Image: MacNider Art Museum, Mason City
Ray Colby, a retired commercial photographer living in Minneapolis, has donated a selection of wildlife photographs printed on canvas to an online auction benefiting the Charles H. MacNider Art Museum in Mason City. The auction starts September 15 at 6 p.m. and ends September 29 at 6 p.m.
All proceeds from the sales will go to the museum’s temporary exhibition fund, which provides funding for traveling shows to come to the museum. The photographs were created specifically for the exhibition and were never accessioned into the museum’s permanent collection.
The donated photographs were featured in Colby’s solo exhibition, ‘Ray Colby: Nature Photographer,’ presented in the museum’s Kinney-Lindstrom Gallery from April 10 through June 17, 2026. That exhibition had three areas of focus: often-overlooked insects and arachnids in Midwestern backyards and gardens, large birds in urban Minneapolis, and a stop on the migration route of Sandhill Cranes near Wisconsin’s Crex Meadows Wildlife Area.
One identified work is ‘Newly Molted Cicada,’ a digital photograph printed on canvas in 2025. Another is ‘Sandhill Crane Migration,’ a digital photograph dated 2025 and associated with the Crex Meadows Wildlife Area in northwest Wisconsin.
