Welcome to the 2024-25 Colby Arts season! Spanning across downtown Waterville and Colby’s campus, this year of arts experiences also spans disciplines, genres, and modes of engagement. The artists featured here exemplify the motto of Colby Arts, “where originals take shape,” helping us forge new connections to each other and our own artistry through their creative offerings.
The year will kick off with a reading from the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, at the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts. Limón’s reading is followed by a slate of multidisciplinary performances and concerts from Colby faculty, staff, students, and guest artists. Greene Block + Studios will be host to programming that supports our local creative communities with concerts, workshops, and installations. The Paul J. Schupf Art Center’s vibrancy continues to grow since its opening in 2022 as a distinctive hub for visual and performing arts, film, and arts education. And the Colby College Museum of Art serves as a forum for experimentation, research, dialogue, and joyful connection.
Throughout the year, we will continue to witness the development of Associate Professor of English Arisa White’s Post Pardon: The Opera as we approach its staged premiere in June 2025. Artists from the creative team will be in residence with the Arts Office and Lunder Institute for American Art, deepening curricular connections to the work in development. Colby Arts will continue to support the incubation of new works and methodologies with faculty and guest artists, creating opportunities for glimpses into the creative process.
We invite you to join us as active participants this season, not only attending events, but taking advantage of the number of other ways to engage through workshops, works-in-progress showings, and participatory performances. We look forward to sitting next to new audience members at the Gordon Center, creating side-by-side in workshops at Greene Block + Studios and Schupf Arts, and finding inspiration in the galleries of the Colby College Museum of Art.
Highlighted Programs
SEPTEMBER
Beehive Collective
September 5
Miller Lawn
The Beehive Design Collective is an activist arts collective dedicated to “cross-pollinating the grassroots” by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images for use as educational and organizing tools. Join them for art, storytelling, and discussion with Colby Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
Ada Limón
September 18, 5 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and a TIME magazine woman of the year. As the poet laureate, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world.
Joel LaRue Smith
September 21, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
An unforgettable musical journey, blending the elegance of jazz with the rhythmic vibrancy of Afro-Latin influences, delivering a fusion of sophistication and soul. Smith’s music resonates with diverse audiences.
Dwayne Tomah in Residence
September 23 - 27
Dwayne Tomah, a Passamaquoddy language teacher and keeper of culture, is the recipient of a yearlong Lunder Institute for American Art fellowship to support his community-based practice. During this residency he will interface
with faculty, staff, students, and community members through academic course visits, workshops, a public panel, and more. At the conclusion of Tomah’s residency, musician Mali Obomsawin will perform at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts.
Mali Obomsawin
September 27, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Mali Obomsawin is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and a citizen of Odanak First Nation (W8banaki). She is a bassist, composer, and vocalist whose work spans from jazz and roots music to film scoring, teaching, and indie-shoegaze. Obomsawin is an international touring artist with her own projects and as an accompanist.
Please go to arts.colby.edu for the full program listing and to reserve your tickets for ticketed events.
OCTOBER
James M . Carpenter
Lecture: Steven
Weinberg ’06
Author and Artist
October 1, 5:30 pm
Greene Block + Studios
Steven Weinberg ’06 writes, illustrates, and makes art all about color! He’s written and/or illustrated 15 books for kids about everything from backpacking to Timbuktu, to all your favorite home appliances, to the horrors (and joys) of being a middle kid.
Songs From Here: Love Today
October 4, 6:30 pm
Greene Block + Studios
Songs From Here’s performing duo returns for its third season of concerts with “Love Today,” a program that celebrates love in its many forms. Soprano Sarah Tuttle and pianist Bridget Convey present a concert of songs celebrating love for friends, lovers, family, and the natural world —tranquil, tragic, and laugh-out-loud funny!
Maine Lit Fest
October 4-5
Maine Lit Fest is a month of readings, conversations, and happenings throughout the state, organized by Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. The Waterville portion, organized by the Colby Creative Writing Program and Arts Office, will focus on the written word with image, graphic novels, comics, illustration, and more. Attendees will engage with these incredible artists through workshops, readings, and discussion.
Highlighted Programs
October 4, 5 pm
A Keynote with Lynda Barry, Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher. The New York Times has described Barry as “among this country’s greatest conjoiners of words and images, known for plumbing all kinds of touchy subjects in cartoons, comic strips, and novels, both graphic and illustrated.”
October 5, 9 am - 4 pm
Workshops and Panels with Lynda Barry, Yao Xiao, Robert Gipe, and Sharon De La Cruz at Greene Block + Studios
October 5, 7:30 pm
Post Pardon Concert of Songs, Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Photography Workshop with Alun Reynold
October 10, 5 pm
Greene Block + Studios
Colby Symphony Orchestra: Brahms and Poulenc
October 19, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
The concert features two contrasting works by Johannes Brahms: his Academic Festival Overture (1880), which quotes multiple student tavern songs, and his melancholy, rich Symphony No. 4 in E Minor (1885). Pianists Steven Pane and Colby Music
faculty Yuri Funahashi will join the orchestra for a cheerful, vivacious early work by Francis Poulenc, his Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1932).
Cappella Nova Mundi: Renewals and Reincarnations
October 26, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Cappella Nova Mundi, a specialized choral ensemble based in Dover, N.H., will perform Renaissance répertoire focused particularly on Pierre de la Rue.
Lunder Institute @
October 29
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
The Lunder Institute for American Art will hold a public program to conclude its first season of Lunder Insititute @, an initiative that invites institutions to be in conversation with one another to partner to respond to the question, “What is the state of American Art?” Representatives from each partner institution, including the de Young Fine Arts Museum, the Broad Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, will convene on campus to participate in a public program that reviews the results of this collaboration.
NOVEMBER
Colby Jazz Band: Vocal Jazz
with Big Band
November 2, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
This concert will feature student vocalists singing with the Colby Jazz Ensemble, as well as many classics from the jazz big band repertoire. “Cry Me a River” by Arthur Hamilton is widely considered one of the greatest torch songs of all time. This tune will feature the collaboration of jazz vocals and big band. Thad Jones’s composition “Backbone” is a swinging blues made famous by the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra in New York City.
Portland Ballet: Dracula
November 3, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Based on the classic by Bram Stoker, audiences will see Dracula brought to life through the captivating art of ballet. Follow Jonathan Harker’s journey from his home, light, and love to Dracula’s ominous dwelling shadowed in mystery, lust, and darkness. From the foreboding theme to the evocative choreography, Nell Shipman’s premiere of this immortal tale is a must-see this Halloween season. Founded in 1980, Portland Ballet is Maine’s professional ballet company.
Clara M . Southworth Lecture: Rebecca Zorach
November 7, 5 pm
Given Auditorium, Bixler Art and Music Center
Rebecca Zorach writes, teaches, and curates exhibitions on early modern European art, contemporary activist art, and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Her books include Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago, 2005), The Passionate Triangle (Chicago, 2011), and Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago 1965–1975 (Duke, 2019). Her current work addresses art and ecology, public art, and racial justice.
Highlighted Programs
Choirs at Colby:
PLAY: Music Meets Theater
November 9, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Choruses have their origins in the Theater of Ancient Greece. A Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities theme event, the Choirs at Colby gather to celebrate the fusion of these artistic domains. This concert will feature pieces from operas, operettas, musical theater, and movie soundtracks.
Colby Wind Ensemble: The Path Ahead
November 12, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
The Colby Wind Ensemble’s fall concert will feature exciting works from a variety of styles. This program presents Dawn by Miyuko Oda, which depicts the ever-changing colors of the sky. Moving Paths by Kelijah Dunton is inspired by the challenges faced by Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment and the search for the path that leads forward.
Artist Talk with Thaddeus Radell
November 14, 4:30 pm
Room 154, Bixler Art and Music Center
Thaddeus Radell is an assistant professor of art at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. He has been a member of the Bowery Gallery in New York since 2014.
Colby Theater Company and Colby Dance Company
Performances
November 14-18
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Program A - November 15 at 7:30 pm, November 16 at 2 pm, and November 18 at 5:30 pm
Program B - November 14 at 7:30 pm, November 16 at 2 pm, and November 18 at 8:30 pm
Armenian Melodies Through the Ages with Mal Barsamian and the Maine Middle Eastern Orchestra
November 15, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Maine Middle Eastern Orchestra and the renowned oud and clarinet virtuoso Mal Barsamian have put together a beautiful program of Armenian music from the classical and folk traditions.
Elm City Small Press Fest
November 16, 11 am - 4 pm
Greene Block + Studios
The fourth annual Elm City Small Press Fest is a community event that focuses on independent publishing in the Maine region. This event highlights contemporary print and publishing culture while activating conversations around creative labor and commerce as viable artistic practices. Lunder Institute Residential Fellows will also have open studios throughout the day.
DECEMBER
Colby Symphony
Orchestra: Dvořák and Stravinsky
December 7, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Cellist Elena Ariza will solo for Antonín Dvořák’s Cello Concerto (1894), written during his final year in New York as director of the National Conservatory. The concert also includes Igor Stravinsky’s colorful depiction of a wooden puppet come to life, Petrushka, the second of his three ballets written for the Ballets Russe between 1909 and 1913.
FEBRUARY
Creative Writing
Jennifer Jahrling Forese
Writer-in-Residence
Anne Elizabeth Moore
Reading
February 13, 5 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Anne Elizabeth Moore is an awardwinning journalist, best-selling comics anthologist, and internationally lauded cultural critic who will be in residence with the Creative Writing Program for the Spring 2025 semester.
Christopher K Morgan & Artists: Native Intelligence/Innate Intelligence
February 22, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Native Intelligence/Innate Intelligence incorporates dance, Hawaiian chant & percussion, original compositions for cello, and multimedia scenic design to examine ancestry, home, and belonging. Native Intelligence/Innate Intelligence asks us each to consider who we are, where we come from, and wonder about our ways of knowing that are both inherited and learned.
Interwoven
February 28, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
This program is a celebration of contemporary music that interlaces traditional Asian instruments with Western classical string instruments, and an anthology of fantasies of Asian folktales, art, and traditions.
Highlighted Programs
MARCH
Youth Art Month
March 2025
A city-wide celebration of youth artists and arts educators with exhibitions at Greene Block + Studios and Ticonic Gallery. The exhibitions will be on view for the month of March featuring more than 1,000 pieces of work from K-12 students in central Maine. The exhibitions will open March 7.
Palaver Strings: Songbook with Vuyo Sotashe & Chris Pattishall
March 5, 7 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Vuyo Sotashe will be featured in concert with Chris Pattishall and Palaver Strings in a celebration of the rich musical and linguistic cultures of South Africa. The program will range from traditional folk songs to works by South African jazz musicians, with songs sung in Xhosa, Sepedi, and Zulu.
Brendon Wilkins Organ Trio
March 8, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Brendon Wilkins leads his organ trio for an evening of swinging jazz featuring the music made famous by Stanley Turrentine, Shirley Scott, and Jimmy Smith. Tenor saxophonist Wilkins will be joined by Chicagobased organist Henry Dickhoff and New York City-based drummer John Sturino.
Ling Ma
March 11, 5 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Ling Ma’s most recent book is Bliss Montage: Stories, which was named a National Indie Bestseller, a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Severance
Colby Symphony Orchestra: Orchestral Masterworks
March 15, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
This year’s Orchestral Masterworks concert features Giuseppi Verdi’s dramatic exploration of fate, the Overture to La forza del destino (1862). Violinist Jaewon Wee will perform Polish virtuoso Henri Wieniawski’s dazzling Romantic showpiece, his Violin Concerto No. 2 (1862), and the orchestra will present Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 2 (1897-1902).
Anne Elizabeth Moore Community Event
March 18
Greene Block + Studios
Join Anne Elizabeth Moore for an event delving into her creative practice.
APRIL
Maine Arts Education Conference
April 4-5
Waterville Creates, Colby’s Office of Civic Engagement, Colby College Museum of Art, and Colby Arts are hosting the annual Maine Arts Education Spring Conference in downtown Waterville. The conference invites art educators from across the state.
Colby Jazz Band: Across Time
April 5, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
This concert features works from throughout the history of jazz: Salt “Peanuts” by Dizzy Gillespie, an essential part of the jazz repertoire based on George Gershwin’s composition “I Got Rhythem” and Wes Montgomery’s “Cariba,” a catchy bossa nova tune arranged by Victor Lopez for big band.
Colby Wind Ensemble: New Perspectives
April 8, 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Colby Wind Ensemble plays new compositions, including one dedicated to the state of Maine. Overture to the Great Hall by Shaun Salem opens the concert in grand fashion. Dirigo Suite, a new composition by Heather Hastings, is a three-movement suite based on folk songs connected to Maine.
Highlighted Programs
Colby Collegium: This is Our Song
April 12 , 7:30 pm
Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts
Collegium is Colby’s auditioning choir, comprised entirely of students. Its spring program will feature music composed or arranged by members of the Colby community.
Center for the Arts and Humanities Play
Keynote: John Green
April 15, 6:30 pm
Lorimer Chapel
John Green is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and The Anthropocene Reviewed. He is also the coauthor, with David Levithan, of Will Grayson, Will Grayson. He was the 2006 recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award, a 2009 Edgar Award winner, and has twice been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Green’s books have been published in more than 55 languages and over 24 million copies are in print.
MAY
Colby Symphony Orchestra and Choirs at Colby: Choral Masterworks
May 3, 7:30 pm and May 4, 3 pm
Gordon Center for
Creative and Performing Arts
The annual Choral Masterworks concert offers two memorial pieces: Johannes Brahms’s Nänie (1881), a transcendent threnody written to honor a young artistfriend, and Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed (2015), a choral setting of the final words of Black men murdered by police officers. The concert will also celebrate a student soloist, the winner of Colby’s annual Concerto Competition, and the orchestra will perform Aaron Copland’s lively one-act ballet, Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes
a haunted botany
Spring 2025
Through performance and archival research, a haunted botany explores a dialectic between the historic violence and trauma of colonization and the pleasure and desire engendered through plants, focusing on accounts of queer intimacy facilitated through interspecies relationships that exceeded the bounds of colonial containment and scientific epistemologies. Led by Gwynn Shanks and AB Brown, Department of Performance, Theater, and Dance assistant professors.
Department of Art Senior Exhibition
May 2025
Colby seniors studying studio art spend four years working toward capstone projects in printmaking, photography, painting, and sculpture. This exhibition offers participating students the opportunity to exhibit their work and participate in the museum’s exhibition process from start to finish.
Post Pardon:
Opera Premiere
June 6, 7:30 pm and June 8, 2 pm
Gordon Center for
Creative and Performing Arts
Drawing on African-diasporic spirituality and folklore, the opera unfolds as Willow is confronted with the ghost of her estranged mother who committed suicide. Set between the material and spiritual worlds, where Elsa, the Bottle
Tree, serves as the threshold, Willow is guided by The Sistas, empowered by the eco-activist group Black Azaleas,
and inspired by Rosa’s love as she embraces the multiplicities of death. With its concern for gendered and ecological violence, Post Pardon is the transgenerational apology needed to repair a Black woman’s soul.
Collaborating artists include Arisa White (librettist), Jessica Jones (composer), Ellen Sebastian Chang (director), Marshunda Smith (conductor), Dianne Smith (design), Laurel Jenkins (choreographer), Jeannie Anderson (vocalist), and Jazmin DeRice (vocalist).
Colby College Museum of Art
of the artist’s Maine subjects illuminates agrarian life in the years during and after the Civil War.
Surface Tension: Etchings from the Collection
Through January 12, 2025
Including several recent acquisitions, Surface Tension showcases the incredible technical, formal, and conceptual versatility of etching, demonstrating why it holds such extraordinary scientific and artistic distinction within the broader practice of printmaking.
Alex Katz: Repetitions
Through March 29, 2026
ON CAMPUS
Martha Diamond: Deep Time
Through October 13, 2024
This survey of paintings, drawings, and monotypes proposes “deep time” as a new way of understanding Martha Diamond’s contributions to American art. Co-organized by the Colby Museum and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
Eastman Johnson and Maine
Through December 8, 2024
Maine native Eastman Johnson was one of the most significant painters of the 19th century. This focused exhibition
This installation in the Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz highlights different strategies of repetition in Katz’s art, exploring four concepts that describe this defining aspect of his artistic practice: reflection, recurrence, reduplication, and re-creation.
Lunder Wing Reopening
Lunder Wing Reopening
Opening September 26, 2024
For the first time in more than a decade, each of the Lunder Wing’s galleries will be fully refreshed with new thematic arrangements of the Colby Museum’s American and Native American collection as well as a works on paper gallery.
Edmonia Lewis, Arrow Maker, c 1868 Marble. 11 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.
Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of Jane, Richard, and David Moss in honor of Doris Rose Hopengarten ’40, Fred Hopengarten ’67, Annie Hopengarten Mooreville ’06, Phyllis Rose Baskin ’39, and Michael Baskin ’70
Before the weather app, there was the weathervane. This exhibition will explore the symbolic associations and cultural resonances of weathervanes in the northeastern United States during the 19th and early-20th centuries.
Radical Histories: Chicanx Prints from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
February 6–June 8, 2025
The Chicanx artists featured in Radical Histories use printmaking to envision and disseminate political advocacy, cross-cultural solidarity, and critical interrogations of the past. Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
DOWNTOWN
JOAN DIGNAM SCHMALTZ
GALLERY OF ART, PAUL J. SCHUPF ART CENTER
Alive & Kicking: Fantastic Installations by Thomas LaniganSchmidt, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, and Gladys Nilsson
Through November 11, 2024
This exhibition presents punchy, surreal installations by three contemporary artists. Catalina Schliebener Muñoz and Gladys Nilsson made new works onsite, while Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt is represented by Mysterium Tremendum (late 1980s), an autobiographical tale.
Square + Triangle: Home in the Colby Museum’s Collection
December 6, 2024–April 21, 2025
With a title that describes an elemental way to draw a house, Square + Triangle explore the topics of home, domesticity, and placemaking through the Colby Museum’s modern and contemporary collection.
Senior Art Exhibition
May 9–24, 2025
Seniors studying studio art spend all year working on capstone projects in disciplines that include printmaking, photography, painting, sculpture, and digital media. This exhibition serves as the culmination of their studies.
Square + Triangle: Home in the Colby Museum’s Collection
The Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts is the most advanced and innovative arts facility in the region and the new home for Colby’s Departments of Performance, Theater, and Dance, of Music, and of Cinema Studies. With a unique combination of multipurpose performance areas and studios designed for teaching, performing,
working, and creating, it also houses a dynamic performance hall as well as Colby’s first arts incubator to facilitate and nurture emerging art forms.
The Gordon Center is named in honor of Life Trustee Michael Gordon, an alumnus from the Class of 1966. In October 2024, the College honored Gordon’s support with a celebratory
opening ceremony. Designed by William Rawn Associates, Architects Inc., the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts emphatically integrates itself into the campus. As a natural bookend to the Colby Museum of Art, it embraces the south end of the College and Mayflower Hill Drive, communicating that the arts are at the core of Colby.
Greene Block + Studios
Greene Block + Studios supports creative communities, providing a home for vibrant arts programming and space for the development of original work in the heart of Waterville, Maine. The ground floor features arts programming open to all, including workshops bringing together writers, artists, and performers and a vibrant First Friday tradition. On the first
Friday of every month, visit downtown Waterville to meet artists, see performances, eat delicious food, shop at local businesses, enjoy the arts, and come together as a community.
Greene Block + Studios is the home of the Lunder Institute for American Art and houses studios for its residential fellows. The Lunder Institute supports
scholarly and creative production by awarding fellowships to emerging, midcareer, and senior practitioners whose work aligns with its goal of expanding the contours of American art. The Lunder Institute also hosts an annual Summer Think Tank, which brings together artists, scholars, museum professionals, and culture-bearers in a fertile space to engage in dialogue.
Paul J . Schupf Art Center
Located in the heart of downtown Waterville on Main Street, the Paul J. Schupf Art Center is a lively, distinctive hub for visual and performing arts, film, and arts education. Developed in partnership between Colby College and Waterville Creates, Schupf Arts is part of a rich and integrated group of arts and cultural institutions throughout Waterville.
The building is home to Waterville Creates and the diverse film, visual, and performing arts programming presented through its divisions—the Maine Film Center, Ticonic Gallery + Studios, and the Waterville Opera House. For more information about Waterville Creates’ events and programming, go to watervillecreates.org.
Schupf Arts also houses the Colby College Museum of Art Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art, featuring exhibitions from the museum’s permanent collection as well as specially commissioned shows from emerging and established artists.
Colby Arts
Colby Arts is building a culture of creativity that is innovative, bold, and socially conscious.
Arts Office
Center for the Arts and Humanities
Colby College Museum of Art and Lunder Institute for American Art
Creative Writing Program
Department of Art
Department of Cinema Studies
Department of Music
Department of Performance, Theater, and Dance
Lyons Arts Lab
To get more information about Colby Arts, see all upcoming events, and reserve your tickets, go to arts.colby.edu.
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