Two shows opened this summer at Colby College Museum of Art’s Jetté Galleries that are fascinating not only in themselves, but in their juxtaposition.

On the upper floor is “Constellations: Forming the Collection, 1973-2023” while on the lower level is “Come Closer: Selections from the Collection, 1978-1994” (both run through Nov. 26). While there is overlap in the eras these shows cover, they could not be more different.

Colby is known for its collection of American art, and it shows beautifully in “Constellations.” There are big, very well-known names here: among others, Charles Wilson Peale, George Inness, Louise Nevelson, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, John Marin (an enormous collection of watercolors which, donated by his heirs to the college in 1973, formed the cornerstone of the American art holdings). But perhaps the most unexpected pleasures of the show are the odd surprises from names that are not so well known.

Take, for instance, “New England Still Life” a reverse painting on glass by Rebecca Salsbury James, dated only as “before 1940.” Rebecca who? The work is beautiful in its own right, its unusual medium, usually considered a folk art or craft that first appeared in 15th-century Europe, imparts an enticing luminosity. But the flatness of its scarlet reds and blacks and the simplification of form is thoroughly modern.

There’s good reason for this. Salsbury James was a close friend to Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, the latter showing her paintings in his An American Place gallery in 1936. This put her in the milieu of Marin and O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and other American modernists. Her first marriage was to photographer Paul Strand, and she lived out her days in Taos, New Mexico, taking her life a year after her second husband and love of her life, entrepreneur Bill James, died in 1967.

Salsbury James also did needlework “paintings” influenced by Southwest colcha embroidery. In other words, she was using traditional crafts and “women’s work” decades before it became a thing among female artists trying to distinguish themselves from the male-dominated Ab Ex movements of the 1950s and ’60s. The term “pioneering” doesn’t begin to cover her idiosyncratic oeuvre. The painting carries on a symbiotic conversation with one of Elie Nadelman’s urban folk-like dancers not far away.

There is what feels like the shockingly modern “Return from the Cross” (1934-35) by Henry Ossawa Tanner, a by now well-known African-American artist whose manipulation of oil and tempera on board looks more like a technique, color sense and compositional approach out of the 1960s.

We find a ravishing, loosely painted double portrait, circa 1880, by John Singer Sargent of the French painters François Flameng and Paul Helleu. But I’d wager it could go toe-to-toe in terms of technique and skill with “Etude,” an equally beautiful double portrait by the much lesser-known Elizabeth Nourse from 1891. This despite Nourse’s fame as a 19th-century “New Woman” artist like Mary Cassatt and Cecilia Beaux (also represented in “Constellations”), and the first American woman to be voted into the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in France.

Even painters who we think we recognize can offer fresh revelations. There are two Inness works in the show, one from 1891, another from 1892. These late-career oils are much more painterly than the work of the 1850s through ’70s. The latter were substantially influenced by French Baroque painters like Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, as well as the Barbizon school, and were meant to represent nature’s innate connection with spirituality. In his later years (Inness died in 1894), his brushstrokes became freer and more liquid, his paintings more dreamy and soft-focus. To my mind, these are much more effective in intimating that spirituality appearing almost like mirages – ungraspable like religious mystery – rather than paying their tribute through minute, religiously observed detail.

Inness came of age during the Hudson River School, admiring paintings of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church and Asher B. Durand. A second generation of this school became known as the Luminists, from which sprang Fitzhugh Lane, Martin Johnson Heade and John F. Kensett. A more rarely exhibited practitioner was Sanford Robinson Gifford. The two works on display here, “The Marshes of the Hudson” (1878) and “The Study of Morning on Haverstraw Bay, Hudson River” (1866) makes us wonder why. Perhaps his light effects were less dramatic, his compositions too quiet. But these works are exquisite, their stillness profound.

“Constellations” is filled with these unexpected turns, making it a deeply satisfying show that can leave you buoyant from the level of sheer great painting on display.

Descending to “Come Closer,” then, can be a shock. To quote Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz,” we’re not in Kansas anymore. The exhibition is comprised mostly of works created during what historians have dubbed “the long 1980s,” in which art took a decidedly activist, often scathing, turn.

Think of that decade: Ronald Reagan repealed landmark legislation on mental healthcare policy and ignored AIDS for four years (and thousands of deaths) before publicly even mentioning the term. Feminism regrouped to keep hold of gains from previous decades, giving rise to “different feminism,” which emphasized and exalted the differences between male and female genders (rather than striving for gender neutrality in law and politics as liberal feminism had). The battles for domestic partnership rights of LGBTQ people. Trickle-down economics. There was a lot to be angry about.

Predictably, the overall tenor of this show is confrontational. Though some works are blithely unconcerned about political issues (Jim Dine’s lightweight “Fourteen Color Woodcut Bathrobe”) and others seem like calms within the storm (Lenore Tawney’s “Leaves from My Book of Days”), the lion’s share will likely shake the gentle feelings left over from “Constellations” upstairs.

Consider, for instance, the devastatingly deadpan rage of Janice Tanaka’s video, which juxtaposes wholesome media and film images of women as wives, mothers, sexual objects – all essentially subservient to men – with a narrative of sex, childbirth and motherhood that might leave you reeling. That narrative begins with a woman inserting a diaphragm for birth control then changing her mind and flipping it away. A few frames on, the woman’s torso rises from the floor to reveal a baby in the form of an infant doll. It’s clear in this sequence who will bear ultimate responsibility for the unprotected sex.

After more images of pliant and/or objectified women, we see the same woman’s hands pick up a meat cleaver as she asks, “Wouldn’t I make a great mother?” then begins hacking the doll into pieces. Ouch. How is that for upending the male notion that a woman’s natural role is to deliver and bring up their kids?

David Wojnarowicz’s photograph “Untitled (Face in Dirt)” is as creepy now as it was in 1991 when the artist was dying of AIDS. It is an indictment of a government callously ignoring the devastating death toll of gay men. The artist looks either to be descending to his eventual passing and burial or to be emerging from the earth, back from the dead to exact revenge.

With some of the pieces, I found myself longing for the unabashedly pleasing work above me in the other gallery. There is no question, for example, that Jon Kessler is critiquing commodified religion in his mixed media “Isolated Masses (For Peace).” But aesthetically it feels a bit barren, despite the complex pyrotechnics of industrial materials, kinetic movement, lights and sound. It lands – at least for me – as disjointed and unresolved. The work’s size and inherent coldness emotes over-conceptualized bombast that doesn’t quite know what it wants to say, or says it in a way that is unnecessarily overdone.

More labor-intensive than this, but far more simply and touchingly direct, is Ken Tisa’s beadwork painting “Janus,” which depicts loss (in this case the death of his partner, the poet Bill Jakobsen, from AIDS-related complications) while also contesting the assumption that his materials and methods are “women’s work.” There is something admirable about the craft of Tisa’s process, as well as the way its shimmery seductiveness lures you in before you realize the sadness and seriousness he is transmitting. It is not “in your face,” but its impact is unquestionably felt in the body.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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