The story
Colby College, a small liberal-arts school in central Maine, keeps one of the best college art museums in the country, and it charges nobody to enter. It grew from modest beginnings in 1959 into a serious collection of American art, helped enormously by two gifts.
One was from the painter Alex Katz, who spends his summers in Maine and gave the college hundreds of his own works, so Colby holds one of the largest bodies of his flat, cool, billboard-scaled portraits anywhere. The other was the Lunder Collection, thousands of works given by the Lunder family, strong in Whistler and 19th-century American painting.
The museum spreads across a bright modern wing added to the campus, moving from colonial portraits and Winslow Homer through to contemporary art, all of it free to students and the public alike.
