Throughout its history, the Lunder Institute for American Art has organized a variety of special projects, events, and initiatives in partnership with other institutions and key collaborators. Learn more about some of these initiatives below:
Ghetto Gastro
In the fall of 2023, the Lunder Institute—in collaboration with multiple partners, including the Colby Arts Office, Campus Dining, Campus Life, the Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, and the Department of African American Studies—invited Ghetto Gastro, a globally recognized culinary collective, for an all-day takeover of Colby College. During their visit to campus, Ghetto Gastro engaged with students through a class visit, a panel discussion, and a campus-wide dining takeover, inspired by recipes from their Black Power Kitchen cookbook, in order to generate dialogue and community excitement about how food connects us all.
Painted Symposium
This two-day symposium was organized in conjunction with the Colby College Museum of Art’s Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village exhibition. Exhibition collaborators, artists, curators, and scholars gathered for a series of panel discussions on Native American art, American art, and art of the American West. Topics included how Native artists delve into historical collections to assert visual sovereignty, how to activate museum collections in new and reparative ways, collaborations between institutions and Native communities, and more.
Chefs in Residence
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 created a pilot Chefs in Residence program to create opportunities to engage with culinary artists around food, it’s making, its origin, its impact, and its influence. In its inaugural season, the Lunder Institute invited three culinary artists to each present a supper club featuring dishes inspired by a work from the Colby College Museum of Art’s American art collection. Each artist spent a week in residence in preparation for an evening for 12 strangers to share in food, conversation, and community.
Elm City Small Press Fest
In 2021, the Lunder Institute was a cosponsor of the inaugural Elm City Small Press Fest, a community event that focuses on independent publishing in the Maine region. The event highlights contemporary print and publishing culture while activating conversations around creative labor and commerce as viable artistic practices. The goal of the fest is to inform attendees of contemporary creative publishing while stimulating and promoting creative economies in the area.
What Is Missing?
Designed by Maya Lin as her “last memorial,” is an interactive project that combines in-depth research on ecological history with personal memories contributed by individuals, making for a truly interdisciplinary and participatory work of art. What Is Missing? is a wake-up call and a call to action, showing us how to reimagine our relationship to the natural world in ways that balance our needs with those of the planet.
Research Symposium: Art by African Americans
In the spring of 2020, The Lunder Institute presented a livestream of presentations by its inaugural cohort of research fellows and invited speakers. Fellows shared their research on selected artworks at the Colby Museum, including works on loan from the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection, connecting them to important questions in the field regarding African American artists. A roundtable featuring leading academics and curators commented on the current state and parameters of African American art history and reflected on how and why art by African Americans has been distinguished from the broader field of American art.
Teaching with Primary Sources: Innovative Approaches to Archives
Organized in partnership with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, this program supported early-career academics committed to teaching the history of American art with archives and developing innovative models to share with colleagues in the field. Drawing on the unique resources of each venue, this multi-year engagement aimed to build lasting relationships among the participants, foster professional collaborations, and allow time for participants to test new pedagogical models.
Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies
Founded in 2010 and comprising the Art Institute of Chicago, the Colby College Museum of Art, the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies is dedicated to nurturing, producing, and disseminating original scholarship and critical analysis of James McNeill Whistler and his international artistic circles. The Consortium fosters collaboration and provides support across institutions with an interest in Whistler and his coevals.
Black Artists Retreat
Black Artists Retreat (BAR), founded by Theaster Gates in 2013, is an annual artist-led initiative guided by the tenets of fellowship, rejuvenation, and intellectual rigor and committed to providing a platform through which Black artists can collectively wield transformative influence and shift the traditional balance of power within museums and the academy. The Lunder institute was a sponsor of Black Artists Retreat 2019, hosted by the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Generous grants from the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported post-BAR convenings in Maine (November 2019) and at the American Academy in Rome (January 2020), fostering ongoing creative research by Gates and key collaborators.
Occupy Colby
In 2019, the Lunder Institute worked on a series of exhibitions and programs on the topic of climate change, in partnership with the Colby Museum, the Environmental Humanities Faculty Seminar, the Center for Arts and Humanities, the Environmental Studies Program, and the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment. Leveraging Colby’s leadership in cross-disciplinary approaches to environmental study and stewardship, the Lunder Institute hosted visiting artists and fellows and supported convenings, publications, and new works of art to address urgent environmental issues. Projects included the Colby Museum exhibition organized by Lunder Institute Fellow Phong Bui, Occupy Colby: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, Year 2, and The River Rail: Occupy Colby, a special edition of The Brooklyn Rail co-published by the Lunder Institute and the Colby Museum.
Maine Makers’ Map
In keeping with its goals of promoting inquiry, expertise, and exploration in the field of American art, the Lunder Institute worked in 2019 to develop a tool to facilitate networking between its visiting artists and highly skilled Maine craftspeople. The Maine Makers’ Map is an interactive map that identifies and locates makers and craftspeople—woodworkers, metalworkers, potters, glassblowers, production studios, and the like—across the state, providing an online network through which visiting and local artists can find Maine-based material experts, builders, and workshops. Please note: New additions are no longer being made to the Maine Maker’s Map.
