Colby Museum to Reopen to Public on June 4

Exhibitions feature the works of Roy Lichtenstein, Mary Cassatt, Bob Thompson

The Colby College Museum of Art will welcome members of the community to once again experience exhibitions and the permanent collection in person when it reopens its doors on June 4 to the general public. The Colby Museum will continue to follow COVID-19 safety guidelines.

Opening in early June, the Colby Museum will offer visitors a chance to see the last weekend of the groundbreaking exhibition, Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960 in person before it closes on June 6 and travels to the Parrish Art Museum in New York, then to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The exhibition has received wide acclaim and has recently been featured in Forbes and The Boston Globe, with the Globe calling the exhibition “a revelation.” 

Co-organized by the Colby Museum and the Nasher Museum of Art, the exhibition is the first major museum show to investigate the early work of one of the most celebrated American artists of the 20th century. The exhibition features loans from museum and private collections, presenting about 90 works from the artist’s fruitful formative years. Many of the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints are on public view for the first time. The virtual exhibition also includes a gallery tour and interview with the show’s curators Elizabeth Finch and Marshall Price, and will continue to be available on the Colby Museum’s website for those who cannot visit the galleries in person. Support for this exhibition and its  tour is provided by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. Additional catalogue support is provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

Visitors can also partake in the opening of two important upcoming exhibitions this summer, Inside Out: The Prints of Mary Cassatt and Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine.

Opening June 17, Inside Out: The Prints of Mary Cassatt examines Cassatt’s printmaking from the artist’s own perspective. It focuses on intersections between her prints and her personal concerns with identity and selfhood, family and child care, creativity and making. Visitors will engage closely with an artist who used printmaking to capture and make sense of the people and the spaces nearest and dearest to her. The exhibition will run through Nov. 1. 

Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine will run July 20 through January 9. As the first museum exhibition devoted to the artist in more than 20 years, it offers a rich reconsideration of a visionary African American painter. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Thompson earned critical acclaim in the late 1950s for his paintings of figurative complexity and chromatic intensity. Curated by Diana Tuite, the exhibition traces Thompson’s brief but prolific transatlantic career, examining his formal inventiveness and his engagement with universal themes of collectivity, bearing witness, struggle, and justice. This exhibition will travel to the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

More information about one of the nation’s leading college art museums, its extensive collection, as well as upcoming exhibitions, lectures, and programs and events for all ages is available on the Colby Museum website. To support the Museum’s world-class exhibitions, academic engagement opportunities for students across disciplines, and free educational programming for the wider community, support Friends of Art today.