Conceived by Adam Lerner and Elissa Auther, the peer reviewed book includes twenty different essays focused on events, happenings and art moments. The twenty were then condensed to eight case studies to create the exhibition on view at MCA. Each element highlights how art was not merely a minor part of the movement. Instead, the exhibition focuses on how the entire counterculture movement was a kind of art. And one that went beyond psychedelic style and design.

Take for instance the Cockettes, founded by George Harris, the preppy blonde in the iconic photograph by Bernie Boston, putting carnations in gun barrels during an antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon in 1967. He was 18 in that photograph and on his way to San Francisco where he changed his name to Hibiscus and came out of the closet. The Cockettes were not merely a gay-themed drag troupe as they are often described, but a group of counterculture individuals both gay and straight who lived theatrically, in costume, performing lavish stage acts for free. Glam rock and contemporary androgyny would not exist if not for the Cockettes. A treasured object on display in this exhibition is a handmade book created by Hibiscus. It’s been carefully photographed by MCA and sits under glass in all it’s sequined glory. It’s the only item George Harris’ mother Ann has of him. Harris died in the early 1980s of complications from AIDS. But he left behind a glamorous legacy. According to Allen Ginsberg, “The Cockettes brought out into the street what was in in the closet, in terms of theatrical dress and imaginative theater.”

An additional form of self-expression and a previously lost work of art from the time period is “The Ultimate Painting.” Collaboratively produced by Drop City founders Gene and JoAnn Bernofsky, Clark Richert, Richard Kallweit and Charles DiJulio, “The Ultimate Painting” was made to spin during multi-media shows in Drop City’s Theater Dome. The large, circular painting, organized according to a five-pointed geodesic framework, reveals different patterns under various frequencies of a strobe light. Mastering the control is half the fun and one can spend many minutes viewing the work and not see all of it’s possibilities. This version was recreated by Clark Richert from a high resolution photograph, as the original was lost after being exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1968/69 as part of “Experiments in Art and Technology” organized by engineer Billy Klüver and artist Robert Rauschenberg.

Also recreated for this exhibition is “Invisible Writing” by The Single Wing Turquoise Bird. Combining slides, films, and strobes with dishes of colored oil and water and other devices for projecting pictures and abstract designs, The Single Wing Turquoise Bird, composed their shows in real time, improvising with acts like The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd and Janis Joplin. A compilation of art, cinema and visual music, the work has a psychedelic vibe, but is far more than can be categorized within that dimension. “Invisible Writing” was created using current technology, but is very much like what they originally produced. Born from Single Wing Turquoise Bird are music video’s, digital media art and musical, visual, theatrical experiences.

The exhibition stands without the book, which is organized into four central concepts: Communal Encounters; Handmade Worlds; Cultural Politics; and Altered Consciousness. Those of us born in the midst of the counterculture movement (that includes Auther and Lerner) realize that we came to be during a time of positive and futuristic belief. A time when people believed they could change the world and set out to do so. From Ant Farm comes ideas for new technology and connection based on experimental architecture. Dance and movement would not be the same without Anna Halprin. And Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, encapsulated their goals into a “10 Point Program” of visual clarity. Something lacking in both the current Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements.

Auther and Lerner make the case that all of these moments tie together and belong in the canon of art history. Lerner acknowledged that given an unlimited budget they could have also included film, poetry, song and music. “The fluidity of recent contemporary art can be better understood if the legacy of the avant-garde is joined by the tradition of the counterculture,” Auther and Lerner write. “The counterculturalists were actually the most enthusiastic followers of the avant-garde’s call for the integration of art into life.”

Yet I agree with Lucy R. Lippard, who wrote the introduction to the book, that West of Center is lacking a sense of context, “of landscape and place, of western identity and its responses to the counterculture in these accounts.” The exhibition raises more questions than it answers, but that is a good thing. It leaves room for more exploration, research and future exhibitions.

It is clear from this book and exhibition that the counterculture wanted to fuse art, life and politics. Perhaps it was a utopian dream. Yet, it continues to resonate. Issue-oriented arts are making a comeback. We are seeing artists all over the world advocating for political change, for life integration, and for the fusion of all into something more. If we keep trying, perhaps someday we’ll succeed.

There’s no place like home for the holidays. But when home is Pagosa Springs, Colorado where people are more interested in the latest ski report, and you’re an art writer, well, home is more a place you retreat to than a place you spend a Saturday viewing art.

That’s not the case thanks to Michael and Denise Coffee and Shy Rabbit Contemporary Arts. On Saturday, the Coffees opened an exclamation point of a group exhibit featuring 17 artists’ work that has graced the walls and floors in 2011 at this secret, visual art treasure in the proverbial middle-of-art-world nowhere.

Shy Rabbit’s 4,000-square-foot space is larger than many exhibition spaces in Denver, Fort Collins and Santa Fe. But it’s the quality of the work that truly shines. I’ve been all over Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., viewing art. This year, I’ve visited New York and Philadelphia. The quality of work on display at Shy Rabbit is comparable to anything I’ve seen.

In some cases, it far exceeds the excessive drivel churned from MFA programs filling galleries and nonprofit spaces. Converse to the frenetic, Shy Rabbit provides a calm via artists dedicated to innovation, craftsmanship, perseverance and passion. These artists are committed to the art and not the market, something that can be found only outside an art world center.

Take, for example, Ron Fundingsland, a 1970 graduate of the University of Colorado. His aquatint etchings are truly brilliant. The craftsmanship is impeccable. He is a master printmaker, the kind that typically works at places such as Crown Point Press in San Francisco or Tamarind in Albuquerque with other artists to make their creative vision a reality. But Fundingsland also is a highly creative and visionary artist. His works are subtle, yet powerful, and sometimes merciless, yet beautiful. On display at Shy Rabbit are three small valentines that are anything but kitschy and romantic. These prints, by isolating familiar objects and taking them out of context, dramatize illusion. The play of light and shadow provides mystery.

Coronary by Ron Fundingsland

In “Coronary,” two heart shapes are connected by a bent tube. Is it cherries on a vine? Or a bent dumbbell? “YOUR MIND” is emblazoned in the blue heart,“ALL MINE” in the red. The color is dripping from beneath. Another valentine features a locked heart. A third, a tube of lipstick and a bullet. These are personal and challenging works about domestic violence and abuse. They take the puffed candy heart to a level that’s anything but sweet, yet they remain beautiful.

Fundingsland’s prints are in the collection of the Denver Art Museum, which should consider offering him a retrospective. He’s also in the Seattle Art Museum, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Nelson-Atkins Museum and many more.

This year, at the North American Print Biennial, Jim Dine awarded Fundingsland the Ture Bengtz Memorial Prize. If Fundingsland lived anywhere but rural Southwest Colorado, he would be handing the prizes alongside Dine instead of receiving them from him. His work is that good. And though he is represented by Robischon Gallery in Denver, I never see his work there, and I should.

Instead, I have to come home, where I can thumb through the flat files at Shy Rabbit and peruse his lush, brilliant, museum-quality prints hanging on the wall in a warehouse in a town with a population of barely 10,000.

Half Life by Ron Fundingsland, Ture Bengtz Memorial Prize 2011

Along with Fundingsland, the Coffees have cultivated relationships with other artists of great talent from around the country.

This show also features the unsettling mutant lithographs of Michael D. Barnes from Illinois, the shattered and remade ceramic vessels of Patrick Shia Crabb from California, the elegant vessels and forms of Jeff Pender from North Carolina, and the organic salt-fired stoneware of Brad Schwieger from Ohio.

These works are shown with Michael Coffee’s Shino, Ash and Tenmoku glazed stoneware Chawan, Ynomi, Guinomi and Mizusashi, which are collected and prized worldwide, and my personal favorites, his tall, rootless jars in handmade metal stands.

Coffee teaches ceramics and his own trademarked version of Reductive Ink Monoprinting that does not require a press. A significant portion of artists on view are current and former students, including Sandy Applegate, Debra Blair, Marti Bledsoe, Lal Echterhoff, Charla Ellis, Ruth Fiege, Gail Hershey and Maureen May. Blair’s mixed media abstractions embellished with embroidered stitching are vibrant and textural with balance and energy. In fact, all the print work by these artists is highly competent with strong design.

The exhibition also includes paintings by Karl Isberg from his Hermetic Book Series and fantastical animal skulls by Chris Haas. Inspired by the post-industrial Rococo works of acclaimed contemporary artist Kris Kuksi, Haas has created his own version of Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull; but where Haas’ ornate and embellished animal skulls are instilled with life and meaning, Hirst’s remain tedious and hollow.

Detail of work by Chris Haas

The contemporary art world often seems meaningless – spectacle for the sake of spectacle. In Denver, there is angst about the market (or lack thereof). The city continues to elevate its cultural profile, most recently with the opening of the Clyfford Still museum. Still left New York in 1950 and rarely showed his work, choosing instead to move it to a warehouse in Maryland until Denver built him a museum that now has 94 percent of his oeuvre.

It’s that same spirit and belief in the art I find here at Shy Rabbit. It’s nice to be home for the holidays.

If you go

Holiday Group Show at Shy Rabbit Contemporary Arts, 333 Bastille Drive, Pagosa Springs, through Jan. 22.
The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily and evenings by appointment. For an appointment or more information, call 731-2766 or visit www.shyrabbit.com.

Leanne Goebel is a freelance writer and member of the International Association of Art Critics. Reach her at artsjournalist@mac.com.

In 1944, Clyfford Still made the first abstract expressionist painting, in Richmond, Virginia: “1944-N No.1”

In 1945 in New York, Willem de Kooning merged together his Cubist and Surrealist tendencies into a figurative abstract called Pink Angels, which is considered his first abstract expressionist work.

I was struck by how individually these artists each approached the figure and how they both used the figure to get to abstraction. Both created figure ground ambiguity in their work and both toyed with Cubism, flattening the picture plane and distorting perspective. But De Kooning remained within the edges of the painting whereas Still exploded beyond them. In the late 1940s, De Kooning was painting his infamous women with their toothy grins and large eyes. His use of paint explosive and expressive. In the late 1940s Still was creating lush fields of thick pigment and ever larger abstractions.

In 1950, Still politely ended his relationship with dealer Betty Parsons and in 1961 he moved to a farm near Westminster, Maryland. Aside from a few select gifts of paintings to museums, Still rarely exhibited his work. But he continued to explore abstraction, with it’s jagged shapes and zippers, only with more open space, less thick pigment, until his death in 1980, when all his works that were not in the public domain, were sealed from both public and scholarly viewing until the opening of the Clyfford Still museum in Denver.

In 1963, De Kooning moved to East Hampton, Long Island. His paintings began referencing the landscape and he created a number of cast bronze sculptures. By the 1980s, suffering from alcoholism and dementia, De Kooning’s paintings became more sparse and graphic, featuring amorphic lines with shapes of color, less dense and more open and airy than his earlier works.

Both are giants of abstract expressionism. Their influence on artists working today is significant. De Kooning’s probably more so than Still because less of his works have been available for viewing until now. It was DeKooning who first explored the use of black and white in painting out of necessity. He couldn’t afford to buy pigments. Many others of the New York based abstract expressionists went on to explore and create black and white paintings: Pollock, Motherwell, Barnett Newman and Franz Kline. Still also worked with only black and white, but often the white was bare canvas.

There is something about Still’s work that is decisively Western. Adjunct curator of the Still museum, David Anfam suggests that Still considered a painting’s surface to be “hostile terrain.” And Christopher Knight wrote in his recent review of the inaugural exhibition that “1944-N No. 1 doesn’t describe a hard-bitten natural landscape so much as create a painterly equivalent for one.” I suppose the same could be said for DeKooning’s women, that he has created the painterly equivalent of a woman. But in Still’s works, the expansiveness is something found in the West, not in New York or Europe. The thick, built up black surfaces are liberating and mysterious, colored by force and energy, by possibility splitting the canvas from it’s frame, creating a seemingly limitless view.

Ricky Allmanʼs paintings on view in this exhibition at David B. Smith gallery are neither
dystopian or utopian—they fall somewhere in the middle—dark, yet hopeful. The series
seems cavernous, as if Allman has gone underground to secret bunkers, perhaps the
abandoned silver mine beneath Area 51 or the rumored tunnels beneath Denver
International Airport. Yet, these are paintings of structures of massive scale, built against and
atop mountains, bereft of human presence, scale signified by flocked white pine trees. Itʼs a
180-degree shift for the Utah born artist who began his art career painting doomsday.

Raised as a conservative Mormon near Provo, Utah, Allman confesses that as a young boy
he didnʼt think he would live to be twenty. He literally believed the world was going to end.
And that ominous fear influenced his early works as a graduate student at the Rhode Island
School of Design, where he began painting apocalyptic imagery based upon his theological
upbringing, the geographical environment, mountainous landscapes and Mormon
architecture.

“At the time, I didnʼt want to admit how biographical it was,” Allman said. “Iʼve made sense of
a lot of that information and Iʼm now fascinated with the future and what possibilities there
are.”

Allman now spends his time listening to science podcasts and reading books on technology.
He is fascinated with the power of the human mind and the merging of science and
technology. Whereas before his work was informed by the hopelessness instilled in him by
his religion, and the bizarre view of the future that faith taught him, today he is more hopeful
and imagines scenarios of possibility. Evidenced in his landscape paintings of imagined
fantastical landscapes that combine organic forms and geometric structures.

In spite of the fact that art was mostly absent in his upbringing, Allman began drawing and
doodling as a boy. He didnʼt know anyone who was an artist and it wasnʼt until college that
he took a few art classes. His teacherʼs encouraged him. He left Utah Valley State College
with an Associates Degree and moved to Boston where he earned his BFA from the
Massachusetts College of Art, where, as a senior, his painting style began to take hold: a
frenetic, expansive, chaotic visual language built on duality and structure. At the time it was
solely apocalyptic and rooted in destruction.

Today, he would find it strange to illustrate those same ideas because as he was painting
works that were autobiographical, he was also beginning to question the theology of his faith
and upbringing. While Allman admits there remains a dark side to his painting, he states that
ultimately he is an optimist. A maximalist, he puts everything into each work, letting loose
any restraints on the level of detail or number of structures he allows in his paintings. This
current exhibition features paintings that are whiter and more industrial than previous works.
And while he has tried some sculptural installations based on his paintings, and even started
a video, he sticks with painting, he says “because the viewer automatically gives up any
pretense of seeing a real space when they look at a two dimensional surface.” His work is
about the manipulation of space, but is also deeply influenced by the science fiction films of
his adolescence like Back to the Future. Also evident in his work is an exploration of density,
urbanism and places like Taiwan, where they are building skyscrapers up the side of
mountains, that the artist finds to be simultaneously disgusting and fascinating.

Now living in Kansas City, Missouri, mountains remain an important element for the painter,
who considers them protective. But they also help him investigate the extreme scale of
expansion and building, and contrast with the high structure and finite detail of the other
elements of his painting, allowing a looser, more painterly touch.
Allman works on multiple canvases at one time, but each painting starts differently with
merely the spark of a compositional idea. He prefers acrylics, which dry quickly, but there is
a lot of prep work necessary, as the canvas gets layered with gesso, underpainting and gel
mediums. The artist conceptualizes the basic structure and the architecture of the painting,
but then leaves the detail to intuition, filling in and refining. His color palette tends to cycle. In
graduate school, he used intense, vibrant color everywhere. Then he took all the color out
and did gray and white paintings, using color selectively, “so it could function in a more active
way,” he said. The paintings gradually got more and more colorful again and he has since
pulled back to a more subdued palette with more earth tones. A wider variety of influences
now affect his palette. A trip to Amsterdam this past summer brought in the palette of that
city: lots of red brick with black and white trim. His studio in Kansas City is in an old industrial
neighborhood with sparse bits of color here and there.

What Sarah Sze creates in three-dimensions, Allman manages to spew across a canvas
more like other RISD alumni Julie Mehretu and Benjamin Edwards. Where Edwards seems
more focused on cities and Mehretu on cosmopolitan mapping, Allman blends together
industry, urban structures and grandiose natural environments into something that is both
science and fiction.

David B. Smith Gallery
1543 A Wazee Street
Denver, CO 80202
303.893.4234
davidbsmithgallery.com

This exhibition began by selecting six invited artists with differing approaches to nature, landscape, the environment, and place: Kevin Bell, Chris Coleman, Gregory Euclide, Jenny Gummersall, Laleh Mehran, and Kate Petley. Artists then submitted works and 40 were selected for inclusion based upon the framework presented by the invited artists. However, the seed of the concept began with Kate Petley, an artist I have known professionally and personally for several years. Petley once lived in the small town in Southwestern Colorado where I currently reside. It’s a gorgeous place, surrounded by the craggy San Juan Mountains, and a vast wilderness. The area is thinly populated and has no big box stores or urban conveniences. It was here that Petley created her largest public artwork Air Drops for the Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas. Her juicy abstract resin panels explore the edges where the urban world bumps up against nature and that tension comes from her relocation to the Front Range. While living in Southwest Colorado, her works were about light, time, and the glimpses of nature caught from the corner of one’s eye. It is inevitable that we came to know one another, living in such a small town, and we remain in a network of artists, writers, and curators who share ideas over soy latte’s and Facebook. Petley shared her concept for Glint: Time and Light with me via email. She then posted it on her website. I kept returning to the work, which seizes on the moment that sunlight reflects off the surface of the water, but is created using industrial film, unfinished wood, and theatrical lighting, for its perception about place and its pretense of nature.

Petley’s work kept bumping up in my mind against the ideas explored by Gregory Euclide,an artist I have written about for Art Ltd magazine, and as an essayist for the David B. Smith Gallery in Denver. His approach to landscape is one that challenges viewers to see small realities and visual misconceptions. His painted, crumbled, mixed media artworks and installations cogitate between the artifice of making an object, the Duchampian tradition of finding an object and making it art, and the actual land. In Capture #3 the sculpture is formed by pouring a glue-like substance on the ground and literally lifting the earth beneath to create the object. He uses lake water, melted snow, and pigments created from dirt combined with found objects and items from nature to create his works that explore the representation of the landscape in art, as in Produced within the layers of viewing’s making. Euclide is critical of Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole, who attempted to convey on a flat rectangle the dynamic experience of nature over time. Euclide wants the viewer to go into the flat spaces not only with their mind, but to enter the 3-D spaces with their physical body.

Both Petley and Euclide ask viewers to enter into a landscape, if not physically, then perhaps figuratively. Imagining the dimensionality of reality. Exploring the relationship between inner and outer topography. They are aware of the traditions of landscape art and have no interest in repeating what many still consider to be the ideal form of creative expression—depicting Nature as
is, as seen, as perceived.

Therefore, it was important that a “landscape painter” be in included in Specific Environments. Kevin Bell is the kind of painter I wanted for this exhibition— one that handles paint masterfully, minimally, and realistically, yet incorporates complex concepts onto the canvas. Bell also helps viewers see what is not readily visible, while challenging perceptions and beliefs. His works deliberate on the man-made and natural environments, but are particularly focused on the tension between the two, which often results in ambivalence. In Sinkhole, unseen erosion results in collapse and introversion, while in Dam an invisible man-made structure is suggested not only by the title, but the depiction of the land. Bell works in the negative spaces highlighting the importance of editing, paring down, and suggestion in our society.

Photographer Jenny Gummersall envisions innuendo as well in her abstract equine landscape photographs. The playful, yet serious aesthetic quality of her work was something I also wanted to explore in this exhibition. It is not necessary for art to be academic and cryptic. It can be accessible, yet rich in beauty and meaning. One of the things I admire most about Gummersall’s work is how she makes the ordinary look extraordinary. In With Clouds and Mane Landscape Square the viewer does a double take. The physical landscape becomes an otherworldly landscape. It seems at once simple, but upon closer examination, the viewer realizes what they are seeing, challenging their initial myths and memories.

When considering the otherworldly, my perceptions jump to technology, which infiltrates and influences our lives in dramatic ways. It is technology that impacts our environment and landscapes. Everything we use to make our lives “easier” involves the use of materials extracted from the land. So it was imperative that Specific Environments include new media animation and HD video. Ivar Zeile, the director of Plus Gallery in Denver suggested I contact Chris Coleman and when I perused his website I knew I had found what I was looking to include in this exhibition. Coleman then introduced me to his wife Laleh Mehran. Coleman and Mehran are instructors in new media and digital art at the University of Denver. His award-winning HD animation The Magnitude of the Continental Divides takes viewers on a journey between many locations in various states of withdrawal and aggression, but more importantly for this exhibition is the notion that the individual is caught in the midst of this chaos, unable to define their identity without place. Place is paramount. “It is the stuff of fiction, as close to our living lives as the earth we can pick up and rub between our fingers, something we can feel and smell,” Eudora Welty wrote.

It is not so much place as point of view that is questioned in Mehran’s projected video Xerces Society, Installment VII: From London to Marrakech. The projection utilizes apertures that are at once windows and eyes suggesting travel by train. A parade of level images raise questions in the viewer’s mind and create the tension of point of view. Mehran blurs art, science, and politics together while exploring the complexities of fanaticism and ideolog—critical notions in a world experiencing upheaval and questioning borders.

Every artwork is a metaphor. But how do we understand and interpret metaphor?

The human brain functions by using a structured set of generic knowledge called schema by cognitive psychologists. When we approach the idea of metaphor, we are employing use of schema. The artist uses their own personal schema to elaborate their visual metaphor. If the viewer doesn’t have a similar schema, they cannot receive the information. They may interpret the metaphor based on their own schemata or perceptions and not that of the artist. However, decoding a map, whether spatial or thematic, seems to be quite natural for most humans. Many theorist’s posit that this is because the landscape metaphor and the way we view our spatial environment requires a knowledge of terrain and our corporeal presence in space. Something we all have. This is why when we look at a painting and see three horizontal bands of color, we automatically presume it to be landscape—terroir, horizon, and sky.

Each of the artists juried into this exhibition relates, reacts, riffs and rubs up against these invited artists works and ideas. An individual artwork represents its own distinct habitat, and these habitats combine to create a composite of our world, our society, and our culture. Viewed together, I hope that Specific Environments adds up to something more than the sum of its parts. That beyond this moment of viewing something is revealed that was unknown and that together these objects originate a new place as tangible as those we can pick up and rub through our fingers.

Leanne Goebel
AICA-USA
Curator and Juror
December 2011

On view through January 14, 2012 at the LINCOLN center gallery in Fort Collins, CO.

Take a YouTube video tour of the exhibition by watching the video below:

Participating Artists

Invited

• Kevin Bell, WY
• Chris Coleman, CO
• Jenny Gummersall, CO
• Gregory Euclide, MN
• Laleh Mehran, CO
• Kate Petley, CO

Juried Artists

• Monique Janssen-Belitz, NM
• Thomas Brunet, CO
• Cynthia Camlin, WA
• Beau Carey, CO
• Stephen Cartwright, IL
• Kevin Curry, CO
• Elvira Dayel-Kogan, CA
• Betsy Duzan, CO
• Jeremy Dyer, NY
• Susan Field, CA
• Jef Gunn, OR
• Sabina Haque, OR
• Jodi Hays, TN
• Cecil Howell, CA
• Andrea Jensen, UT
• Tomiko Jones, CO
• David Jones, WY
• Anna Landa, NY
• Armin Muhsam, MO
• Hilary Norcliffe, CA
• Stephanie Ognar, IL
• Woody Packard, NY
• Karina Rocco, FL
• Dawn Roe, FL
• Pam Rogers, MD
• Katherine Rondina, NM
• Georgia Rowswell, WY
• Adrien Segal, CA
• Amanda Small, NC
• Anthony Teneralli, CO
• Cheryl Gail Toh, MO
• Andrew Wapinski, PA
• Jordi Williams, VA

Catalog available:

What can be known of the man who forcibly turned his back on the commercial art world in the early 1970s? This question may well be the province of the new Clyfford Still museum, which bests any other hagiographic museum dedicated to a single artist’s work, in possessing 94% of his lifetime output: 825 paintings, 1,575 works on paper and 3 sculptures. The inaugural exhibition at the new space designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, co-curated by director Dean Sobel and adjunct curator David Anfam, features 110 Still works.

Earliest is PH-45, a small still life of colorful river stones and lupine, painted in 1925 when Still was 21.  This is followed by a 1927 western landscape with a factory or grain tower, a plume of smoke rising, and a vast horizon punctuated by a long, red train. Even in his earliest landscapes, Still’s affinity for color and vertical shapes is evident.  He painted trains, farm workers, sweeping fields and broad skies. Then, switching to the figure, he turned nearly mannerist, in works featuring elongated faces and limbs, while exploring the physical, emotional and psychological effects of hard labor on men.

In PH-77 from Depression year 1936, blood trails down the arms of the men chaffing wheat, their bodies bent beneath a blackened sky. The grotesquery of arms nearly as long as legs prefigures the 1937 work in which men, in PH-343, begin to merge with machinery, before five years later Still moves to showing solely outlines, shapes and shadows.

1944-N No. 1 (PH-235) shows Still having made a canvas of complete abstraction, using layers of  black pigment cut with a deep red outline, a hint of vivid yellow, a drip almost of white and in the lower right corner, an emerald green.

Still said that if you look “with unfettered eyes you may find forces within yourself that you didn’t realize.” One painting that continues to resonate long after standing before it is PH-129, 1949. It’s a smallish canvas, featuring thick layers of burnt umber and goldenrod sliced  by storm cloud gray with the palest lavender. There are hints of hidden green and then in the upper left quadrant the merlot red and black tones that Still preferred. It was painted in San Francisco, when he taught at what is now the San Francisco Art Institute.  Still claimed that behind all of his work was the figure. The tall verticals express a life force.

In gallery five, dedicated to the 1950-1961 years when Still lived in New York and painted amid AbEx brethren, the scale of works increase dramatically. These works will look familiar to viewers who have seen Still’s in the Museum of Modern Art or San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, for example: jagged shapes locked in bold color fields, or raw ungessoed canvases pierced with color.

Two of the late paintings on view are magisterial. PH-9292 from 1974 is nearly 15 feet wide. In this horizontal canvas, the vertical gesture, expressed in Still’s signature black pigment, is more lightly applied, jutting into bare canvas, punctuated by white. There is a thin red vertical near the lower middle of the work and hints of color in dabs of magenta and yellow. The swirling motion in the canvas is like the wind blowing the jagged shapes in all directions, clockwise and counterclockwise. Not all works succeed for me, some have too much zigzag motion in them, but I left the museum realizing that Clyfford Still’s contention that his work needs to be seen all together, was correct. The gestalt is symphonic.

Still was serious about his painting and what it meant. Sobel, Anfam and others have dozens of possible future exhibitions to present yet unseen works by the artist. Scholarship, until now nonexistent will likely increase. But the question remains, though, once the school field trips come and go, and the novelty of the new wears off, will this museum with its $10 admission price be appealing to a public with a millisecond attention span more interested in snapping photos with their smartphones than actually spending a sustained time looking at the paintings as Still wanted? With an art viewing public that can go to art fairs for a viewing hypermarket, is there a contemporary art lover capable of seeing the majesty in Clyfford Still’s vision?

Exhibition Essay by Leanne Haase Goebel

One summer more than 20 years ago, while traveling through the Andes Mountains of Ecuador, Kim Keever began to question: Where did these changing landscapes come from? Why is there such a great differentiation between mountains, oceans and river systems? Why do the Andes jut up between the Pacific Ocean on one side and the nearly endless Amazon River Basin on the other? When he returned to New York that fall of 1989, he began an autodidactic study of geology.

It is from these questions, with the mind of an engineer and an objective, scientific, yet creative approach, that Keever came to create his large C-print photographs. They are constructed images. The artist works with a 6-foot-long, 200-gallon aquarium, building dioramas within the tank. Sometimes he uses pillow stuffing behind the tank to create cloud banks fading to the horizon. On other occasions, he builds additional dioramas in front and behind the tank. The tank is then filled with water, and paint pigments are added and pumped around with special tubing to create an atmosphere of surprisingly realistic quality. Then he begins to take hundreds of photographs.

“It is amazing how some things mimic examples in the real world. Paint will flow through the water like cloud formations we see every day.” It’s a perfect example of fractals, where the mathematical and visual mimicry of large and small systems come into play. A rock can look like a mountain, and a mountain can look like a rock. One hundred miles of coastline can look like ten thousand miles of coastline or vice versa.”

Little things caught the attention of Keever as a young boy growing up on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. His fatherʼs house overlooked an estuary that met a beach surrounded by sea grass. At low tide, thousands of little fiddler crabs would move up and down the beach, scouring the sand for invisible motes of food left behind by the ebbing tide. If he got close to them, they would scatter and drop into holes in the mud. He was amazed by these miniature worlds in which he could not physically fit. But he could conceptualize that diminutive dimension. Then, in first grade, he realized he could do something better than the other children — make art. He lived with his father until he was nine, and then with his mother in Chicago, where he spent time at The Field Museum and sometimes the Art Institute of Chicago. “I remember the dioramas at the museum, where I could look into an imaginative world of miniature Indians camped in a pine forest and feel like I was there. It was fascinating to peer into these odd windows of the world,” Keever said.

He studied art in high school and went on to get a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from Old Dominion University, continuing to make art on the side. It was in graduate school, while studying fluid flow and boiling heat transfer, that he saw a film about Picasso. The artist was in his late 80s, painting on clear Plexiglas. The audience viewed him through the material. It was the expression of joy and happiness on his face that made Keever realize he wanted to feel that way when he reached Picasso’s age. Not long after that, Keever dropped his academic studies and became an artist. He was primarily a painter, but dabbled in printmaking and sculpture, while also making countless drawings. His subject matter focused on figures in the landscape. However, he got bored with the materials and the ways in which he had been working. During this time, he admired the constructed photographic process Cindy Sherman used for her work. He made the shift to create his own constructed photographs, determining that his constructions would not reference people, but would show the beauty and catastrophic
elegance of the natural world. Most of his various series of photographic prints are landscape-based, without figures.

When viewing his photographs, one is peering into a conceptual landscape — a world that doesnʼt exist, but might. Keever is less a magic realist than Didier Massard, who invokes specific and iconic places like India, China, Holland and the cliffs of Normandy. Keever is often compared to Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic painter who is best known for allegorical landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against skies, mist, barren trees and gothic ruins. Yet the most familiar link between Friedrich and Keever and between J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and Keever is the notion of a reevaluation of the natural world.

“Iʼm trying to create other worlds,” Keever said. “They are not necessarily on other planets, but may exist in the here and now and may seem very familiar. Most people readily have an answer as to where these places are. I sometimes think of them as dreamscapes.”

His landscapes are inspired by nature programs, magazine articles, films and the artistʼs own fertile imagination. But they also explore concepts in geology. One body of work called “Wildflowers” explores the origination of flowering plants. Keever created a diorama from hundreds of tiny plastic flowers he collected over time. According to early 20th-century plant hunter Ernest H. Wilson, China is the “Mother of Gardens.” China is home to some 31,000 native plant species, a third more than the U.S. and Canada combined. Gardens throughout the world today are graced with flowering plants —forsythias, peonies, lilies, magnolias, primroses, rhododendrons and more — that originated in China and were dispersed to England, Europe and America during the empire building of the 1800s.

Similarly, he creates erosion in his fabricated worlds by combining different types of plaster. In his latest series, a mountain range made of weak plaster is constructed directly over a mountain range composed of strong plaster. The weak plaster is eroding to reveal a sturdier mountain range underneath. The process takes only a few weeks in the water tank but involves millions of years on earth.

He created a series of images called “Shell Man” and “Eroded Man,” where landscapelike constructions erode and evolve to make faces. These works are comparative to the Rupestrian sculptures of Ana Mendieta, who created silhouettes in sand, dirt and grass, and earthwork sculptures echoing prehistoric figures.

Besides plaster, Keever uses other materials, including various pigments, herbs and items found on the sidewalk in New York. His process is intensely involved with lighting, incorporating colored gel coatings for effect, as well as working with pigment-filled bottles to introduce clouds into the water. He works with a digital Hasselblad 50 megapixel camera. The camera is much faster than using film, and he can get an image on the screen every few seconds. It’s very handy to get as many images as possible because the view is constantly changing as the paint moves around in the water.

There is a theatrical element focused on the importance of creating the correct amount of light and shadow. Keever may use as many as a dozen lights for one shot, moving the light sources and changing the colors of the gels. However, Keeverʼs process, while akin to creating a still life, is in some ways like the dioramas created by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre in 1822 (who went on to co-invent the daguerreotype, the first widely used method of photography). A diorama was a theatrical experience, viewed by an audience. As many as 350 patrons would file into a proscenium to view a landscape painting that would subtly and dramatically change appearance; then, after a 10- or 15-minute show, the audience rotated on a massive turntable to view a second painting, hand painted on linen, transparent in selected areas. A series of these multi-layered, linen panels was arranged in a deep, truncated tunnel, then illuminated by sunlight, which had been redirected via skylights, screens, shutters and blinds. It was the skillful manipulation of light that caused the scene to appear to change. The astounded public believed they
were looking at a natural scene.

The difference between what Daguerre created in the original dioramas and Keeverʼs landscape constructions built in an aquarium is that Keever is not trying to recreate nature, but to create a mirage of nature. “Iʼm trying to escape the typical images you see over and over that become boring,” Keever said. “By excluding humankind from the landscapes, I try to make them timeless. The photographs could take place now, a million years ago, or a million years into the future.”

In the end, Keever creates landscapes that are mesmerizing. The viewer stops, ponders, frozen in her tracks. Where is it? What is it? Have I been there? Will I go there? Itʼs familiar, yet strange. Real, yet an apparition. A Kim Keever photograph is prehistory and post history, the epoch and the apocalypse.

David B. Smith Gallery
1543 A Wazee Street
Denver, CO 80202
303.893.4234
davidbsmithgallery.com

Exhibition Essay by Leanne Haase Goebel

Gregory Euclide is an outsider. An observer. Whether walking in the woods, or driving across country, he pays attention to the minutiae. Important details become part of his art. Since his last solo exhibition at David B. Smith Gallery, his work has branched out into objects that are similar yet diverse. Heʼs created large installations for New Yorkʼs Museum of Arts and Design and Denverʼs Biennial of the Americas. He also produced an album cover for Bon Iver, has been featured at the PULSE Art Fair, and continues to broaden his studio practice creating 3-dimensional works on paper, sculpture, captures, and video. Euclide is pushing the boundaries of the way he thinks about the land, and how itʼs used.

“The message hasnʼt changed,” Euclide said. “But itʼs a little fractured. The Captures deal with something very different than the Take it with you pieces. Such drastically different approaches address something that is real, nuanced of the entire, overall issue.”

Euclideʼs nuanced objects are rooted in the expansive history of landscape painting, which is evidenced, but then transformed by the artist. In Euclideʼs studio work —installations, captures, and sculptures — we see references to the 15th century painting by Albrecht Dürer, Pond in the Woods, one of the earliest examples of pure landscape painting, in which the landscape is the subject and not just the setting. However, Euclideʼs works have more in common with shan shui, the Chinese ink painting tradition, in which the only sign of human life may be the well-hidden hut of a sage. Euclide never includes human forms in his work, but often renders the architecture of humans, the structures and buildings that represent our existence. These are painted in the tradition of precisionist Charles Sheeler. Yet there is also something transcendental and mystic in Euclideʼs work, similar to that found in Charles Burchfieldʼs paintings. In the end, they seem flourished, baroque, and often like the kitschy house-in-the-woods paintings that every grandma has hanging in her living room.

But not.

Euclideʼs objects embrace the political aspects of landscape painting as well. He crumples and cuts up the romantic notions, exposing them as illusion. He adds the trash, the Styrofoam, the cigarette butts, and more that defile the natural world. The objects demand that the viewer move within the artificial landscape in order to see everything, to shift perspective. Euclide is mindful of the land, the landscape, nature as a dynamic system of which we are all a part. He is pointing out that we cannot escape thousands of years of iconic imagery of sunsets, lakes, rivers, mountains, and seascapes that we have been shown and told are beautiful, scenic, important. In Euclideʼs video work, on display for the first time in this exhibition, the artist has
strapped a camera to his chest, recording these iconic vistas as his breath causes the viewfinder to rise and fall. The technique is simple, the idea complex. Euclide wants us to question how a culture can value a fuschia-red sunset, a majestic mountain peak, or a sparse, spatial coastline, and yet, at the same time, remain oblivious to how our daily actions result in the destruction of these locations.

In nature, Euclide believes that we canʼt help but respond emotionally with our bodies. But he wants viewers to be knowledgeable, self-aware, and to understand why they react to a brook or vista. “Part of my work is about my inability to escape the conflicting thoughts surrounding something as simple as viewing a river valley at a scenic turnout. Someone told you this was where you were supposed to stop and look. Youʼre in a car. That car came on a road that was gouged into the side of a mountain. All of these things that allow for the view are complicated and political. But thereʼs still this emotional pull of the view. Sword of Damocles.”

The imminent peril is evident in his compositions, which are drawn, painted, crumpled, discarded, recovered, reused, constructed as multi-layered. They are a flowing mess of tiny scenes and diagrams brandished with embellishment and details. He cuts through the striations to probe the oxymoron of our human appreciation for landscape and our daily destruction of that landscape.

His objects are dense. A combination of turning organic matter into formalist art materials, finding things decaying in the forest, taking them apart and embedding them in an object. A blade of grass becomes a tree, a pinecone is peeled apart and its petals become layers of soil. The components of making a work of art are like memory. Moments of time. Euclide tries to transform the art experience into something akin to a story. Something akin to a journey that one might have in a wood, alone and observing.

David B. Smith Gallery
1543 A Wazee Street
Denver, CO 80202
303.893.4234
davidbsmithgallery.com

I spoke on this vibrant economies subject with interim Beet Street executive director Beth Flowers, trying to clarify how AIR will be a creative placemaker for Fort Collins while also extending to 10 states. Flowers declined to provide detailed specifics, as she said they are still in the process of finalizing their business plan. On Nov. 10-11 Fort Collins hosts a summit with the state arts councils from  Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Nevada, the 10 states to be served by AIR. Flowers said a plan will be unveiled about next steps in January.

But a recent Beet Street survey hints at details that might emerge from grafting the goals of creative placemaking across a broad and distant geographic swath: delivering online classes, hosting networking events in communities throughout the region, offering reduced cost business-coaching and consulting services, as well as possibly free access to an online database of resources, and a monthly e-newsletter.

According to its NEA proposal AIR plans to use $50,000 for a needs assessment and relationship building with regional arts councils; another $50,000 to develop curriculum; $20,000 for internship development; and $20,000 for business plan development. An additional $50,000  was forseen for interior/exterior design of the  historic Carnegie building in downtown Fort Collins; and $10,000 for marketing and web design and development.

Which raises a lot of question, but first: What is an arts incubator?

Related to a “business incubator” concept that dates to the industrial 1950s, incubators support entrepreneurs and small businesses by creating shared economies around affordable office or warehouse space, and other business costs such as administration and accounting. Most business incubators require businesses to meet certain benchmarks and “graduate” from the incubation program. Today, according to the National Business Incubation Association, more than half of all incubators also provide online or distance-learning incubation services to affiliate members who are not in the same physical location as the incubator.

As to the arts, arts are not often seen as fitting neatly into business models. But to the extent cities have taken active “incubation” approaches, those historically include the Sammons Center for the Arts, founded in 1981 in Dallas,  to renovate a historic pump station and operate it as a multipurpose arts center. In 1990, Arlington, VA launched an arts incubator model that has been repeated: local governments across the country provide subsidized rent to artists and arts organizations. Arlington grew its arts economy from $1 million to $5 million between 1990 and 1996 using this approach.

Class at Sammons Center for The Arts

But that’s the old model of incubators, both in business and the arts, requiring a start-up venture to set up shop at the incubator’s site. Fast forward to virtual models like Sramana Mitra’s One Million by One Million, a global initiative designed to help a million entrepreneurs around the world  reach a million dollars each in annual revenue by 2020, and Fractured Atlas, a New York-based virtual arts incubator primarily for individual creatives providing free classes with titles like “Getting Your Sh*t Together” and a NYC database linking empty rehearsal spaces with groups looking for space.

What does this mean for Fort Collins and the 10 states that will fall into the purview of AIR? The most  Flowers offered were some lofty adjectives: “organic,” “innovative,” and “limber” to describe the partnership of AIR. “We want to be open and very observant of what’s happening in the world and find fresh ways to insert ourselves as creatives,” Flowers said.

AIR will be based in Fort Collins, and will take over the historic Carnegie building. Flowers said the City Cultural Office will handle all the programming, which includes remodeling the Carnegie to house two large gallery spaces and offices for Beet Street and AIR. No office space will be leased to help incubate start-up creative industries. However, Flowers asserted that the surrounding blocks on Matthews and Olive Streets, half a mile from Old Town Square in downtown Fort Collins are “ripe for redevelopment” and “would make excellent live/work spaces.”

“Nobody is helping small cities and small towns. State arts agencies don’t have the resources,” Flowers said. As comments go, this one indicates that inventive are the partnerships that must sow fertile ground from out of the scorched earth of state arts budgets. From the Fort Collins grant application:

The  curriculum and professional development programs include components that are intended to be models for activating business professionals and other resources in small, rural communities.

So AIR is going to incubate incubators?

A clue to this might lie in some programming innovated in Colorado this April, when Beet Street partnered with Creative Capital to bring its “Professional Development Core Weekend Workshop “ to Colorado for the first time. Creative Capital workshops are targeted to creative workers,  to help them  sustain creative careers by doing strategic planning, marketing and public relations and fundraising. I was selected to participate and heard discussion from Creative Capital about how it is moving to make more training programs available virtually, to reach a broader audience of creatives.

Flowers said AIR wants to “create community through technology.”

“If we can buy awesome professional development and spread it throughout the region via distance learning and some on-the-ground contact in each community, then we can translate the experts into real experiences on the ground.”

My hunch then is that AIR plans to help bring this type of Creative Capital training to the region. (But if AIR plans to utilize a website to provide live streaming workshops, chat rooms and social networks for creatives, as well as distribute original content, $10,000 sounds like far too conservative a budget number for web development.) Who might emerge as partners? Beet Street could conceivably partner with Colorado State University, and more likely, will tap into the already existing CSU Online & Distance Learning platform that provides certificate and noncredit courses for graduate as well as undergraduate students and working professionals.

While Flowers described it as “an exciting thing to foster so many willing players with so much to gain,” hopefully the local legs-on-the-ground will remain local and not be loaned executives traveling from somewhere else.  Place does matter, and for “grassroots” to be a grassroots movement it must emerge from, for and in Florence, MT, Bismarck, ND or Monte Vista, CO, run by locals.

Stay tuned…

This article originally appeared on adobeairstream.com.

November 10, 12-2 p.m.
Cut ‘n’ Sew Yves Saint Laurent Challenge
H&M Store
Denver Pavilions
November 10, 6-10 p.m.
West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America 1965-1977
MCA/Denver
1485 Delgany Street
November 10, 5:30 p.m.
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith authors of Van Gogh: The Life lecture
Denver Art Museum
Hamilton Building, lower level

November 10, 5:30-8 p.m. RSVP required by Nov. 7
Colorado Abstract Expressionism
Kirkland Museum
1311 Pearl Street
November 11, 5-8 p.m.
$52.80 Tag Sale
TOSA (The Other Side Arts)
1644 Platte Street
Denver

November 12, 3:30-5:30 p.m.
What’s Wrong with Western Art? Panel Discussion
Is Western Art a dead language? Is it regional? Panelists hope to illuminate fundamental distinctions between traditional and contemporary perspectives on the American West.
Moderator: Jeffrey Schrader, Assistant Professor of Art History, UC Denver. Panelists: Rose Frederick, Curator of the Coors Western Art Show; Don Stinson, artist; Ann Daley, former Associate Curator of Western Art, Denver Art Museum; Duke Beardsley, artist; Steve Weil, president, Rockmont Ranch Wear; Ed Connors, retired arts educator; Kyle McMillan, art critic,The Denver Post; and Thomas Smith, director, Petrie Institute of Western American Art, Denver Art Museum.
Visions West Gallery
1715 Wazee Street
http://visionswestgallery.com

November 12
¿Being Home? returns
Denver Art Museum

November 10, 7:30 p.m
November 13, 2 p.m.
Still, Amie Knox and Chad Herschberger’s documentary about the Clyfford Still museum
Starz Denver Film Festival
Denver Film Center
2510 East Colfax