Essay by Ruth E. Fine. Introduction by Hugh J. Gourley.

Promised to Colby College in 2007, the Lunder Collection comprises more than 500 works of art, including paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs. Special strengths of the collection include 19th- and 20th- century American art, as well as the Lunder-Colville Collection of Chinese Art and more than 300 works by James McNeill Whistler. The Lunder Collection: A Gift of Art to Colby College is a richly illustrated volume featuring more than 265 collection highlights. Conceived as the companion to the 2009 publication Art at Colby: Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Colby College Museum of Art, the catalogue includes seven essays on the collection’s major areas, The Lunder Colville-Chinese Art Collection, Art through the American Centennial, the art of James McNeill Whistler, art of the Gilded Age, art of the American West, American Modernism, and art after 1945, as well as seventeen reflections on specific works or groups of work in the collection. Selected contributors include Elizabeth Broun, Barbara Haskell, Erica Hirshler, Virginia Mecklenburg, Kenneth Myers, Martha Tedeschi, Thayer Tolles, William Truettner, and Adam Weinberg.

Produced and circulated outside the elite sphere of fine art, folk art appealed to the middle-class Americans who were eager to express their identities, interests, and social ambitions through these decorative, vernacular objects. This catalogue presents new research on the Colby College Museum of Art's important collection of paintings, sculptures, needleworks, and works on paper by self-trained artists working primarily in the eastern part of the United States during the long nineteenth century. Essays by Seth A. Thayer, Jr., and Elizabeth Finch investigate the formation, evolving interpretation, and intended uses of the American Heritage Collection of Edith Kemper Jetté and Ellerton Marcel Jetté - one of the earliest gifts to enter the Colby Museum and the basis of its folk art collection. A third essay by Tanya Sheehan explores the complex relationship between folk art, fine art, and American visual culture. More than sixty catalogue entries by scholars, curators, and Colby students identify previously unknown makers and subjects, uncover new information about the construction and original contexts of works in the collection, and enlarge our understanding of what these artworks meant for the people who made and displayed them.

Beverly Hallam is an unusually gifted and productive artist. A pioneer in the use of acrylics and airbrush, Hallam also made groundbreaking strides in monotype. She produces images that are spectacular in form, composition, and color.

A graduate of Cooper Union in New York, Whitfield Lovell has been widely exhibited worldwide. His work is in such museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Museum of American Art, and the Seattle Art Museum. Inspired by his own background, global travels and research, and large collections of found objects and photographs of African Americans, Lovell creates tableaux and full-scale, site-specific installations, melding two-dimensional charcoal drawings with the three-dimensional objects. His works reveal African American spirituality and recall the memories and the heritage that define who African Americans are.

Coming of age as an artist in the 1950s, Alex Katz set out to reinvent representational painting in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. At first, Katz struggled to find an audience, destroying hundreds of canvases. This exhibition surveys the artwork that survived from this momentous decade, one in which he first painted outdoors, innovated with collages and met Ada del Moro, his wife and muse. The author's contextualise Katz's painting, consider how he and his peers looked at one another, mined 19th-century portraiture, and borrowed from television, advertising and cinema. The result is a fascinating study of a young artist laying the groundwork for an astonishingly successful career. Fans of Katz will be astonished by the radicalism of his early work, and those being introduced to the artist will be struck by its freshness and relevance. Published in association with the Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME. AUTHOR: Diana Tuite is the Katz Curator at the Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME. 150 colour illustrations

Contains up-to-date information on travel in the state of Maine, with recommendations on lodging, restaurants, regional events, family activities, entertainment, and natural landmarks.