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Drawn Across the Century

Highlights from the Dillard Collection of Art on Paper

October 28th-December 23, 2005
Opening Reception: Friday, October 28th, 5-7p.m.

Jane Hammond
Tricky Fingers (detail)
mixed media on paper

The main exhibition was made possible through the cooperation and friendship of Nancy Doll, Director of the Weatherspooon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.Greensboro is the home of the Dillard Paper Company, now known as xpedx, which has funded the museum’s acquisition of over 500 works on paper through the Weatherspoon’s annual Art on Paper exhibition since 1965. The exhibition was organized by the Weatherspoon Art Museum Staff, especially their Assst. Registrar, Noelle McClure, and is a slightly different show than the previous national tour of works from the Dillard Collection. Noelle provided the show’s checklist and outgoing condition reports, made transportation arrangements and supervised the show’s packing on her end.

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International Watermedia 14

August 19-October 14, 2005
Opening Reception: Friday August 19, 5-8 p.m.

Catherine Woodin
Egg Timer (detail)

This international watercolor exhibition presented by the Pikes Peak Watercolor Society in collaboration with the Gallery of Contemporary Art features 113 works by artists. Artist and independent curator Katherine Chang Lui selected the show from slides. Ms Lui exhibits internationally and has had over 39 solo exhibitions and over 100 invitational and competitive exhibitions. Since 1986 she has been invited to juror over 80 shows in the United States alone. She does not believe in any heirarchy in art. In the process of selecting works for the show she looks for personal content and the artist’s ability to express this effectively and emotionally. She believes that her role as a juror is to choose the best work from the submissions. She doesn’t believe in putting the works through any personal preference filter.

For this show, each participating artist paid a fee to submit up to three slides. Ms Lui then selected 113 works from the 413 submitted slides. The awards for the show were selected by looking at the art, as slides can be deceptive in terms of the actual quality of the work. The award selection process involves not only awards selected by Ms Lui, but selections by several community and corporate entities which have donated cash, as well as art supplies. Ms Lui also gave a public lecture at UCCS specifically for local artists entitled “Finding One’s Voice”.

This show is the museum’s third collaboration with the Pikes Peak Watercolor Society. All three shows have been independently sdjudicated and open to submissions from any artist. The initial collaborative exhibition took place durring January and Febuary of 1997, and the second happened in Febuary and March of 2000. For each exhibit the Pikes Peak Watercolor Society produced a color catalog of the show, with each work illustrated, and had done so once again.

The show includes 111 artists with only two artists getting two works selected. Colorado artists dominate the show with 52 hailing from Colorado, and 30 of these from Colorado Springs. The next best represented states are California with 9 artist; Texas with 7; New york with 6; and 4 from North Carolina. Washington, New Mexico, Oregon, Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania yielded two artists each. Connecticut, Virginia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Indiana, Nebraska, Tennessee, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Maryland, Oklahoma, Florida, and Michigan are represented by one artist. Although artist from 4 countries submitted slides, only one Canadian artist was selected to participate.

Additional support for the exhibition was provided by the Colorado Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the National Endowment for the arts, and the Colorado General Assembly: the Bee Vrandenburg Foundation; the Colorado Springs Community Foundation; The UCCS Student Government Association on behalf of the student body’s cultural awareness; and the Gallery of Contemporary Art’s membership.

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Selections from the Colorado Collection

Four Vignettes

May 27-August 5, 2005
Opening Reception: Friday May 27, 5-7 p.m.

Hung Liu
The Bride (detail), 2001

University of Colorado President, Elizabeth Hoffman, in collaboration with the CU Art Museum in Boulder and the Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Present: Selections from the Colorado Collection: Four Vignettes.

The Vignettes, or small exhibitions are:
A Looking Glass of One’s Own: Contemporary Women Photographers
Two Mexican Views: Photographs by Paul Strand and Manuel Bravo
Books, Maps, and Multiples: Contemporary Graphic Art
Minimalism: Presence – Absence

These exhibitions were selected from the Colorado Collection, the CU Art Museum’s permanent collection, by Lisa Tamiris Becker (CU Art Museum Director) with organizational assistance from Brigit Carlin (CU Art Museum’s Collection Manager). The last time an exhibition from this extensive state-owned art collection was shown at the Gallery of Contemporary Art was in March of 2002. This particular show was guest curated by Bridget Carlin. Lisa Becker’s selections focus on modern and contemporary art organized into four exhibitions featuring contemporary women photographers; photographs of Mexico by two masters, Paul Stand and Manuel Bravo; Contemporary prints and artists’ books; and selections of significant minimalist works on paper. The collection was started in 1939 to be used as a teaching tool for students. It has grown into a comprehensive collection that enriches the educational experience of students, faculty, and the broader CU community, as well as the general public, through exposure to origional works of art and thus art history, museum studies, contemporary art practice, and various social and cultural issues that can be addressed through viewing such art.

The Colorado Collection, has grown over the years through the generosity of many donors and mosest acquisition funds. Over the last three decades, it has grown rappidly as a result of faculty and student collaboration with the CU Boulder Art Department’s Visiting Artist Program. More than 370 artists, critics, and curators have been involved with this program since 1970. Many of these individuals contributed works to the collection. Areas of concentration are old Master works on paper, American prints of the 1930’s and 1940’s, documentary photography, Japanese ukiyo-e prints, 19th century German landscapes, pop art and contemporary prints and paintings. Major gifts from Polly and Mark Addison beginning in the early 1990’s significantly expanded the contemporary graphics in the collection.

A Looking Glass of One’s Own: Contmporary Women Photographers

Since it’s inception in the first half of the nineteenth century, women have been active practitioners of the science and art of photography, carving out a space of their own within the history of photography and thereby assuring the canonization of subject matter crucial to the lives of women. Artists included in this section include Judy Dater, Meridel Rubenstein, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, and Orit Raff, representing generations of prominent contemporary women photographers.

Two Mexican Views: Paul Strand and Manuel Bravo

Strand’s photographs, taken in 1932 durring an extended stay in Mexico, depict street scenes, architecture, religious statuary, and the people of Mexico. “(Photography) is the language in which Strand has written the most eloquent paean to the stregth and dignitiy of man, to the brooding violence and beauty of nature”, wrote Leo Hurwitz in his introduction to Strand’s Mexican portfolio. The images are reproduced by Photogravure, which gives them lush and richly toned surfaces and exquisite detail.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo is considered Mexico’s greatest photographer. This group of black and white photographs reflect daily life in both the city and countryside. Elegant and rich in texture, Bravo’s images isolate the poetic, revealing the lyrical shape of a plant’s leaves, the interlocking forms of an adobe entranceway, the pattern of people against the horizon. These brilliantly composed images have a sence of timelessness.

Books, Maps and Multiples: Contemporary Graphics

The arts of printmaking, bookmaking, and mapmaking have an intertwined history within the arts. This exhibition highlights diverse approaches to the art of the multiple featuring contemporary artists’ prints and books, as well as the continued use of map imagery by contemporary artists. The exhibition includes the 92″ long codex by Mexican American artist Enrique Chagoya, which comments on the contemporary society while referring back in form, structure, and content to the ancient Meso-American codex. Also included is Jane Hammond’s astrological map print My Heavens!, and Hung Lui’s prints The Bride and Leaping, which merge influences from Chinese Social Realism with painterly expressionism to comment on dramatic political and social changes in China in the 20th century.

Minimalism: Presence – Absence

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, artists such as Donald Judd theorized that art should be reduced to it’s very essentials. This radical strategy of reduction yeilded not only subtlety of form, color, and light but aspired to achieve a greater presence through absence. The emphasis on refined differentiation achieved by minimalist reduction paradoxically often manifested itself most effectively in seriality. This section includes portfolios by Sol LeWitt and Dorthea Rockburne, as well as individual prints by Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella.

Additional support for the exhibitions provided by the Colorado Council on the Arts, a stage agency funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Colorado General Assembly; the UCCS Student Government Association on the behalf of the student body’s cultural awareness; and the museum’s membership.

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2005 Student Art Exhibit

April 8 - May 13, 2005
Opening Reception: Friday April 8, 5-7:30 p.m.

The Gallery of Contemporary Art will host the opening of the 2005 Student Art Exhibition with a public reception on Friday, April 8, 2005 from 5:00 – 7:30 pm. The exhibitions include the juried 2005 Student Art Exhibition at the Gallery of Contemporary Art, a university art museum, and the Salon des Refuses at the University Center. Both shows will continue on view at these adjacent locations through June 2, 2006 durring regularly scheduled hours.

Submissions for these annual shows are open to any UCCS student presently enrolled, or enrolled durring the Fall 2004 semester. These exhibits are intriguing as they include a broad range of experimental work executed by UCCS students in virtually all art media. The museum show is often the first opportunity for emerging artists to exhibit work in a museum setting. These annual shows also provide a ready means for the art going public to spot potential talent and to aquire origional art inexpensively before an artist’s career is established.

Jurors for this year’s museum show include Daisy McConnell, local artist and Director of Colorado College’s Coborn Gallery: and Malcolm McCollum, local writer, poet and artist, and a DeVry University Humanities and English Instructor, Malcolm previously taught at Pikes Peak Community College’s Downtown Studio and helped to operate that location’s art gallery. Both jurors are well known to the local art scene.

The Salon des Refuses consists of work submitted to the jurors, but not accepted into the museum show. Students may elect a rejected piece of work to be shown in this spin-off show. The Salon des Refuses is named after the show sanctioned by Napoleaon III in 1863, as a result of public outcry at the Impressionist’s exclusion from the annual French Academies Beaux Arts Salon. The Impressionists are now regarded as the most well known artists of all time. The historical implication of this particular show title is designed to take some of the stigma of rejection away from the artists, and certainly invites comparison with the accepted work in the museum show.

These exhibitions are the only annual shows the Gallery of Contemporary Art regularly schedules. They always take place at the end of the spring semester and are collaborative projects involving the museum’s Gallery Management students, the UCCS Student Art Club, and the University Center. Essentially the exhibitions are wholly student projects designed to benefit the Student Art Club directly through submission fees, as well as to provide venues and practical experience to students involved in exhibiting art and learning about installing and promoting exhibitions.

A related art educational lecture series which takes place during the shows is ArtWeek. This year ArtWeek will take place between April 18th through the 22nd, and will include free daily presentations that are open to anyone. These events usually involve local or regional artists or art professionals, mid-career, who reveal how they got their careers off the ground, and specifically, what their artistic interests involve. This kind of exposure is very meaningful for emerging artists and can prove invaluable to the planning and implementaion of their careers.

The exhibitions and ArtWeek presentations are supported by the UCCS Student Government Association on the behalf of the student body’s cultural awareness; the Colorado Council on the Arts with assistance from the National endowment for the Arts and the Colorado General Assembly: the Stonehouse Agency; and the Gallery of Contemporary Art’s membership organization.

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2005 Art Faculty Biennial Exhibition

February 11 - March 18, 2005
Opening Reception: Friday February 11, 5:00-7:00 p.m.

Sean O'Meallie
Wood sculpture

The Gallery of Contemporary Art, a university museum, in conjunction with the Visual and Performing Art’s Department of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, is proud to present its biennial art faculty exhibition featuring work by 17 teachers. From its beginning as a degree program in 1970, the Visual Art Department at CU, Colorado Springs, has offered Bachelors of Arts degrees in studio art and art history. Since 1981 there has also been an undergraduate minor in Gallery Management in conjunction with the art museum, which acts as a lab for the minor. Within the studio program, coursework is offered in painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, papermaking, computer imaging, and time based media.

The UCCS art faculty are active not only in teaching, but in pursuing their own creative interests. The tradition of artist/teachers began centuries ago when master artisans took apprentices into their workshops to teach them their trade. Outside the United States it is less common for universities to offer degrees in art, leaving this job to trade schools, which are referred to there as polytechnical schools.

This year’s art faculty exhibition will include work by painter Honorarium Instructor Chris Alvarez; a digital media installation by Asst. Professor Valerie Brodar; sulpture by Professor Louis Cicotello; photographs by Instructor Carol Dass; a mixed media installation by Professor Lin Fife; paintings by Honorarium Instructor Micheal Gault; digital images by Professor Emeritus Julia Hoerner; a mixed media installation by Honorarium Instructor Kathy Hutton; paintings byHonorarium InstructorSarah Jurewicz; paintings by instructor Lenore McKerlie; sculpture by Honorarium Instructor Sean O’Meallie; a film, interview, and photographs by Asst. Professor Gerry Riggs; photographs by Honorarium Instructor Bill Starr; sculpture by Honorarium Instructor Laurel Swab; a film by Professor Robert Von Dassanowsky; mixed media woks by Honorarium Instructor Rodney Wood; and paintings by Honorarium Instructor Mariya Zvonkavich.

Support for the exhibition at UCCS provided by the Bee Vandenburg Foundationl; the Colorado Council on the Arts, with assistance from the National Endowments for the Arts and the Colorado General Assembly; the UCCS Student Government Association on behalf of the student body’s cultural enlightenment; the Jane Hardeman Estate; and the museum’s membership.

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