"Alive and Kicking" Packs a Playful Punch at the Colby College Museum of Art
Maddie Klett, Boston Art Review, October 22, 2024
Gladys Nilsson’s Rounding Rosie’s Ring: Dance, You Fools, Dance (2024) bisects the broad, trapezoidal gallery of Colby College Museum of Art’s downtown outpost in the small post-industrial town of Waterville, Maine. Encircling all four sides of a thirty-two-foot-long freestanding wall in the center of the gallery, the painting is the eighty-four-year-old artist’s largest work to date. Nilsson renders sinewy figures in pastel hues, pirouetting hand-in-hand as they enact the titular “Ring Around the Rosie” nursery rhyme and its accompanying jig. It is one of three works featured in the exhibition “Alive and Kicking,” alongside a newly commissioned mural by Catalina Schliebener Muñoz and an installation from the 1980s by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt.
“Alive and Kicking” is on view at the Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center. Opened in December 2022, the building, which is adjacent to the town hall, also houses a cinema, a performing arts venue, and studio and exhibition space operated by Waterville Creates. The complex is down the street from the headquarters of the Lunder Institute, a branch of the college’s museum devoted to research on American art.
Colby and its alumni are certainly endeavoring to make Waterville the cultural center of Maine. And within this milieu, the visual art program downtown is an access point for Mainers who have perhaps never stepped onto the museum on campus. A sense of humor and playfulness was therefore important to impart with “Alive and Kicking”—and the idiomatic title certainly doesn’t hurt. The exhibition welcomes folks with a swatch of candy-colored elements; both Nilsson and Schliebener Muñoz’s contributions are chromatically liberal, and Lanigan-Schmidt’s installation of 125 shining aluminum lasagna pans offers a material both recognizable and opulent. Viewers ultimately step into what appears to be a playhouse, where, upon further examination, individual artworks touch on the tribulations of navigating identity, relationships, and whatever else life throws at us.