Chief Curator Colby College Museum of Art

JOB DESCRIPTION:

The Colby College Museum of Art, located in Waterville, Maine, seeks an experienced, visionary, and highly collaborative Chief Curator to join the Museum’s senior leadership team. They will establish and direct curatorial strategy at a time of institutional transformation, develop and steward the Museum’s art collection, and lead an ambitious staff of five while contributing to the overall vitality of the museum.

The role of Chief Curator presents an exceptional opportunity to shape the future of one of the nation’s leading academic museums. Its distinguished collection comprises more than 10,000 artworks representing the full breadth and complexity of American art, as well as works by international artists from antiquity to the present. By supporting research, organizing exhibitions and displays of its collection, and convening a diversity of people and perspectives, the Museum incubates art scholarship and practice to explore and expand how the idea of America is understood and how art is made, interpreted, and shared.

About the Colby College Museum of Art:

Founded in 1959, the Colby Museum is a leading academic art museum, with strengths in American art and contemporary art, at one of the nation’s preeminent liberal arts colleges. In the past decade, the Colby Museum has grown rapidly and now encompasses nearly 40,000 square feet of exhibition space. Since 2021, the Museum has expanded to include two sites in downtown Waterville: the Greene Block + Studios, where its Lunder Institute for American Art is based, and the Paul J.

Schupf Art Center, which includes the Museum’s Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art. The Museum’s artistic programming at times extends to Colby’s Island Campus, previously the home of Betsy and Andrew Wyeth, and to Colby’s Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts. Learning and engagement programs have also increased in reach and impact, drawing more than 16,000 people in the past year and taking place on campus, in downtown Waterville, and in the broader Waterville community.

This includes collaborations with over 180 courses a year in nearly 30 departments across the College, class visits by over 3,400 K–12 students and educators each year, and varied public and community events. The Museum employs 31 full-time staff and 21 part-time staff. Its annual operating budget is $6 million.

The Museum currently organizes and presents ten to twelve exhibitions a year, many with accompanying publications, including major traveling shows. Recent exhibitions include:
Gertrude Abercrombie:
The Whole World Is a Mystery, the first nationally touring presentation of work by this critical figure in Chicago’s mid‑twentieth‑century art and jazz scenes, co‑organized with the Carnegie Museum of Art;
Is anything the matter? Drawings by Laylah Ali, the first retrospective exhibition to survey the artist’s prolific work in this medium;
Martha Diamond:
Deep Time, the first survey of the late artist’s paintings, with the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art;
Painted:
Our Bodies, Hearts and Village, a collection‑based exhibition about Taos and the Taos Society of Artists from the perspective of Pueblo artists; and Bob Thompson:
This House Is Mine, which garnered international acclaim and introduced many audiences to the artist’s work.

The Paul J. Schupf Wing for the Works of Alex Katz features a rotating selection of artworks from the Museum’s collection of nearly 900 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures spanning the artist’s entire career. Along with the Katz Archive, these holdings make the Colby Museum the institution of record on the work of this influential artist and offer countless opportunities to explore the wide‑ranging sources, interactions, and perspectives that inform Katz’s practice.

The Lunder Institute for American Art was established in 2017 through the generosity of Peter and Paula Lunder and the Lunder Foundation. It supports innovative research, scholarship, and creative production that expands the boundaries of American art. Longtime benefactors in the field of American art, Peter and Paula Lunder have also made possible the acquisition of over…