As Colby students, we first see the spaces we live in as bare, white-walled rooms, devoid of any evidence of human presence. They feel alien at first—disconcertingly empty boxes we’ll inhabit for nine months, but never really own. We wage war against this unfamiliarity and temporariness through the decoration and personalization of our dorm room walls.
Conversation with Richard Blanco
An interview by Professor Michael D. Burke
Poet Richard Blanco was the Artist in Residence at the Lunder Institute in the spring. Michael D. Burke, Professor of English at Colby, sat down with him and talked about
Henry Kirke Brown’s Filatrice
American themes and the importance of women in industry
Women play an important role in Henry Kirke Brown’s life and career. Filatrice manifests this strong influence and the significance of women in industrial society. Henry Kirke Brown’s statuette Filatrice
City of Ambition
Alfred Stieglitz at the Colby Museum
For [Alvin Langdon] Coburn, as for Stieglitz—a second-generation German Jewish immigrant who spent his student years in his ancestral homeland—the city of New York surfaces, symbolically, as a point of reentry, a place where the exhilaration and anticipation disintegrate, in Coburn’s words, into a “sudden . . . plung[e] into the rush and turmoil.”
A Path into the Arts
Q&A with Julia Lo
Whether you intern, give tours as a docent, volunteer for programs, attend events, or just frequent the galleries – you can make these experiences as meaningful as you want.
Art and Knowledge
Tim Rollins, His Grandmother, and the Value of Education
There is a story that the artist Tim Rollins liked to tell about his grandmother, Alice Rollins. She worked at Colby, in Foss dining hall, from 1957 to 1975. One
Senior Exhibition 2018
In this series of blogposts, my students [in the Writing Art Criticism class] revisit their interviews and share additional perspectives on the rich and compelling practices of their peers.
Making Space for Conversation
Entitled Space for Conversation, this series was designed to establish a shared understanding of best practices for public art initiatives and innovative projects and to examine the ways art can instigate meaningful exchange and serve as a catalyst for reshaping public spaces.
Immigration, Masculinity, and Motherhood
Yoshua Okón's Oracle
Okón decided to place the video in a desert, a location contrary to all female concepts. The barren terrain depicts an infertile soil with few signs of fauna or animals. The desert offers the men of the video a place where even the soil exudes hypermasculinity. Ironically, the only other animal species found in this work are the ants, which exist under a matriarchal system.
The Teacher Tree
A new addition to the Lunder Collection is featured in the Colby Museum’s William D. Adams Gallery
As part of the presentation of [Judy Crook 5] in the Colby Museum’s lobby, visitors are invited to compose dedications to their favorite teachers on paper leaves. A cascade of these leaves now fills one of the lobby’s windows, and a handful of dedications appears here in celebration of Teacher Appreciation Week.