Colby Museum's Summer Luncheon Celebrates Community

Bob Keyes, Colby News, July 18, 2023

“Your presence here matters,” said Hoopes ’89, chair of the Museum Board of Governors. “By being here, you demonstrate that what this museum makes happen inside and outside of its buildings matters. The impact of this museum and the Lunder Institute for American Art is possible because of each of you in this tent.”

An annual tradition since the museum’s opening in 1959, the Summer Luncheon brings together an always-interesting mix of artists, educators, curators, collectors, volunteers, and dedicated museum friends. It has become, in the words of one artist who attended the event July 8, “the great gathering of the art tribe in Maine. In three hours, you get to see everybody you have been thinking about or hoping to see all at one time. It’s a chance to rekindle all those connections.”

Jacqueline Terrassa, the Carolyn Muzzy Director of the Colby College Museum of Art, spoke about the lasting importance of those connections and the relationship between people and place. At the Colby Museum, she said, “creativity and community have led the way from the beginning. … When we are in connection, that is when new ideas emerge and that is when new possibilities emerge.”

With its extraordinary collection of American art and the emergence of the Lunder Institute for American Art as a place for scholarship, creativity, and artistic ingenuity, the Colby Museum is in a unique position to promote, explore, and shape “a new understanding of the American experience, American identity, and American expression, which is not limited to the notion of a United States, but is really an active question: What is America, who makes America, and how does art get expressed and created in response to where we are, who we are, and where we come from? That is what we are trying to do at the Colby Museum.”