WATERVILLE, MAINE.- The Colby College Museum of Art is now presenting Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change (June 3–October 22, 2023), a timely exhibition of drawings, prints and paintings by artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) that speak to the enduring phenomenon of urban transformation. Featuring approximately sixty works drawn primarily from the Colby Museum’s renowned Lunder Collection, Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change reflects the uncertainties of metropolitan life that Whistler saw firsthand during the Victorian era.

Curated by David Park Curry, a 2020–21 senior fellow at the Colby Museum’s Lunder Institute for American Art, Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change invites us to consider the implications of art that silently witnessed the struggles of the working poor, at the same time romanticizing poverty for a rising middle-class art market.

“It’s exciting that my research, supported by a Lunder Institute senior fellowship, will reach a broad audience through this exhibition,” said Curry.

“Whistler’s diminutive shop fronts and streetscapes are packed with half-hidden references to the complex, changing urban culture in which he operated. His art rewards scrutiny, for each carefully staged image hints at the real world underlying his abstract compositions. Such veiled references would become standard elements in the work of many seemingly non-objective artists during the twentieth century.”

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler rose to prominence as an expatriate artist in Paris and London, where many of his shop fronts and streetscapes were created. He also explored urban topics during forays to Venice, Amsterdam, Brussels, and elsewhere. As is evident in these pieces, the picturesque old neighborhoods where he lived and worked were in the throes of relentless redevelopment as spacious parks, avenues, and buildings for affluent city dwellers obliterated crowded historic districts, squeezing the urban poor into ever more squalid conditions. Many of the shops and ateliers that engaged the artist’s attention were torn down shortly after he rendered them. By the end of his life, Whistler—a determined modernist—had attracted a somewhat undeserved reputation as an historic preservationist.

Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change offers a rare opportunity to see a selection of works by the artist that, due to the light-sensitive nature of their medium, can only be displayed for limited periods of time. The exhibition draws from the museum’s extensive holdings of art by James McNeill Whistler—over 360 works in total and most of which have been collected by Peter and Paula Lunder and given to the Colby Museum as part of the Lunder Collection.

The exhibition will also appear at the Freer Gallery of Art at the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution (November 18, 2023–May 4, 2024), where it will rely on the renowned Whistler collection established by Charles Lang Freer. Whistler, in fact, played an important role in the aesthetic education of Freer, the Detroit industrialist and founder of the Freer Gallery. Both the National Museum of Asian Art and the Colby Museum, along with the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Glasgow comprise the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies.

The Consortium was established in 2010 to nurture, produce, and disseminate original
scholarship and critical analysis of James McNeill Whistler and his international artistic circles. It is now led by the Colby Museum and its Lunder Institute for American Art.

“This exhibition has benefited from the collaborative opportunities created by the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies,” noted head curator Beth Finch.

“We’re delighted to be working with the Freer Gallery of Art at the National Museum of Asian Art on this innovative two-site project that features our respective collections.”

An exhibition catalogue, developed in partnership with the National Gallery of Art and published by Delmonico Books, will be released in August. The installation will also be accompanied by a series of public programs, including an opening celebration with gallery tours by Curry and a book signing with an opportunity to purchase advance copies of the publication. A full list of events can be found on the Colby Museum website.

Curry, the exhibition’s curator, holds a Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale University. His work has included key roles at the Freer Gallery of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. He is the author of James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art (1984), a 2004 monograph, James McNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces, and curated the 2003 Freer exhibition Mr. Whistler’s Galleries, which featured Curry’s reconstruction of the Arrangement in White and Yellow (1883), the artist’s controversial installation of etchings as a total work of art.

Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change is a project of the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies and is made possible with support from the Lunder Foundation.

Founded in 1959, the Colby College Museum of Art is a teaching museum, a destination for American art, and a place for education and engagement with local, national, and global communities. Part of Colby College, the museum is located in Waterville, Maine, and actively contributes to Colby’s curricular and co-curricular programs and to the region’s quality of life. It inspires connections between art and people through distinctive exhibitions, programs, and publications and through an outstanding collection that emphasizes American art and contemporary art within holdings that span cultures and time periods. The Colby Museum actively seeks to increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and access across all of its work and to advocate for the community value of art, artists, and museums in engaging with today’s most vital questions.