The Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum recently debuted an interesting exhibit titled “50% of the Story: Women Expressing Creativity.” It’s an ambitious undertaking, especially when it’s situated in one of the medium-sized main floor galleries. Paintings, photographs, prints and woven art are hung salon-style on the walls, so many that the eye is overwhelmed.
There is no written catalog, no introductory curatorial note by the entrance – just a few QR codes to scan. It’s an analog show in a digital world. No more peering intently at indecipherable artist signatures or obscure informative notes. The work is the show – and there’s a lot of it. According to Leah Davis Witherow, the CSPM Curator of History, “The goal of the exhibit is to represent the diversity and uniqueness of the Pikes Peak Region using historic artifacts and artworks as well as contemporary pieces.”
The show’s theme and reach are extensive and wonderful. It’s like going to a party with lots of familiar faces and many interesting strangers. Missye Bond’s portrait of Mary Howbert and Helen Jackson brought me back in time – Mary was a dear friend of my mother and I remember Helen riding her bicycle around downtown in the early 1950s.
Lupita Carrasco’s “I Watched Him Dream” is beautiful and moving. Carrasco’s mother suffered from severe mental illness and Carrasco assumed full-time care of her at 24, doing so while raising her own six kids and creating wonderful art.
Zoe Davis’ Deckers “Old Bridge” (a 1947 lithograph printed by Lawrence Barrett) is a gift from the past as is Ann Parrish’s “Portrait of Katherine F. Adams” (formerly titled “Portrait of Anne Adams”).
The disparity between men and women in the Museum’s collections and show had long been obvious to Witherow. The show is far from being quirky and uncurated, although much of it consists of work from its permanent collection. The Museum has splendid antiques, artifacts, tools, books, prints, fine art and original documents as well as, I suspect, hundreds of boxes of unsorted papers waiting to be perused by historians in the distant future.
It’s an analog show in a digital world.
Witherow didn’t sit around and wait for donations. The Museum bought significant work from regional women artists, including Christy Callaham, Sushe Felix and Deb Komitor. Rather than a passive actor dredging up stuff from the basement, the Museum paid contemporary artists for their work, adding them to the permanent collection.
Yet it was refreshing to see works from the permanent collection by 20th-century women who have long been overshadowed by their male contemporaries, including Verna Versa, Grace Bartlett, Mary Chenoweth, Ernestine Parsons, Elizabeth Spaulding and Anne Gregory Ritter.
What makes the show stand out is that it wasn’t dominated by a few superstars. As one who has spent decades collecting regional artists on a limited budget, women were very much in the mix. We couldn’t afford a Charles Craig, but Ernestine Parsons and Maud Leach were (and still are!) amazingly affordable. And although I like them, I guess I didn’t see them then as “serious artists.”
My favorite: Adolf Dehn, who spent summers in Colorado Springs during the 1930s and 40s. It never occurred to me that two women who were romantically linked to him were better artists. Virginia Dehn’s work is superb, while Wanda Gag became the most successful author in American history. She wrote and illustrated Millions of Cats in 1928, a children’s book that has been continuously in print for 96 years. She was also a skilled printmaker – if you’re in New York, Wanda Gag’s World is on display at the Whitney until December.
And now it’s coulda/shoulda time. Women artists are about 25% of my household’s collection but we’re about 100% broke. But for all you budding collectors out there, use the show as a guide. For my fellow geezers, donate your collections to the CSPM. Remember, giving stuff to the Museum is a way of giving the finger to your own mortality. I’ve done it a few times, including lending/giving an iron gate created in Colorado Springs by Hassell Ironworks in 1899. It’s on display now in another exhibition, “The Story of Us.” And once I paddle across the river Styx, maybe a few exhibition-worthy canvases will show up at the door to further clutter the Museum’s storage spaces…