ML - Boston Common

2013 - Issue 3 - Summer

Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.

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ART FULL Birch and Pine Trees—Pink by Georgia O'Keeffe, 1925. THE COLBY COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART BECOMES THE LARGEST IN MAINE WITH THE OPENING OF ITS STUNNING NEW WING. BY JESSICA LANIEWSKI T he art scene in Northern New England will get a welcome boost when Colby College opens the $15 million, 26,000-square-foot AlfondLunder Family Pavilion at the school's art museum on July 13. The inaugural exhibition, "The Lunder Collection: A Gift of Art to Colby College," will feature pieces from the $100 million-plus collection of more than 500 primarily modern and contemporary American artworks donated by Paula and Peter Lunder. Peter Lunder is a graduate of the school, and the couple has built their collection for the past 30 years, since they first began buying art while visiting antique shops in Maine. Now the collection has returned to the state where their passion was first realized. The AlfondLunder Family Pavilion—which also houses additional exhibition galleries, classrooms, and staff facilities—will now serve as the main entrance to the museum. Visitors will be beckoned from afar by a three-story wall drawing by Sol LeWitt, which is mounted in the glass-enclosed stairwell. 60 One of the collection's most exquisite pieces is Georgia O'Keeffe's oilon-canvas Birch and Pine Trees—Pink, 1925, which the Lunders acquired in 2003. O'Keeffe painted the work near the vacation home in Lake George, New York, where she spent summers with her husband, the art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz. "Working in a distinctly modernist language, O'Keeffe abstracted her subject of birch and pine trees by simplifying and cropping the trees' forms and flattening the pictorial space in which they are represented," says Sharon Corwin, professor of art and the Carolyn Muzzy Director and Chief Curator at the Colby College Museum of Art. She adds, "The painting functions more like a detail of a landscape, rather than traditional landscape depictions that offer a horizon line and orienting perspective." The exhibition will be on view until June 8, 2014. 5600 Mayflower Hill, Waterville, ME, 207-8595600; Colby.edu/museum BC PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF THE LUNDER COLLECTION, COLBY COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART art major BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM 060_BC_SC_ArtFull_SUM13.indd 60 6/7/13 1:32 PM

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