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Alex Katz has been a regular summer resident in Maine since he first attended the Skowhegan School in the early 1950's, and the landscapes of Maine, along with his figural subjects, have been a prominent feature of his work for the last half century. Since the early 1950's, among the various print media in which the artist has worked, linoleum cuts and woodcuts have constituted an important feature of his artistic activity, noteworthy because of the artist's direct hand in the carving of the blocks, as well as because of the complex interrelationship played out between these prints and his painting. His first known woodcut, from 1951–52, is a Maine landscape, and many of his recent relief prints are likewise inspired by the woodlands and water adjacent to his house in Lincolnville.

These prints are not mere reproductions of paintings: in many cases they stand alone; in some, they precede a painting of a similar subject; in others, they are part of a transitional process mediating between variations on a theme in a variety of media and sizes. As a touchstone for his work as a painter, these prints, customarily fabricated from one, two, or three blocks of color, exhibit in varying degrees the qualities of directness, simplification, and distillation that are prominent features of his work in all media. The total body of this work consists of more than a hundred examples that the artist has created over the last half century. This exhibition, which will include a generous number of these prints, will take a retrospective look at this important dimension of the artist's production in these media. Their exhibition at Colby will enable visitors to see these works in conjunction with a generous display of related paintings by the artist, from which the common denominators of his style can be more fully understood as these have evolved throughout his career.