Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, is justly celebrating its most recent campus addition: An eye-catching new pavilion housing a magnificent collection of American art given to the college by a well-known Maine couple.
The collection, which numbers some 500 pieces and is valued at more than $100 million, includes works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Frederic Remington, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, Donald Judd, and Jenny Holzer. Colby already had a good museum for a small college, but a gift of this size is transformative. With the new wing and the collection it houses, Colby now boasts the largest art museum in Maine. In addition to enriching the college experience for Colby students, the hope is that it will render a trip to the free-admission museum a must-make journey for regional art lovers.
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In that way, it’s a gift that’s good for Colby, for Waterville, and for Maine itself, since some who make the trip to Colby, in central Maine, will also stop at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, to visit its museum, and in Portland, to see the Portland Museum of Art, one of the most interesting small-city museums in New England.
Peter and Paula Lunder, Colby’s benefactors, had a reason for the gift beyond the fact that Peter is a Colby graduate. “If you went to the Metropolitan or the MFA, if we went to a big-city museum, there’s a possibility much of the collection could sit in the basement,” said Peter Lunder. “Here, it’ll be shown and used by students.”
He’s exactly right. The Lunders’ attitude is one more art collectors should emulate when they decide the time has come to find a permanent home for their beloved collections.