JAUNTING TO WATERVILLE
We know a few folks who’ve worked at or graduated from Colby College, but had never visited the campus. It’s located about ten minutes from downtown Waterville on Mayflower Hill—a pleasant spread of green dotted with red brick buildings and athletic fields. A guard at another museum (which will remain nameless) told us that the best art museum in Maine, “its Louvre,” is the art museum here, which prompted this visit.
Founded in 1959 and housed in a contemporary building with two levels and five wings, the Colby College Museum of Art has a wonderful collection focusing primarily on American art from all periods with some pieces from Europe and Asia.
The entrance hall includes some fanciful shrub seating while the lobby area is airy and light-filled with splashy red chairs. The young woman at the reception desk was most welcoming and helpful.
We spent time looking at some of the thousands of photographs from Ebony magazine in Theaster Gates: Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories and then marveled at the intricately worked baskets and the colorful paintings which are part of an exhibit of arts and crafts of the First Nations People of Maine and Maritime Canada.
The exhibit is titled, Wiwenikan: the beauty we carry, and includes works from the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Abenaki that collectively are known as the Wabanaki.
I also particularly enjoyed some of the contemporary paintings and sculpture in the permanent collection including two works by Maya Lin, with whom we spent some time in our San Francisco years. Lin’s works are small in scale, one made all of straight pins, and better appreciated up close in person.
This is a first-rate museum and well worth a visit. For us, it was only about an hour and half’s drive from the coast. Admission is free to both the campus community and the general public.
To cap off our tour, on the recommendation of the museum staff, we drove downtown, easily found a place to park in a large free lot, and then had a most satisfying lunch at the Last Unicorn Restaurant.
The Chief Penguin and I both selected one of the lunch-sized chicken entrees which came with a small green salad and basmati rice. Salads and sandwiches were also on offer with seating inside or outdoors at umbrella tables.
Note: Text ©JWFarrington and all photos by JWFarrington. Header photo is a birch and cedar bark canoe in the Colby museum.
