Everyday Devotions: Gifts from the Alex Katz Foundation and Beyond

Location

Space

Dates

A pencil and crayon drawing of the comic strip character Nancy, wearing a helmet or bonnet with a red bow, affixed to a white background. The drawing is on a piece of notebook paper and secured with clear tape and staples. Below the image, handwritten in pencil, are the words: "IF NANCY WAS A DRAWING BY LARRY RIVERS." A faint signature and year, "BRAINARD-72," are visible in the bottom right corner.

A collage of various paper clippings. Prominent elements include a yellow chick on the left, a section of a map or diagram with green, yellow, and red color blocks overlaying a drawing of a soda can, a black-and-white drawing of a cowboy with a star badge and a large hat, and a cutout of a woman's legs and feet wearing dark heels in the top right corner. The bottom of the collage features a decorative pink and white pattern.

Through their incorporation of everyday materials—from scraps of paper to photographs to fragments of fabric—the works on view reveal the medium of collage to be inherently approachable and open-ended. Whether deliberate compositions or arrived at through chance accumulations, the works demonstrate collage’s boundless creative potential.

Everyday Devotions: Gifts from the Alex Katz Foundation and Beyond is curated by Kiko Aebi, Katz Curator, and Kendall DeBoer, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition title is borrowed from Richard Deming's essay, Everyday Devotions: The Art of Joe Brainard (2008).

Artists

Alex Katz at Colby College Museum of Art

The Colby Museum is home to the largest number of works by Katz of any institution, with nearly nine hundred paintings, drawings, and prints, primarily gifted by the artist. A rotating selection is continuously on view in the Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz on the Colby campus, one of the only museum spaces in the country devoted solely to the work of a single living artist. Since 2004, Katz has also extended support to other visual artists through the Alex Katz Foundation, donating nearly five hundred outstanding artworks to the Colby Museum.

Selected Works

Sally Egbert

An abstract painting featuring a background wash of soft purples and greys. Various shapes are layered on top, including a cluster of pink, red, and purple watercolor-like shapes in the upper right. A dominant orange shape is centered within a large black irregular circle. Splatters of black and white paint, thin dark lines resembling branches, and smaller turquoise, white, and purple shapes are distributed across the composition.

John Newman

A small abstract sculpture with a light purple base and an arching superstructure of bright lime green, fuzzy, wire-like material. The green structure flares out like a fan or a feather plume and terminates in a small piece of light blue material. The sculpture sits on a white surface against a plain white background.