The Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville is getting a very big gift — a donation from Peter and Paula Lunder worth more than $100 million.
It includes work from a wide array of artists — and not just American art that’s historically been the museum’s focus, but also work from Picasso and from Chinese activist artist Ai Weiwei.
Much of that work is already on display in the museum. Museum director and chief curator Sharon Corwin says over the years, the Lunders have worked with Colby to pick pieces, with the ultimate plan to donate them.
“As they grew as collectors and continued to expand their vision for what this collection could be for Colby, they began to ask the question before every acquisition, how could an object like this serve the teaching mission of the museum and the college? That means we’ve built a collection that really has relevance in the liberal arts mission of Colby College,” she says.
The small liberal arts college will also use part of the gift — it’s not quite clear how much — to establish the Lunder Institute for American Art, which will host a residential program for scholars and artists on campus as well as in downtown Waterville.
Corwin says it won’t just be bringing people in — the work will be used to inform the school’s current liberal arts curriculum, as in the case of two works by American artist Maya Lin, who’s best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, DC.
She says the two pieces, on the Polar ice caps and endangered waterways in Florida, “are really dealing with bigger issues like climate change. And our students in environmental sciences for example are using them in their classes.”
And she says the gift will also help the museum in its goal of engaging the people of Maine.
“We are a museum that’s free and open to the public, and the ways in which this collection and museum is accessible to any visitor to Waterville and to the museum I think is a big part of it. We see about 4,000 Maine schoolchildren annually, we bring them to campus, give them tours of the museum, we do art projects with them,” Corwin says.
The gift comes at a time when Colby is buying property in Waterville, as well as working with local groups, with a goal of revitalizing the small city’s downtown.
This isn’t the first big gift from the Lunders to the museum. In 2013, they gave Colby more than 500 pieces of mostly-American art, also worth more than $100 million.
