History

Guided by a strategic vision, the museum’s Friends of Art and the college’s leaders began to position the Colby Museum as an educational resource for the college, a cultural hub in Central Maine, and, in their words, “an instigator of shows of national importance.” In 1963, with director James Carpenter, they organized the major exhibition Maine and Its Artists, 1740–1963 to commemorate Colby College’s sesquicentennial. It featured 127 paintings and sculptures and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, where it received national press and praise. With this exhibition came an ambition to build an Archive of Maine Art at Colby College that would make it a leading institution for housing, maintenance, and scholarship on an art history focused on Maine artists and their contributions to American art. This archive is now held by Special Collections, Colby College Libraries.  
 
Friends of Art succeeded at attracting important gifts. Adelaide Pearson, a ceramicist and educator from Blue Hill, Maine, was determined to bring to Maine the art and cultural opportunities that were available in urban centers. She donated hundreds of ceramics she collected on her travels across the United States and around the globe. Other collectors  donated gifts of Asian and Mesoamerican art. The strategic emphasis, however, was always on American art, and early on, the museum’s leaders committed to championing practicing American artists.  
 
Friends of Art devoted similar energy to establishing the museum as a community resource. Carolyn Muzzy, one of its members, led the effort to bring the museum to schoolchildren across Central Maine. She recruited seven volunteer docents who offered both museum tours and classroom art demonstrations, extending the Colby Museum’s mission as a teaching museum. Lectures for interested adults also built a community for art.  
 
The friendship between artist Willard Cummings and Hugh J. Gourley III, who became the Colby Museum’s first full-time director in 1966, nurtured a relationship with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a Maine-based school founded by artists, for artists. The close relationship between the institutions would lead to exhibitions at the museum under Gourley’s tenure, and to the acquisition of art made by Skowhegan faculty and resident artists, a practice that carries into the present. Thanks to these networks, the museum established relationships with such renowned artists as Ashley Bryan, Louise Nevelson, David Driskell, Lois Dodd, Bernard Langlais, Yvonne Jacquette, and Alex Katz, among many others.

In 1973, John Marin Jr., Norma B. Marin, and their daughter Lisa gave the museum a transformative gift—the John Marin Collection—making the Colby Museum second only to the National Gallery of Art in its holdings of the artist’s works. The gift coincided with the opening of the first of five (to date) museum expansions. The Jetté Galleries were designed by E. Verner Johnson and Associates and offered dedicated space for changing exhibitions. The gift of more than thirty early works by sculptor Louise Nevelson, who had grown up in Rockland, Maine, also marked this moment. Nevelson had been honored in 1971 by the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, an occasion that led her to reestablish her relationship with the state and to become familiar with Director Gourley and the Colby Museum.  
 
Gourley directed the museum for thirty-six years, from 1966 to 2002, under the leadership of college presidents Robert E. Lee Strider (1960–79), William R. Cotter (1979–2000), and William B. Adams (2000–2014). Gourley’s long tenure and deep relationships with artists, dealers, and collectors widened the museum’s network and significantly shaped the collection. Gourley had a very small staff, but benefited from the support of a growing number of committed museum volunteers (Peggy Watson, Hilary Ervin, Alice Fitzgerald, Jean Bird, and Paula Lunder, among others) and the active support of Friends of Art. His willingness to mentor and trust people opened opportunities for students, and Colby undergraduates soon became deeply involved in ambitious research, collections management, and exhibition making. Then and now, those early experiences have inspired Colby students to pursue careers as art curators, administrators, and dealers.

In 1991 the museum’s galleries expanded by one-third with the addition of the Davis Gallery. Designed by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott of Boston, the project also increased on-site storage facilities to support the collecting and care of art. The following year, Carolyn Muzzy anonymously gave the museum an endowment for its directorship, expressing, “My dedication to the museum is based on my conviction that it is well on its way to becoming the very best museum of its kind in the country.” (Muzzy allowed for the director’s role to be named after her death.) Audiences were growing as well. When the Payson Collection, shared with the Portland Museum of Art, was displayed in 1992, approximately seven thousand schoolchildren from as far away as Machias, Maine, came to the Colby Museum to see it.  
 
In the early 1990s, thanks to being introduced to Colby and its museum by Linda Cotter, wife of President Cotter, the collector Paul J. Schupf—friend of artists Alex Katz and Richard Serra, among many others—began to make gifts of art to the museum.  
 
In 1992, Alex Katz gave the museum 414 works of his own, along with his archives, which immediately established the Colby Museum as a destination for Katz scholars and enthusiasts. In 1996 the museum inaugurated the Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz to house this collection. Since then, this unprecedented gift has grown through gifts from Katz and his collectors, as well as through strategic purchases, to number approximately nine hundred works. Katz’s long-standing relationship with the Colby Museum and Maine has led him and the foundation he established to donate more than five hundred artworks by other artists, in many media, to the Colby Museum. This extraordinary generosity has been instrumental in solidifying the museum’s reputation.  
 
In 1993, the museum’s growing collection and acquisition endowments led President Cotter to reorganize its governance. He established the Museum Board of Governors and named Gabriella De Ferrari, a writer, art historian, and Colby parent, as its first chair. Friends of Art remained a separate group, continuing to raise visibility and support for the museum. In 1995 the museum was granted accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums, giving it greater professional standing and facilitating partnerships. De Ferrari’s close relationships with many artists, including Sol LeWitt, and Director Gourley’s continued active presence in the art world led to several groundbreaking acquisitions.  
 
Alan Mirken ’51 became chair of the Museum Board of Governors in 1997. A New York publishing company executive and a member of what is now known as Colby’s Board of Visitors, Mirken was devoted to the museum and its educational mission. Within a decade, he began to manifest this passion through capital gifts for facility projects and education endowments.  
 
Around this time, Peter and Paula Lunder made a challenge gift to inspire others to address the long list of museum needs, including gallery space, funds for collection conservation, funds to support traveling exhibitions, museum staff, and a dedicated, endowed position for a curator of American art. In 1999, a new wing opened for the exhibition of Colby’s growing collection of American art. The Lunder Wing, designed by architect Frederick Fisher, comprises eleven galleries and 9,000 square feet of exhibition space for the Colby Museum’s stellar collection.

One of Gabriella De Ferrari’s aims for the museum was to elevate its visibility nationally and internationally through the commissioning of major works of public art on Colby’s campus by important sculptors. In 2000, she partnered with museum director Hugh Gourley to commission a monumental sculpture by renowned artist Richard Serra with resources from the Jere Abbott Acquisitions Fund. Installed in the Paul J. Schupf Sculpture Court, 4-5-6 is a three-part Corten steel sculpture that dramatically anchors the courtyard and main entrance to the museum.  
 
In 2002, the Museum Board of Governors approved the acquisition of Sol LeWitt’s concrete-block sculpture Seven Walls. The artist had first visited the Colby Museum in 1996 for the opening of his exhibition Sol LeWitt Drawings, where he unveiled his Wall Drawing #803, a gift to the collection. Following the completion of the wall drawing, De Ferrari proposed to Gourley the idea of an outdoor sculpture by the artist. Gourley approached LeWitt, and LeWitt agreed, offering Seven Walls to the museum as a second gift of art. The cost of realizing the work was funded through the Jere Abbott Acquisition Fund. Seven Walls remained on view until 2024, when it was deinstalled as a result of irreparable weather-related damage to the concrete over the years. A conceptual artwork, it remains in the museum’s collection, available to be physically realized again in the future. It is currently one of fifteen works by LeWitt in the collection.  
 
Sharon Corwin was appointed the inaugural Lunder Curator of American Art in 2003 after a brief tenure by Daniel Rosenfeld. In 2006 she became director and chief curator, and led the museum for thirteen years, until 2020. With a growing and capable staff and support from the college and the museum’s donors and board, she focused on embracing the Colby Museum’s mission as an educational and research resource and a destination for contemporary art and American art. Thanks to the advocacy and generosity of Dr. William Tsiaras ’68, Nancy Meyer Tsiaras ’68, and Norma B. Marin, the museum began to develop a photography collection, eventually receiving transformative gifts from the Tsiaras family and Marin. The Colby Museum also became the sole repository of the complete print works of Terry Winters thanks to an initial partial gift from the artist and Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in 2004 and continued gifts from Winters. In 2006, Paul J. Schupf promised his collection of more than 150 works on paper and one sculpture by Richard Serra. Upon Schupf’s passing in 2020, his estate gift made the Colby Museum one of the largest repositories of Serra’s works on paper. In 2010, artist Lois Dodd gave the museum dozens of her works.  
 
Goals during this period included strengthening the museum’s role as a cross-disciplinary teaching resource for faculty and students across Colby College (beyond the Art department) and sustaining its robust programs for K–12 students in Maine. Starting in 2006, museum governors Alan Mirken and John Shore led the way with endowment gifts for the museum’s educational work, which supported new staff positions as well as programs. In 2007, Lauren Lessing became the museum’s first Mirken Curator of Education, dramatically expanding and deepening relationships with faculty. Alan Mirken and the Mirken family eventually established additional endowments to permanently support education and community engagement positions and programs, as well as the museum’s publications.  
 
The museum’s growing commitment to education and community and the leadership of college president William B. Adams inspired Peter and Paula Lunder, longtime benefactors of the museum, to promise their outstanding art collection to the Colby Museum in 2007. The gift included more than five hundred works of art, the majority of them by nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century American artists, as well as over four dozen exceptional examples of ritual and mortuary art that make up the Lunder-Colville Chinese Art Collection.  
 
In 2008, Sharon Corwin appointed Elizabeth Finch as the next Lunder Curator for American Art.  
 
In 2009, the college approved the designs for the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion, named in recognition of a gift from the Harold Alfond Foundation and the partnership and friendship between Harold Alfond and Peter Lunder. Also in 2009 the museum marked its fiftieth anniversary by presenting the exhibition Art at Colby: Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Colby College Museum of Art.

In 2010, following a major bequest of Helen Langlais’s estate to Colby College, the museum acquired 175 works by Bernard Langlais and donated other works to museums, libraries, and other public institutions, creating the Langlais Art Trail. The Kohler Foundation partnered with the museum and the Georges River Land Trust on a massive conservation effort to safeguard Langlais’s extant outdoor sculptures located at the Langlais Sculpture Preserve. A major exhibition at the Colby Museum in 2014 celebrated Langlais’s legacy.   
 
In 2013 the Colby Museum inaugurated the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion and unveiled the gift of the Lunder Collection. These milestones garnered local, national, and international attention, positioning Colby as one of the nation’s leading college art museums. Two driving goals of the 2013–17 strategic plan, developed under the leadership of director Sharon Corwin, governor Barbara Alfond, and President Adams, were to amplify the museum’s role as a platform for learning within the liberal arts model at Colby and to elevate the museum’s profile.  
 
Minimalist in form and flanked by a colorful three-story wall drawing by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, the Alfond-Lunder glassed pavilion reflects those aspirations. Designed by architect Frederick Fisher and Partners, the pavilion includes a spacious lobby and a terrace, exhibition galleries, museum classrooms, collection storage, and staff offices. The upper floor houses the college’s studios for photography and foundation classes, reinforcing the historic connection between the museum and the Art department.  
 
Concurrent with these developments and recognizing an opportunity for collective impact, in 2013 the college and the Colby Museum partnered with the Maine Arts Commission, the city of Waterville, and other partners to begin making Waterville a cultural leader in the region—efforts that informed other arts-based city revitalization projects nationwide.  
 
In 2015 and 2017 the Linde Family Foundation endowed positions and programs in academic engagement and museum outreach (including K–12), enabling the museum to succeed in meaningfully reaching Colby students and the local community. These staff positions and the opening of the Landay Teaching Gallery exponentially increased the use of the collection for transdisciplinary teaching across the college and beyond.

Starting in 2016, the museum bolstered its exhibition programs and scholarships thanks in part to new endowments in honor of former chair of the Museum Board of Governors Barbara Alfond and a Mirken Family Foundation endowment for museum publications. That year, the museum presented Whistler and the World: The Lunder Collection of James McNeill Whistler at the Colby College Museum of Art with a major accompanying catalogue. A year later, the Colby Museum co-organized with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Marsden Hartley in Maine, and co-organized with the Asia Society No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki, the first US retrospective of this pioneering Chinese French artist. Immediately after its launch, the Lunder Institute for American Art began supporting the development of new scholarship and artistic projects as well as organizing convenings that significantly amplified the museum’s reputation and impact. Colby Museum exhibitions and publications began to publicly share the research and creative practices of Lunder Institute fellows and its program as a whole, including international projects by Theaster Gates, an edition of Phong Bui’s ongoing exhibition series Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, and a museum installation by Torkwase Dyson, among others.  
 
In 2017, three years after David A. Greene became Colby College’s twentieth president, Colby College launched its Dare Northward Campaign. Its priorities included making the liberal arts more deeply engaged with and connected to the broader world and its complexities, Waterville’s revitalization, and investment in distinctive assets in the arts. With a donation from Peter and Paula Lunder and the additional gift of a significant number of works of art, the Colby Museum launched its Lunder Institute for American Art and named American art curator and scholar Lee Glazer as its founding director. This major new initiative aimed to build a distinctive and global research center for American art at the Colby Museum. US inaugural poet laureate and Maine resident Richard Blanco developed the Lunder Institute’s first artist residency; soon after, multidisciplinary artist Theaster Gates received an inaugural three-year appointment as a visiting artist. Art historian Daisy Desrosiers and Colby Art professor Tanya Sheehan were also appointed to artistic and scholarly roles.  
 
In 2019, Wíwənikan…the beauty we carry opened to the public in the Jetté Gallery, featuring contemporary art by First Nations artists of what are now Maine and Maritime Canada and the first-ever presentation of contemporary Wabanaki art in an art museum. This path-setting project and its related publication were first steps in addressing a major gap in the museum’s own program and in American art history. Wíwənikan generated tremendous academic and public interest, forged lasting relationships with Wabanaki people, and informed multiple subsequent projects, acquisitions, and initiatives at Colby and across the field. That year, Passamaquoddy artist Jeremy Frey received the William Cummings Award for Artistic Excellence at the Museum Summer Luncheon.

In March 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic crisis shuttered institutions across the world. Soon after the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization, the Colby Museum began to address the demands of the moment, including a national reckoning with the history of racism in the United States. Building on commitments made in 2016 to address the diversity of staff, governors, collections, and programs as a core principle of excellence, the museum’s staff and board, the latter under the leadership of Karen Linde Packman, came together to reflect on and further advance those goals.

That fall, under the leadership of President David A. Greene and its Board of Trustees, Colby College reopened its campus to students, staff, and faculty. It was one of the few institutions of higher education to do so at that point, prioritizing the value of learning in person and in community. The Colby Museum resumed its in-person academic programs at the same time that it continued offering virtual public engagement events, school programs, and Lunder Institute fellowships. It also continued its exhibition, publication, and acquisition initiatives, though under a drastically different operational, social, economic, and health environment than previously. Jacqueline Terrassa began her tenure as director of the Colby Museum in October 2020.

Co-organized with the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, in January 2021 the Colby Museum opened the exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1941–1960 in its Jetté Gallery, and published an award-winning catalogue to accompany it. After a limited public presentation at Colby, the show traveled to the Parrish Museum in Water Mill, New York, and then the Columbus Museum of Art. Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine immediately followed. Originated by the Colby Museum, the exhibition and catalogue garnered national and international attention and traveled to three additional museums between 2021 and 2024. In 2022–23, Alex Katz: Theater and Dance showcased for the first time Katz’s collaborative work for the stage in an exhibition and publication. In partnership with the American Federation of Arts, a version of the exhibition is traveling across the United States through 2027. Along with others across the museum and external partners, these complex projects took shape under the leadership of Barbara Alfond Director of Exhibitions and Publications Megan Carey, head curator Elizabeth Finch, and deputy director for planning and operations Julianne Gilland.

Concurrent with these major milestones, between 2021 and 2023 three new art centers opened in downtown Waterville and on campus, and Colby College became the steward of Allan and Benner Islands on Maine’s coast through a partial purchase and partial gift from the foundations that had previously stewarded them: the Wyeth Foundation and the Up East Foundation. The Greene Block + Studios opened on Waterville’s Main Street in May 2021, for the first time providing the Lunder Institute with physical spaces to convene and host artists in residence. The Paul J. Schupf Art Center opened in December 2022, and is home to the Colby Museum’s new Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art, representing a 25 percent increase in exhibition space and an equivalent increase in creative engagement programs with and for local city and Colby community members. Conceived as a cultural living room, free and open to all, the Paul J. Schupf Art Center welcomed more than one hundred thousand people in its first year for concerts, movies, exhibitions, art making, events, and drop-in visits. The senior show by Colby’s graduating class of art students was presented for the first time in the Schmaltz Gallery in 2024. In fall 2023, Colby College opened its state-of-the-art Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, dramatically expanding opportunities for arts collaboration across campus, including with the Colby Museum and the Lunder Institute. The museum began hosting annual summer K–12 educator seminars and artist convenings at Allen and Benner Islands.

All of these developments significantly increased the physical and programmatic footprint of the Colby Museum, establishing it as a highly dynamic, porous, multi-site institution.

The exhibition projects and community initiatives of the early 2020s launched a more vigorous phase of the Colby Museum as an originator of projects of national and international importance and a cultural and educational resource for Colby and Maine.  
 
In May 2023 the Colby Museum launched its 2023–28 strategic plan, with board chair Hilary Barnes Hoopes and museum director Jacqueline Terrassa leading the planning committee. The plan focuses on a mission of access, experimentation, dialogue, and learning, with a vision to bring a diversity of people together to explore the complexity of the American experience.  
 
Imagining an Archipelago: Art from Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and their Diasporas, a project that Jessamine Batario, Linde Family Foundation Curator of Academic Engagement, began to develop in 2022, is informed by this strategic framework. With support from major grants from the Teiger Foundation and the Warhol Foundation and developed through academic engagement and collaboration, this traveling exhibition is organized by the Colby Museum and debuts in Waterville in summer 2026.  
 
Erica Wall assumed directorship of the Lunder Institute in summer 2022. A year later, and building on its established fellowship program, she launched three new initiatives: the Summer Think Tank; Lunder Institute @, which brings the museum into communities across the United States and, soon, internationally; and an audio archive of conversations and individual histories. These initiatives are engaging the field in active conversations about the state of American art.  
 
The fourteen-month-long collection installation Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village opened in the Lunder Wing in May 2023 and manifested the Colby Museum as a forum. Drawing from the museum’s stellar holdings of art by Taos Society of Artists (TSA) members in the Lunder Collection, the exhibition centered Pueblo perspectives on the context that informed the social and cultural landscape of Taos from 1915 to 1927, when the TSA, a group of Anglo-American painters, was active. Painted emphasized the sovereignty of Pueblo peoples. Research conducted by Lunder Institute fellows and Colby student assistants from 2020 to 2022 informed its early direction and led to subsequent Lunder Institute fellowships for Native artists and culture bearers. Painted offered a new curatorial model to address historical American art in relation to the allied field of Native American art. Activated in myriad ways through curriculum development, public programming, convenings, fellowships, and performances, it demonstrated what is possible when the Colby Museum brings together in dialogue all of its communities and audiences. In advance of and as a result of the project, the Colby Museum acquired a total of thirteen new works of art, several of which were commissions, by living Pueblo, Diné, and Wabanaki artists, fundamentally changing the stories its collection can tell.  
 
The project offered the museum a conceptual and practical opportunity to fully reinstall its Lunder Wing for the first time in a decade. Drawing from years of collaboration with faculty, students, scholars, artists, and community members, the flexible framework for the series Some American Stories facilitates interconnected and multivocal narratives delving into history, the environment, art, spirituality, and economics. The reinstallation features a new commission by artist Nari Ward and a gallery dedicated to works on paper.  
 
As it looks to the future, the Colby Museum’s mission is its bedrock. It is advised and supported by the Museum Board of Governors and Friends of Art; informed by its constituencies, including students and faculty; enlivened through a partnership with Waterville public schools and teachers statewide; and strengthened through expansive collaborations with artists and scholars and with local, regional, national, and international partners.