As a kickoff to its pilot chef in residence program, the Lunder Institute for American Art is partnering with DavisConnects to present a webinar for Colby students and others interested in careers in the culinary arts.

On Thursday, April 6, 7–8 pm, spend an hour with four accomplished chefs to learn more about what it takes to pursue a career as a chef or restauranteur. This virtual event will include introductory remarks by each panelist, opening questions about each chef’s individual path, and an opportunity for attendees to ask questions.

The four panelists are:

Jordan Benissan, chef and owner of Mé Lon Togo, a West African themed restaurant in Rockland, Maine.

Dave Mallari, chef and owner of the Sinful Kitchen in Portland, Maine, and a former Chopped contestant.

Louis Pickens, chef and owner of Black Betty’s Bistro, a catering kitchen and restaurant based in Portland, Maine.

Ben Wexler-Waite, a Colby College alumnus and chef-owner of Il Leone, a seasonal, outdoor pizzeria located on Peaks Island, Maine.

Join live via Zoom.

The Lunder Institute for American art is excited to announce a pilot chef in residence program. Acknowledging the impact of the culinary arts within the art world, and Colby’s unique position, both figuratively and literally, to the superior culinary community that exists in Maine and, specifically, Portland, the Lunder Institute seeks to create opportunities to engage with culinary artists around food, it’s making, its origin, its impact, and its influence.

The Lunder Institute is committed to acknowledging, exploring, and representing the broadest understanding and reflection of American art. This unique opportunity allows our campus community, as well as the wider Waterville community, to understand the greater relationship between food and its culture in American art, and how that relationship impacts the ways we understand our American history, our history with food, our history with the land, and the history between the cultures and people of America.

­Starting in April, the Lunder Institute will invite three culinary artists—Jordan Benissan, chef and owner of Mé Lon Togo, a West African themed restaurant in Rockland, Maine, Dave Mallari, chef and owner of the Sinful Kitchen in Portland, Maine, and a former Chopped contestant, and Louis Pickens, chef and owner of Black Betty’s Bistro, a catering kitchen and restaurant based in Portland, Maine—to present a supper club featuring dishes inspired by a work from the Colby College Museum of Art’s American art collection. Each artist will spend a week in residence in preparation for an evening for 12 strangers to share in food, conversation, and community.

The Lunder Institute will partner with DavisConnects, Colby’s career center, to offer more discussion around pathways within the food industry and the culinary arts and will offer a panel, on April 6 to introduce the three Lunder Institute chefs in residence to the community and to learn more about their practice, their career paths, and their work.

The Lunder Institute for American art will invite these three chefs back during the summer to offer supper clubs and participate in the Lunder Institute for American Art Summer Think Tank: ____________ American 2023. During this time, the chefs will interact with thought partners across disciplines, within the arts and beyond, to further the discourse around the relationship between the culinary arts, the history of food, land history and ownership, farming, and how that has impacted and influenced art practice for generations.

Image (Left to Right): Dave Mallari, Jordan Benissan, and Louis Pickens. 

On March 16, 2023, multidisciplinary artist Genevieve Gaignard, a spring 2023 resident fellow at the Lunder Institute for American Art, and Jon Gray, multidisciplinary curator and co-founder of the culinary collective Ghetto Gastro joined Lunder Institute director Erica Wall for a conversation about their artistic practice.

As longtime friends and colleagues, Gaignard and Gray each work in their own ways to “Change the Conversation,” seeking to shift social and historical narratives around such subjects as race and identity through innovation across mediums.

Jon Gray is a curator, entrepreneur, and co-founder of the Bronx-born culinary collective Ghetto Gastro. Gray aims to shift social narratives, blending a background in fashion to create immersive experiences, product design, and unique storytelling. From Co-Op City, Gray’s mother and grandmother taught him about the arts and challenged him to innovate as a way of life. When a rebellious adolescence almost put him behind bars, Gray used the experience to imagine a greater vision for himself. Inventorying his passions and pastimes, he made Bronx-driven gastro-diplomacy his career and mission.

In 2019, Gray delivered his noteworthy TED Talk, “The next big thing is coming from the Bronx, again.” Gray is a Civic Practice Partnership Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2021, he served as guest curator at the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, where “Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects” featured an Afrofuturist theme. He is an avid art collector and people connector.

Genevieve Gaignard (b.1981) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses self-portraiture, collage, sculpture, and installation to elicit dialogue around the intricacies of race, beauty, and cultural identity. Referencing regional and historical events, as well as a personal archive as a biracial woman, Gaignard creates environments that teeter between symbolic and autobiographical realms. She cleverly interrogates notions of skin privilege while challenging viewers to look more closely at racial realities. The ensemble of her work shatters viewers’ perceptions of culture and race, compelling them to piece together novel ways of perceiving the world and their place in it.

Since 2019, Gaignard has debuted six solo exhibitions and participated in numerous countrywide group shows. Last year, she presented two solo exhibitions: To Whom it May Concern with Rowan University Art Gallery and Strange Fruit with Vielmetter Los Angeles. Gaignard’s work has appeared at: The Broad, CA; The Nerman Museum, KS; Stephen Friedman Gallery, UK; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Getty Center, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MA; and Prospect.4, LA. In July 2022, Gaignard partnered with Orange Barrel Media on Look At Them Look At Us: a permanent, site-specific public art installation in downtown Atlanta. Gaignard received her bachelor of fine arts in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her master of fine arts in photography from Yale University. She splits her time between her hometown of Orange, Mass, and Los Angeles.

The Lunder Institute for American Art and Buck Lab are seeking 2 research interns to work closely with Lunder Institute Senior Fellow Oscar Santillán via zoom/email for the 2023 spring semester.

His practice emerges from the notion of “Antimundo,” which he understands as “a way of identifying and generating realities that do not fit in the world.” For this purpose, he has resorted to forms of knowledge production and imaginaries overlooked by mainstream Western thinking, such as cybernetics, science fiction, ancient cosmologies, a more inclusive history of science and plant intelligence.

Interns will support Oscar Santillán, who will be working remotely, with his research and support him to develop and pilot a project that conjures Little Fort Island, in Downeast Maine as a sentient entity and imagines the possibilities of communication and expression among biological, technological, human and animal realms. Interns will be paid on an hourly basis.

There are 2 internships available:

The ideal candidates for these internships will have a programming foundation, at least to use this project as a learning experience by expanding current programming knowledge and understanding of the connection between ecology and emerging technologies. The ability to work independently and meet deadlines is critical.

Research Intern Position 1: ES Qualifications

• Find ways to map out and organize the available real-time environmental data
• Write a short report on the ecology around the region where Little Fort Island is located
• Get in touch with initiatives in the US and Canada advocating for the Rights of Nature in search for a potential collaboration conducive to explore if Little Fort Island could be, eventually, granted personhood
• Collaborate with CS intern in some additional tasks such as integrating the environmental data with the neural networks
• Post/upload research and progress on an IVM website (which will be launched soon)

Research Intern Position 2: CS Qualifications

• Create a coherent dataset mixing texts by artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson
• Find interesting ways of activating this dataset by means of GPT3 or other language models.
• Find the way in which the voices of both artists can be integrated (i.e. by means of VALL-E and/or other software)
• Put together the whole pipeline (real-time environmental data > AI > real-time audio)

General Skills: Basic programming, research, database entry, proofing, and copy editing, Adobe Premiere, etc; expected to meet with the Institute fellows via Zoom; to participate in one or two scheduled events related to their April visit to the Colby campus; and to check in with their LIAA and Buck Lab supervisor and Oscar Santillán on a weekly basis via email and through monthly in-person meetings. 

Students can apply through Workday, where more information about the responsibilities of these roles can be found, and/or contact [email protected] with questions. Applicants are encouraged to apply by Friday, February 24th. Please include a cover letter, resume and names of 1 to 2 references. Decision will be made by March 1st.

Suggested Prerequisite: Jan Plan Course with Oscar Santillán. 

Image: Oscar Santillán with students in his 2023 Jan Plan course “Antimundo.”

Gaignard (b.1981) uses self-portraiture, collage, sculpture, and installation to elicit dialogue around the intricacies of race, beauty, and cultural identity. Referencing regional and historical events, as well as a personal archive as a biracial woman, Gaignard creates environments that teeter between symbolic and autobiographical realms. She cleverly interrogates notions of skin privilege while challenging viewers to look more closely at racial realities. The ensemble of her work shatters viewers’ perceptions of culture and race, compelling them to piece together novel ways of perceiving the world and their place in it.

Since 2019, Gaignard has debuted six solo exhibitions and participated in numerous countrywide group shows. Last year, she presented two solo exhibitions: To Whom it May Concern with Rowan University Art Gallery and Strange Fruit with Vielmetter Los Angeles. Gaignard’s work has appeared at: The Broad, CA; The Nerman Museum, KS; Stephen Friedman Gallery, UK; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Getty Center, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MA; and Prospect.4, LA. In July 2022, Gaignard partnered with Orange Barrel Media on Look At Them Look At Us: a permanent, site-specific public art installation in downtown Atlanta. Gaignard received her bachelor of fine arts in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her master of fine arts in photography from Yale University. She splits her time between her hometown of Orange, Mass, and Los Angeles.

Gaignard will join current residential fellows Heather Flor Cron, a queer Peruvian-American farmer, performer & transdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Tessa Greene O’Brien, a Maine-based artist and curator with a multi-faceted painting practice, and Dylan Hausthor, an artist based on the coast of Maine, who joined the Lunder Institute’s residential fellowship program during the fall 2022 semester.

Learn more about this group of artists and read their bios on our Spring 2023 Resident Fellows page.

Image: Genevieve Gaignard, photography by Charlsie Gorski.

The Lunder Institute for American Art is excited to welcome Heather Flor Cron as its newest resident fellow. Cron will take up residence in Waterville in February for a semester of community building and creative collaboration.

Established in 2021, Lunder Institute residential fellowships provide artists with spacious studios as well as opportunities for collaboration with Colby College faculty, students, and staff, the Waterville community, and the Maine arts community. This studio program, based out of the Greene Block + Studios in downtown Waterville, Maine, encompasses artists at all stages of their careers and working in a range of artistic disciplines and mediums. Resident fellows are provided with housing and a stipend, have access to Colby College campus facilities, and are in dialogue with local organizations and community members.

Cron (she/they) is a queer Peruvian-American farmer, performer & transdisciplinary artist who works with intuitive movement, dirt, installation, printmaking, fiber, social practice and food. From a young age, she frequently traveled to Peru to visit her maternal family. There, her passion for movement, food and textiles was ignited. Cron lives in Portland, Maine, which is settled on stolen and occupied territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Through performance and object making, she locates the present moment and the relationship between her two cultures. She explores the defeat and transformation of trauma through the twin powers of vulnerability and forgiveness, and how exposing pain can transcend trauma.

Cron works and organizes with Presente! Maine, a grassroots organization which works to empower displaced indigenous and afro-Latinx peoples of Maine through survival programs, community power building, cultural celebration, and transformative healing practice. There she co-lead the Food Brigade project, a food survival program and the Cuidado Colectivo Program, a youth recreation day program. Cron has been featured in a number of group exhibitions including SPACE Gallery’s Re-Site, Able Baker Contemporary’s Undercurrents curated by Veronica Perez, and Speedwell Projects Can’t Take My Eyes Off You curated by Faythe Levine.

She is also the recipient of awards and residencies such as the Kindling Fund via Space Gallery / Andy Warhol Foundation, David C. Driskell Black Seed Studio Fellowship, Speedwell Projects Residency, Studios at MASS MoCA Fellowship and the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Residency.

Cron will join our continuing residential fellows, Tessa Greene O’Brien, a Maine-based artist and curator with a multi-faceted painting practice, and Dylan Hausthor, an artist based on the coast of Maine, who joined the Lunder Institute’s residential fellowship program during the fall 2022 semester.

Learn more about this group of artists and read their bios on our Spring 2023 Resident Fellows page.

Image: Heather Flor Cron.

We are thrilled to announce that artist Paula Wilson will serve as a Lunder Institute senior fellow and will be the recipient of the 2022–23 Alfonso Ossorio Creative Production Grant.

Established in 2019 and supported by the Ossorio Foundation, the Alfonso Ossorio Creative Production Grant provides financial support to artists affiliated with the Colby Museum and its Lunder Institute to further their intellectual pursuits, research, and the creation of new artworks that expand the boundaries of American art.

Wilson (born 1975) is a mixed-media artist who enlists an extensive range of techniques to create hybrid works. Using sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock, Wilson explores perceptions of light, form, and the body in space.

Each year, the Lunder Institute supports scholarly and creative research by naming one or more scholars, curators, or artists whose work aligns with its priorities and initiatives. Chosen by invitation, senior fellows’ appointments last from nine to eighteen months. During that time, the fellows contribute to the Colby College community through academic engagement and one or more public programs related to their research or artistic practice.

“We are both excited and honored to have Paula Wilson as our Ossorio fellow this year,” said Erica Wall, director of the Lunder Institute.

“Her work is exemplary, and she is a true force. Her practice perfectly reflects the Lunder Institute’s commitment to the intersection between art making, interdisciplinary research and scholarship.”

During her fellowship, Wilson will be a featured artist in Ashley Bryan / Paula Wilson: Take the World into Your Arms, a highlight of the Colby Museum’s inaugural season in its new Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center in downtown Waterville. The exhibition pairs works by Wilson with those of Ashley Bryan (1923–2022), a celebrated teacher, author, and artist best known for having illustrated more than fifty books of poems and stories.

Though Wilson and Bryan never met, their passionate and open embrace of the world unites their multifaceted creative endeavors. Through their art, they channel the beauty and spirituality to be found in humanity and nature, using texture, color, and light to convey magical lyricism. With knowing and critical eyes, Bryan and Wilson also examine cultural history and tropes of identity and self-representation.

The exhibition, on view from February 17 through July 31, 2023, will introduce Wilson to Maine audiences and offer a new perspective on Bryan, an artist who made Maine his chosen home and who, though beloved for his illustrated books, is insufficiently recognized for his contributions as a contemporary artist.

Born in Chicago, Wilson received her bachelor of fine arts from Washington University in 1998 and her master of fine arts from Columbia University in 2005. She has served as a visiting artist at several art schools, and her growing exhibition opportunities include a two-person project with artist Nicola López at the Albuquerque Museum and the solo show, Paula Wilson: Toward the Sky’s Back Door, at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, opening July 15, 2023.

In 2007, Wilson moved from Brooklyn to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she lives with her woodworking partner and collaborator, Mike Lagg. In 2015 Wilson and Lagg, along with Warren and Joan Malkerson, cofounded Carrizozo AIR, a residency program designed to provide space and time to a range of creative practitioners. Wilson and Lagg also cofounded the arts organization MoMAZoZo, which, since 2010, has hosted weekly art activities and children’s workshops.

Wilson will visit the campus two times during the year to engage with Colby students, faculty and community members. There will also be opportunities for students to be in virtual conversation with the artist during the school year.