Wilderness and Culture
Welcome Words – Véronique Plesch, Professor, Colby College
Welcome to Wilderness and Culture! For the 13th time, two students from Colby College have curated the L.C. Bates Museum summer exhibition and for the third time since the COVID pandemic forced the museum to close in the spring of 2020, this is a virtual exhibition. Although we look forward to having again in-person exhibitions, the virtual format has demonstrated its enormous advantages and we plan on retaining it in the future, along with a physical installation. For now, I hope you enjoy this exhibition and seize the opportunity to peruse the previous two as well.
Viewing the Exhibition
To view each artist’s submission alongside their statement, click on the names of the artists listed below. To return to the gallery, click the “return to gallery” button at the bottom of the page. To view all of the works in the exhibition, scroll down below the list of artists.
To navigate the gallery, click on the images to view a larger image. Navigate between works in the gallery by clicking the arrow buttons on the right and left sides of the images. To close the gallery and return to this page, click the small X button in the upper right corner of the screen.
Wilderness and Culture
Caged Lion (1976–77), Bernard Langlais’s monumental wooden sculpture on the lawn next to the L.C. Bates Museum, perfectly encapsulates the notion of captivity. Taking its cue from the fall 2021 state-wide initiative and the 2021–22 Annual Humanities Theme at Colby College on Freedom and Captivity, the 2022 L.C. Bates summer exhibition invited artists to reflect upon the meanings that these two concepts hold for the natural world and the ways in which we conceive, represent, and imagine freedom and captivity in nature, considering issues such as wilderness, cultivation, and domestication.
List of Artists
2022 Exhibition Curators
María Minuesa-Sicilia is a senior at Colby College, majoring in Art History and French Studies. After graduating from Colby, she will be pursuing a Master’s degree in Art History at Williams College. Although María is most interested in studying Spanish Baroque art, working on Wilderness and Culture was a great opportunity to explore the curatorial side of art history and to get to experience the work of contemporary Maine artists.
Caroline Scarola ’22 double-majored in Art History and Government. Both Caroline and her co-curator, María, spent their first semester in Dijon, France, through the Global Entry Program. Curating Wilderness and Culture has allowed Caroline to pursue her passion for editing and working with Maine artists, also central to the work she has been accomplishing since February 2021 as editorial intern for the Maine Arts Journal. In her future endeavors, Caroline hopes to combine her editing skills and passion for helping people.
Véronique Plesch is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Art Department at Colby College. Born in Argentina and raised in Switzerland, she holds advanced degrees from the University of Geneva in Art History and Medieval French Literature and from Princeton University, where she received her Ph.D. in Art History in 1994, the year she joined Colby’s faculty. Her scholarship deals with late medieval and Renaissance visual arts and theater, early modern graffiti, and contemporary art, with a steady focus on word and image studies. She is one of the editors of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly, to which she regularly contributes articles. She has been supervising student curators for the L.C. Bates’s summer exhibition since 2009.