the American West, American Modernism, and Art after 1945. Befitting the breadth of the Lunder Collection, the twenty-four authors of the essays and reflections have been drawn from the many facets of the art world: curators, museum directors, teachers, and dealers, all specialists in their fields, who bring to their writing deep knowledge of the artworks and sometimes of the Lunders themselves.

The Lunder Collection: A Gift of Art to Colby College accompanies the inaugural exhibition of the Lunder Collection, marking the opening of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion at the Colby College Museum of Art.

Roy before he was Lichtenstein: the path to becoming a Pop Art titan began with Lichtenstein's cycling through a provocative range of visual culture, from fairy tales and children's and folk art to mythic forms of Americana, such as cowboys and Disney.

Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960 is the first major museum exhibition to investigate the early work of one of the best-known American artists of the twentieth century. Co-organized by Colby College Museum of Art and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the exhibition will include approximately ninety works from the artist's fruitful and formative early career, many never before seen by the public. The show and accompanying catalog will include paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints which reveal an artist, even in the earliest stages of his career, with a keen interest in visual culture, culling--with a critical eye--from a wide range of sources. These inspirations were the essential but little-known precursors to the artist's later sourcing of comic books and advertisements. Likewise, his exploration of abstraction, just before the artist's abrupt turn to Pop Art in 1961, straddles the line between unabashed lyricism and wry critique of second-generation Abstract Expressionism.

The catalog, with new scholarship by leading experts in the field, provides a new understanding of Lichtenstein's influential techniques of appropriation and offers the opportunity to more fully assess the artistic and cultural dynamism of postwar America.

A multidisciplinary look at the foremost archive of Black American visual culture, as recast by Theaster Gates

This book features essays and other reflections commissioned in response to the Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories, a monumental participatory work by Theaster Gates (born 1973). The Cabinet includes nearly 3,000 framed images of women from the Johnson Publishing Company archive, and highlights from the collection appear in this edited volume.
Founded in 1942, Chicago-based Johnson Publishing chronicled the lives of Black Americans for more than seven decades through the magazines Ebony and Jet. Composed from arguably the most important archive of American Black visual culture in the 20th century, Gates' work centers the essential and too often unsung role of women in this history.
When the Cabinet was exhibited at the Colby College Museum of Art, 12 women from a wide range of disciplines (including archivists, legal scholars, anthropologists and librarians, as well as curators, visual artists, filmmakers, writers and art historians) were invited to reflect on a work that brings a sisterhood of images to light.