Building the Museum’s Future.

The Colby Museum will partially close starting Oct. 3, 2011, for construction of a new addition and renovations to existing museum spaces. Slated to open in the summer of 2013 in celebration of Colby’s bicentennial, the new wing will consist of an additional 10,000 square feet of exhibition galleries, new art studios for photography and foundations classes, additional classroom space, and an expanded lobby and sculpture terrace. Designed by Los Angeles architects Frederick Fisher and Partners, the addition will accommodate the extraordinary Lunder Collection, promised to the College by Peter H. Lunder ’56, D.F.A ’98 and Paula Crane Lunder, D.F.A ’98 in 2007. The Museum will fully reopen in 2013 with a museum-wide exhibition of the Lunder Collection. 

During construction, the Museum will continue its outreach to Colby faculty and students, making the collection available to classes across the curriculum. The Museum will also undertake programming in local schools that will sustain and strengthen connections to these communities until the reopening. The Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz and part of the Lower Jetté Galleries will remain open to visitors throughout construction.

A Welcome Return

Following a two-year hiatus, the Joan Whitney Payson Collection returns to Waterville for an exhibition that will combine its strengths in Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and portraiture with selections from the Colby Museum’s permanent collection. The Payson Collection includes works by Gustave Courbet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, which will appear with Colby paintings and watercolors by Mary Cassatt, Maurice Prendergast, and Rockwell Kent, among others. On view through June 12.

Revisiting the Documentary Photograph

The Colby Museum is the third and final stop of American Modern: Abbott, Evans, Bourke-White, an exhibition that offers new insight into the flourishing genre of documentary photography in the 1930s through the work of three American photographers. Organized by the Amon Carter Museum and the Colby Museum, the exhibition comes to Waterville after a stop at the Art Institute of Chicago. On view from July 9 through Oct. 2.

Robot in the Museum 

Last spring a robot explored the Colby College Museum of Art. Developed by Colby Computer Science Professor Bruce Maxwell and Professor William Smart from Washington University in St. Louis, the robot was built and programmed by Maxwell and his students to allow people to remotely view works of art in the Museum. Maxwell’s student Bogumil Giertler ’12 received a student scholarship from Apple for his work on the robot and was invited to show off its gallery-roaming abilities at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2010 in San Francisco in June, where participants were invited to control the robot's movements and take a virtual tour of the Museum. Read more at http://insidecolby.com/article.php?articleid=339.