100 Years of the Art of Taos

Foothills Art Center

Golden, CO

303-279-3922

http://www.foothillsartcenter.org

100 Years of the Art of Taos

January 23 - March 21, 1999

Does the cool relentless flicker of your computer screen ever make you long for winter in Taos: the warm glow of adobe against the snow, the flickering light from kiva fireplaces; the fragrance of pinon smoke? For the sensory delights without the drive, Golden residents may take in "100 Years of the Art of Taos" (Jan. 23 - Mar 21, 1999) at Foothills Art Center.

Four interrelated exhibitions transport visitors back 100 years to a time when only 25 Anglos lived in Taos. In 1898, two academically trained Yankee artists, Ernest L. Blumenschein and Bert Geer Phillips made an emergency stop in Taos for wagon wheel repair (the two greenhorns had outfitted themselves in Denver). Their enchantment with the landscape, light and Hispanic and Pueblo Indian inhabitants led to the gradual formation of the Taos Society of Artists, eleven legendary professionals who relocated to the area and gained national reputations. All are represented in the Taos Masters section of the show, plus other non-Society colleagues. The paintings are on loan from the fledgling Harmsen Museum planned for the Denver West development in Lakewood.

A second exhibition for the first time graphically establishes links between the Taos founders and the colorful "Denver School" of painters and sculptors. In the stained-glass-lit spaces of Foothills' largest gallery, eleven Denver-based or Denver-destined realists, some of whom formed an.emigre mini-colony in Taos in the sixties, are reunited: among them, Ken Bunn, George Carlson, Ned Jacob, Buffalo Kaplinski, Mark Daily and Bill Sharer. Completing the exhibitions are works by established Taos "greats" R.C. Gorman and Ed Sandoval; Pueblo pottery of glittering mica-laden clay; Santos from the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and exquisite woodblock prints of northern New Mexico by.Gustave Baumann (1881-1971) loaned by Holme Roberts & Owen.

From top to bottom: William Sharer, New Mexico Goat Herder, oil on canvas; R. C. Gorman, Wazbah, lithograph; Ed Sandoval, New Mexico Chili Field; R. C. Gorman, Fatima, lithograph; Buffalo Kaplinski, Up Front Aspen; Gustave Baumann, Talaya Peak, woodblock print, collection of Holme Roberts & Owen

Left to right: Front cover of 100 Years of the Art of Taos exhibition guide; third page of exhibition guide listing 11 artists of the Taos "mini-colony."

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