Watch where you step

“Untitled (Face in Dirt)” (pigmented ink print), by David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) in the show “Come Closer: Selections From the Collection, 1978-1994,’’ at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine

The museum explains that “Come Closer” “presents artworks … that explore the relationship between the personal and the political. During this period, artists reflected upon urgent current events and social issues such as gender equality, racial justice, technological advancements, sexual freedom, and the AIDS crisis.”

Dressed up for the end

“Dr. Syn” (tempera on panel), by Andrew Wyeth, in the show “Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death,’’ at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through Oct. 16.

The museum says that famed painter Wyeth (1917-2009) envisions his own funeral in the recently rediscovered series of drawings from the 1990s. "The exhibition connects the sketches now known as the Funeral Group to Wyeth’s decades-long engagement with death as an artistic subject in painting, his relationships with the models depicted, and his expressive and exploratory use of drawing." Wyeth lived on the Maine Coast for much of his life.

About the title: The Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn is the smuggler hero of a series of novels by Russell Thorndike. The first book, Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh, was published in 1915. The story idea came from smuggling in the 18th-century Romney Marsh, in England, where brandy and tobacco were brought in at night by boat from France to avoid taxes.

Unsettling indent

Still from Ana Mendieta's Silueta Sangrienta, (1975. Super-8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent, 1:51 minutes), in her show at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through Dec. 17. The remarkably large and rich museum says the film focuses on an indent in the ground shaped like Mendieta's body. The body is first shown naked, then it disappears, and then it  suddenly fills with red paint before she reappears in it face-down. The two-minute film is quite unnerving.
 

The road to Milltown and Miltown*

"Work from "A Useable Past: American Folk Art,'' at the Colby College Museum of Art, in Waterville, Maine, July 9-Jan. 8. The show  primarily features the work of self-taught artists who worked in the eastern U.S. in the 19th Century. * Read S.J. Perelman's The Road to Miltown, or Under the Spreading Atrophy.

Upholding the dignity of the beach

"Bather'' (oil on linen), by ALEX KATZ, in the show "Alex Katz in the 1950s,''  at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through Oct. 18.