The Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs gets a refresh after years of turmoil

It was spring 2023 and a group of artists, academics, curators, museum workers, art historians and local experts were gathered at the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs for what organizers called, somewhat cryptically, “the convening.” 

This was the beginning of a new chapter — one that most people familiar with the FAC agreed was a long time coming.

Over the past two decades, the FAC has been burdened by massive debt, leadership changes and culture clashes that threatened to warp the illustrious institution’s nearly century-long history. 

In July 2017, the FAC was “gifted” to Colorado College, officially becoming the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. The college was also “gifted” a $10 million debt and years of deferred maintenance. 

That move smoothed out some of the FAC’s financial and administrative rough spots, but simultaneously created a rift between longtime patrons and newly hired college staff, eroded further by the pandemic, a quick churn of leaders and a public argument over a set of racially coded murals.

By 2023, the FAC was ready for a reset. 

It started with a question: “What would happen if Georgia O’Keefe were in the Broadmoor Art Academy gallery?” contemporary art curator Katja Rivera said. 

The FAC permanent collection was split into three distinct areas at that time: Southwestern art, including Indigenous and Hispanic religious items; portraits and landscapes from the Broadmoor Art Academy; and modern and contemporary works. 

But these groupings didn’t allow for the actual overlap — of timelines, of artists or of cultures — that was occurring in the Southwest during the FAC’s founding and that continues today. 

Rivera got to work with Michael Christiano, director of visual arts, on a complete reinstallation of the permanent collection, a three-year effort that involved seven curators, two grants from the Terra Foundation, a drawdown on the Margaret L. Lane endowment — part of the museum’s fund to support new exhibitions — and countless hours in conversation with local communities and tribes. 

“Gathering Place,” the semipermanent exhibition of the permanent collection, opens Saturday.

The show takes up a major chunk of the first floor and is divided into four gallery spaces, each one painstakingly curated by a specific artist, historian, academic or local expert that the FAC zeroed in on during their 2023 “convening.”

“I was flattered just to be asked to think about the collection even for a weekend,” artist and historian Josh Franco said. Franco attended the convening and was subsequently asked to be one of four guest curators on the reinstallation. “Only later I came to realize they were using that weekend to whittle down a smaller group to invite on this yearslong endeavor of rethinking the whole permanent collection. It was like a job I didn’t know I was interviewing for.”

“It was not quite an undercover job interview,” Christiano laughed. “Well, maybe a little bit.”

The first gallery

In the first gallery, co-curated by Franco and Southern Ute Tribe member Cassandra Atencio, visitors are greeted by Arthur Dove’s “Fog Horns,” a 1929 oil painting from one of America’s earliest abstract artists. Franco loves this painting. 

“This is like the one work I needed to be in the show,” he said. But the work presented a problem in a show built to prioritize the Southwest.  

Dove was born in New York. He painted “Fog Horns” from a boat, floating on waters outside of New York.

“Arthur Dove had nothing to do with southern Colorado,” Franco said. “The painting ended up there because of collectors, because they had their eyes towards New York.”

The FAC’s founding collection was a blend of Native and Hispanic art collected by Alice Bemis Taylor, along with modern American and European art collected by Elizabeth Sage Hare. Taylor, Hare and Julie Penrose, who donated her land, established the multidisciplinary Fine Arts Center in 1936 as an extension and expansion of the famous Broadmoor Art Academy, founded in 1919.

The East Coast works gave the collection its credibility, while the Southwestern works gave the collection its edge.

“Having Alexander Calder and Martha Graham, that was validity,” Franco said. “It implied, like, we’re valid because we can bring New York here, which is interesting. And those are great artists. But you know, what about the stuff that’s great about Colorado?”

Franco and Atencio focused their gallery on the theme of belonging: “Who am I when I’m here?” said Alana Adams, assistant curator of collections.

“Fog Horns” is the exception to the rule, the only thing in the gallery that wasn’t collected from Colorado or the Southwest. There are Ute moccasins and “lots of landscapes,” Franco said. Photographs of Pikes Peak from the 1970s share space with paintings of the same summit from the 1920s.

“The landscape is here for millennia, of course it changes, but it’s an icon because it lasts so long,” Franco said. “But who’s looking at the landscape changes it, and that’s so cool. That’s one of the goals, right? We want people to leave the show with new eyes for exactly where they are.”

The second gallery

“Not everything we’re going to look at here was meant to be looked at here,” said James Cordóva, curator of the second gallery. 

Cordóva is an associate professor of art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He specializes in “santos,” traditionally devotional images of Catholic saints that became characteristic of New Mexican artisans during Spanish colonial times. Cordóva is also a “santero,” someone who creates these images.

His gallery houses an interior space with dimmed lights and haunting hymns, recordings from the 1930s and ’40s borrowed from the Library of Congress. The presentation is meant to evoke chapels where the santos are traditionally displayed, “without turning it into an actual chapel,” Cordóva said flatly. “That would not be appropriate for a museum.” 

Outside of the chapel-like space, the santos — which range from the early 17th century to present day — mingle with Indigenous pottery pieces and paintings by artists from the Eastern U.S.

“The old perspective, at least in the scholarship, was that early New Mexico was so isolated from everything else happening on the planet, that art was made only out of necessity, that it was folk art,” Cordóva said. “That was not the case.” 

New Mexico was once deeply integrated into the Spanish colonial empire. The early santeros pulled imagery from objects that the Spanish imported from Mexico, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. 

But the real focus of his gallery is how santeros interacted with Native American objects from the same region. “They created a visual vocabulary and aesthetic that crossed ethnic and cultural lines,” Cordóva said. “That vocabulary then becomes greater than just the santos, it becomes greater than just pueblo ceramics. It created a regional language that’s greater than its individual parts.”

That’s not to say santos mean the same thing to “someone from the pueblos and someone with Spanish background living in Santa Fe,” Cordova clarified. It means that the two groups — sometimes consciously, often unconsciously — borrowed imagery, motifs and symbols from one another, in ways that Cordóva hopes to highlight in his gallery. 

He also included works by East Coast contemporaries of the santeros, made during travels to New Mexico, including the 1917 painting “The Santero” by Bert Geer Phillips, a New York artist and a founding member of the Taos Society of Artists, and a painting of a Penitente ceremony by Isaac “Doc” Udell, a beloved Michigan-born man who left medical school to live and work in Taos. 

Udell’s work is one of a few that Cordova hadn’t expected to include, but during months of digging through the collection and collaborating with other curators, he realized these outside perspectives represented yet another cultural interaction during the FAC’s early days, and could provide a “stepping stone” into the next gallery. 

The third gallery

To curate the third gallery, which focuses on the institutional history of the Fine Arts Center, Pat Musick looked outside. 

“The metaphor for my gallery is an ecotone,” Musick said, a term in ecology that applies to a zone where ecosystems meet. “Where the Rocky Mountain foothills meet the Great Plains, that’s an ecotone. Each of them has their own species, but where they meet, there is this richness and intermingling.”

Musick has witnessed much of that intermingling at the FAC. Her father — painter and muralist Archie Musick — started his fine arts career at the Broadmoor Academy in 1927. He moved around the country as a working artist, first to New York, then to Los Angeles, before landing back in Colorado Springs and picking up work as a teacher at the FAC in the 1930s.

“There have been a number of recent directors that didn’t seem terribly interested in the background of the institution,” Musick said. “But they are,” she said of Christiano and the curatorial team. “And they realized that I have a long history with it.”

Musick was determined to display items from the permanent collection that had either never been shown or had been off-view for a very long time. She selected works from students of the Broadmoor Art Academy, including her father, to show how their styles diverged as they pursued careers.  

“Virtually all of these artists had that regionalist 1930s style, but in their later careers went in all different directions,” Musick said. “Ethel (Megafan) went to semi-abstracted and abstracted mountain scenes, others went toward a sort of whimsical realism, or a pleasant surrealism. So I put those side by side.”

She’s also got frescos, colchas and Native pottery alongside work from East Coast artists who changed their entire palettes to paint the West. 

“The color schemes that they were using back East just didn’t work here, with the bright Western light,” Musick said. 

There have been many points of divergence, not just among the artists at the FAC. “There was one director who wanted to turn the center into a decorative arts museum,” Musick said. “It didn’t last very long.”

There were directors with zero interest in Native American and Hispanic parts of the collection, she said. Others hoped to become contemporary arts hubs “to rival Denver or, I don’t know, Metropolitan Museum in New York or something,” she laughed. While others insisted local and regional arts were the collection’s strength.

Despite changing times and tastes, there’s a continuity that Musick sees Christiano and his team working to preserve, while orienting the FAC toward what’s current.

The final gallery

In order to tackle the 18,000-piece permanent collection, Christiano and his team had to learn to let go.

“This is just one exhibition with four different chapters, nothing we do can ever be fully comprehensive,” Christiano said. “Realizing that was liberating.”

Christiano collaborated with Adams and Rivera to curate the final gallery around the theme of movement — the way that people, goods, ideas and religions have moved throughout the region, Adams said. 

The plan is to leave “Gathering Place” up for three to four years, according to Christiano, while rotating out certain light-sensitive works, like those on paper and textiles.

“I hope people leave with a sense that neither this institution nor those histories that we present are fixed,” Christiano said of the exhibition as a whole. “That our understanding of, and the meaning we make from them, will shift over time.”