Art, Community, and Ethical Urban Development

Students enrolled in the course hosted Theaster in a class discussion, joined him on a tour of Waterville’s South End, attended multiple community meetings arranged around his visit, and traveled to Chicago to visit some of his projects on the South Side. These are some of their responses to that experience.

The Painter from Maine

Marsden Hartley in Literary and Artistic Context

Special Collections houses Colby’s rare books and manuscript collections as well as the college archives. Drawing on these rich collections, the exhibit highlights Hartley’s own literary work as a lesser-known aspect of his creative career, as well as letters, manuscripts, and published works by some of the Maine writers Hartley knew and read.

Artwork out of the Museum

Winslow Homer and Prouts Neck

When I was able to put Homer’s work in context, not only out of the museum but off the pedestal of “genius” that often surrounds great artists, I found myself thinking about his paintings differently. I was able to see improvisation, movement, and creativity that I hadn’t noticed before.

Art World Aspirations in the Big Apple

Mirken Trip to New York City

Over the course of the four-day trip, the students are set up with professionals working in all corners of the art world, from museums and galleries to studios and auction houses to communications and law firms and other organizations.

Space, Place, and Belonging

in Leah Modigliani's How Long Can We Tolerate This?

This October, students from Associate Professor Winifred Tate’s anthropology class “Space, Place, and Belonging” visited the Colby College Museum of Art. They each selected one photograph from Leah Modigliani’s installation, How Long Can We Tolerate This?, and analyzed it as a representation of place.

Marsden Hartley’s Glass Paintings

Hartley’s first glass paintings from 1917 are primitive compared to his canvas paintings from prior years. A complicated procedure, reverse painting on glass requires that details and highlights be painted first, then the foreground carefully laid on top.

Discovering Marsden Hartley in Stoneham, Maine

An Interview with Dan Barker

Houses like the ones he painted can still be seen in this area. He liked to walk and spent a lot of time on the road. He collected thoughts and memories and then used them later on somewhere else. The waterfall Hartley painted is on Great Brook and today you can’t see it because it’s all grown back up with forest growth.