A visit to Altered Space

Watch Springs Culture Cast's visit to the latest exhibition at the FAC MODERN, Altered Space: 21st Century Installation Art...

Altered Space media previews from Gazette, Westword

Bold art alters space
FAC curators take on unpredictable exhibit
By Mark Arnest, The Gazette (Feb. 1)

• “Altered Space: 21st Century Installation Art” is the riskiest exhibition the Fine Arts Center has hosted in years, say curators Blake Milteer and Tariana Navas-Nieves. “We’re committed to balancing our traditional role as an anchor for the community and going out on a limb,” Milteer said. “Part of what a curator does is create a beautiful, cohesive exhibit,” he said. “This is different.”

Rooms with a View
FAC MODERN dedicates a show to installation art
By Susan Froyd, Westword (Jan. 31)

• “(Matt Barton) says, ‘I want the overall sense of the work to be positive, fantastic and wonderful while being woven with what can, on the surface, be thought of as dark.’ That means his room might be haunted by stuffed animals and found animated video clips or, somehow, a tornado. Hi-tech and lo-tech, heaven and hell.”

Interview with Altered Space artist Gwen Laine

Gwen Laine has lived in Denver since 1975. She earned her BFA from the University of Colorado, where she studied photography, sculpture and art history. Her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and has been published internationally ... more

Interview with Altered Space artist Matt Barton

Matt Barton currently teaches 3D art making for the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs’ Visual and Performing Arts department. Following brief stints as a Chuck E. Cheese dancing rat and Victoria Secret shop stock boy, Barton spent a year in Italy as an artist apprentice. He earned his Masters in Fine Arts in 2006 from the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh ... more

Interview with Altered Space artist Christina Marsh

Christina Marsh, from Lindenhurst, Ill., is currently in her second year as the Riley Scholar in Residency at Colorado College. She earned her Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana. Her works have been exhibited in many venues including the Schmucker Gallery at Gettsyburg (Pa.) College and Eastern Illinois University’s Tarble Art Center. She also participated in the Mobilivre traveling exhibition that was shown in 14 states. Her work has incorporated food, photography and prints ... more

Denver news features Impressionist show

Watch the video featuring Impressionist and Modern Masters as a 'Colorado Getaway' by Denver's CBS 4 ... click here.

Over the River ... The Rocky covers Christo and Jean Claude visit to the Springs

Christo’s river project is still flowing
By Mary Voetz Chandler, Rocky Mountain News (Jan. 26)

“An exhibition on Over the River, including drawings, anchors, fabric and other objects related to the project, will open in October at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. The show will travel, including a visit to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 2011.”

Impressionist and Modern Masters tour

Learn more about the Impressionist and Modern Masters as Springs Culture Cast tours the exhibition with FAC Curator Blake Milteer...

John Updike on Georges Seurat

Celebrated writer John Updike reviewed the Georges Seurat MOMA exhibition in The New York Review for Books (Jan. 17), writing, "Impressionism, our impression is, proceeded by instinct, its stabs of high color pursuing what the eyes of Monet and Renoir and Pissarro and Sisley found in the open air, as sunlight's spectrum flitted across the sight of haystacks, poppy-dotted fields, and rippled water. Analysis was left to Post-Impressionism, whose varied masters, with a greater or lesser degree of programmatic determination, put forward terms for their own art and the art of the future. Neither Cezanne nor Van Gogh was more resolutely theoretical than Georges Seurat."

• Impressionist and Modern Masters
• Sunday in the Park with George

Bon Vivant: "The mastery of light, color and line"

In the January edition of Bon Vivant magazine, writer Noel Black reviews the Impressionist and Modern Masters exhibition, saying it "satisfies like a weekend trip to New York."

"Using colored walls to denote the three separate eras in the chronology, Blake Milteer and the FAC curatorial staff hone done an excellent job of creating visual moods around the periods they define: regal burgundy for the pre-impressionist era, a brooding green for the impressionists and a sunny yellow for the modernists. The works themselves are, without hyperbole, some of the finest examples of their times."

2007 Fine Arts Center highlight reel

Check out our 2007 Year-in-Review video, featuring all the highlights of the past year ... the grand opening of our new building, award-winning theatre productions, groundbreaking exhibitions, special guests and more!

Denver Post: Center's treasures revealed

The Fine Arts Center was featured on the front page of the Denver Post A&E section Sunday, complete with four articles and eight photos. About the FAC Permanent Collection, art critic Kyle MacMillan wrote, "The return of a little more than 200 permanent works to public view is among the most exciting aspects of the arts center's newly opened addition ... No comprehensive story of Colorado art, which for much of the 20th century was centered in Colorado Springs, can be told without including selections from the arts center's extensive collection."

"A major boost to those holdings came with the July announcement that 67 paintings from the extraordinary Colorado Springs collection of Katherine and the late Dusty Loo would be given to the institution. A selection of 27 pieces is on view.

"The Loos were highly discriminating in their purchases, managing to find a, if not the, definitive example of virtually every artist represented in their collection."

Center's treasures revealed: Rediscovering the Collection
Curating the Future: What's next for the Fine Arts Center
Miro and Monet: Impressionist and Modern Masters

Impressionist and Modern Masters wallpapers

Have you seen the Impressionist and Modern Masters exhibition at the FAC? If you have, you know that it includes one masterpiece after another. Almost too many. You need to take your time and study each work of art. Until your next visit to the FAC, download a free wallpaper to load on your computer ... Degas, Monet and LeBrun ... for your viewing enjoyment.

Cheyenne Edition: 'Exhibit ... will make your heart swell'

On Dec. 14, Cheyenne/Woodmen Editon columnist Lisa Matthews wrote of the Impressionist and Modern Masters exhibition:

"The newest exhibit at the Fine Arts Center will make your heart swell with pride. In a word, it is simply, “Wow!” Even the FAC security guards concur, “This is our finest exhibition bar none.” And they should know, it is their job to keep these million-dollar masterpieces safe.

"A painting by Claude Monet first greets you at the entrance. From there, you’ll find works by many of the major artists from the past 300 years including Picasso, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse, Pollock and even Georgia O’Keeffe and Wassily Kandinsky. An oversized painting of Marie Antoinette – in its original frame and once hung in the Palace of Versailles – will virtually blow you away.

“I’d expect to be in Paris or New York, okay even Denver to see such works of art,” said one proud attendee. Truly something Colorado Springs has worked hard to achieve. “We’ve transitioned from a place with dust in the corners to something as elegant as this,” said Ann Winslow, a past FAC board of trustee member.

Gazette: New FAC exhibition is 'jaw-dropping'

Fine Arts Center masters the masters
Gazette // Mark Arnest (Dec. 6)

If the sheer size of the Fine Arts Center expansion and its first post-expansion exhibit made a good impression, get ready to be really impressed.

Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Claude Lorrain: With its jaw-dropping, masterpiece-packed new exhibit “Impressionist and Modern Masters,” the Fine Arts Center solidifies its new position as a major player in the state’s art scene.

Words of wisdom from Impressionist and Modern Masters

In preparation for this Friday's Opening Celebration of Impressionist and Modern Masters, the FAC Blog has gathered quotes -- words of wisdom, if you will -- from some of the artists featured in the exhibition.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.
Auguste Rodin

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.
Paul Gauguin

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
Claude Monet

I do not judge, I only chronicle.
John Singer Sargent

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
Camille Pissarro

I think that if you shake the tree, you ought to be around when the fruit falls to pick it up.
Mary Cassatt

The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
Pierre Auguste Renoir

Everything starts from a dot.
Wassily Kandinsky

All good ideas arrive by chance.
Max Ernst

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
Georgia O'Keeffe

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
Henri Matisse

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.
Jackson Pollock

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.
Alberto Giacometti

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
Joan Miro

RMN: Eclectic exhibit benefits from center's expansion

Rocky Mountain News art and architecture columnist Mary Voelz Chandler reviewed "The Eclectic Eye: Pop and Illusion" in today's paper.

"In short, the addition that opened in August, designed by David Owen Tryba Architects, offers beautiful spaces to view art, whether the more traditional Western pieces in "Colorado Sublime," or the numerous glass sculptures (and bright orange chandelier) the center acquired from artist Dale Chihuly, or the adventurous and provocative pieces from Weisman. It helps that the detailing is pristine, and the flow simple and direct."

"In "Eclectic," organized with a fair amount of wit by the late collector's wife, Billie Milam Weisman, the overall effect is, fittingly, a little bit of everything."

Read the complete review here.

KRCC interview FAC's Sylvester Smith on jazz

Sylvester Smith, known as 'Smitty', is a long-time Fine Arts Center employee and Colorado Springs native who has seen many of the jazz legends from Portraits from the Golden Age of Jazz perform live. He recently shared his memories while touring the FAC MODERN exhibition with KRCC's Kate Dawson. Listen to KRCC's interview (5:56)

Gottlieb Opening Night video

Portraits from the Golden Age of Jazz: Photographs of William P. Gottlieb opened at the FAC MODERN May 4. The exhibit features 71 photos of giants of jazz captured on film by a rookie photographer in the 1930-40s. New FAC curator Blake Milteer is interviewed for this Opening Night video from Springs Culture Cast:

Gazette: Jazz Visions

In Mark Arnest’s preview of the Gottlieb photography exhibit from May 3, new FAC curator Blake Milteer talked about Gottlieb’s ardent love of jazz, which enabled him to gain his subject’s confidence. “The show is about his close-knit relationship with the performers, before, during, after they were performing,” said Milteer. “They’re not studio shots. They’re reflective of the energy of the performance.”

Katrina Gallery Tour

New Orleans gallery owner and exhibition organizer Arthur Roger with Louisiana artists Willie Birch, Jacqueline Bishop and Dawn Dedeaux, provide a room-by-room narration for Katrina: Catastrophe and Catharsis. Download the first-ever FAC MODERN audio tour on your mp3 player, then come downtown to view the exhibit. Experience Katrina through the eyes – and words – of the artists!
Download (1:03:07) | Listen:

Dr. Michael De Marsche’s NPR interview

On March 7, Louisiana artist Jacqueline Bishop interviewed FAC President and CEO Dr. Michael De Marsche about Katrina: Catastrophe and Catharsis for New Orleans’ NPR station 89.9 WWNO.
Download (10:38) | Listen:

Storm of Creativity

Mary Voelz Chandler reviewed the Katrina show in Friday’s Rocky Mountain News … “In short, "Catastrophe and Catharsis" is a prime example of the natural inclination of artists to create, even as the world seems to blow apart.” She concludes, “(Katrina) … has moments of pure power, tempered by revelation, sadness and the opportunity to see art that carries the personality of an American city unlike any other.” Read the whole review here.

Katrina Opening March 9, 2007

Katrina: Catastrophe and Catharsis, the latest exhibition at the FAC MODERN, opened March 9 and runs through April 29, 2007. Watch the Opening Night video from Springs Culture Cast:

2005 Chihuly TV Commercial

View the television commercial from our blockbuster exhibition, Chihuly at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center from 2005. This historic exhibit of paint and glass caused an explosion of art interest in the Rocky Mountain region with nearly 80,000 visitors attending; the FAC membership tripled in that one memorable year. Our newly expanded gallery space at the FAC will feature $2 million worth of Chihuly art from our permanent collection.