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Colby Museum Features Skowhegan Art School
The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is the focus of a Colby College Museum of Art exhibit which opens on July 22 and runs through October 20, 2006. Founded in 1946 in the barns and chicken coops on the family farm of local artist and portrait painter, Willard Cummings, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture now fills 300 acres and more than 60 buildings and comprises a substantial lakefront area on Lake Wesserunsett in Madison. According to its sixtieth anniversary write-up, the Skowhegan School — as it is known throughout the art world — resulted from an impossible dream. Cummings set out to take painting and sculpture out of the contest category whereby one artist competed against his peers and make it the subject of interpretation and "grading" by the viewer. He felt that art should be the result of the artist's interpretation of the subject and armed with his dream, Cummings, along with Henry Varnum Poor, Anne Poor, and Sidney Simon set out to establish the most successful art school of its type in the entire world. 
Over the years, many great teachers have come to the Skowhegan School to work with the outstanding artists of the future, including Ben Shahn, Margaret and William Zorach, Walter Murch, Agostini, Buckminster Fuller, and Robert Indiana. Lists of impressive alumni have attained international recognition; equally impressive is the list of wealthy benefactors. The Colby College Museum of Art exhibit will bring together works by 27 distinguished artists and faculty spanning the history of the School. Through digital recordings from the Skowhegan Lecture Archive, artists' voices enter the Museum, facilitating a dialogue between artistic ideas and the artworks themselves. A central feature of the exhibition is the newly released Skowhegan Lecture Archive, which contains recordings of over 520 lectures by over 370 artists who have spoken at Skowhegan since 1952, as well as over 350 transcripts. The museum hours are Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. and Sunday 12:00 – 4:30 p.m. For more information call 859–5600 or visit www.colby.edu/museum/. For more information about the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, go to www.skowheganart.org. | ||