The Fine Arts Center at Colorado College in Colorado Springs is embarking on a comprehensive transformation following years of financial struggles, leadership instability, and cultural conflicts that threatened to overshadow the institution's nearly century-long legacy. The renewal effort culminated in the opening of "Gathering Places," a groundbreaking semi-permanent exhibition that completely reimagines how the center's 18,000-piece permanent collection is presented to the public.
The transformation began in spring 2023 when a diverse group of artists, academics, curators, museum workers, art historians, and local experts gathered at the Fine Arts Center for what organizers cryptically called "the convening." This meeting marked the beginning of what most people familiar with the FAC recognized as a long-overdue fresh start for the troubled institution.
For over two decades, the Fine Arts Center had been weighed down by massive debt, constant leadership changes, and culture clashes that threatened its reputation. The situation reached a turning point in July 2017, when the FAC was gifted to Colorado College, officially becoming the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. However, along with the institution, the college also inherited a $10 million debt and years of deferred maintenance issues.
While the transfer to Colorado College helped resolve some financial and administrative problems, it simultaneously created new tensions between longtime patrons and newly hired college staff. These rifts were further deepened by the pandemic, rapid leadership turnover, and a public controversy surrounding a set of racially coded murals. By 2023, it became clear that the FAC needed a complete reset.
The reimagining process began with a provocative question posed by contemporary art curator Katja Rivera: "What would happen if Georgia O'Keeffe were in the Broadmoor Art Academy gallery?" This question highlighted a fundamental problem with how the FAC's permanent collection had been organized. The collection was previously split into three distinct and separate areas: Southwestern art including Indigenous and Hispanic religious items, portraits and landscapes from the Broadmoor Art Academy, and modern and contemporary works.
However, this rigid categorization failed to acknowledge the actual overlap of timelines, artists, and cultures that occurred in the Southwest during the FAC's founding era and continues today. Rivera collaborated with Michael Christiano, director of visual arts, on a complete reinstallation of the permanent collection—a ambitious three-year project that involved seven curators, two grants from the Terra Foundation, a drawdown on the Margaret L. Lane endowment, and countless hours of consultation with local communities and tribes.
The resulting "Gathering Places" exhibition, which opened on Saturday, occupies a major portion of the first floor and is divided into four distinct gallery spaces. Each gallery was meticulously curated by a specific artist, historian, academic, or local expert that the FAC identified during their 2023 convening. Artist and historian Josh Franco, who attended the convening and was subsequently selected as one of four guest curators, described his experience: "I was flattered just to be asked to think about the collection even for a weekend. Only later I came to realize they were using that weekend to whittle down a smaller group to invite on this years-long endeavor of rethinking the whole permanent collection. It was like a job I didn't know I was interviewing for."
Christiano acknowledged the strategic nature of the convening with a laugh: "It was not quite an undercover job interview. Well, maybe a little bit." The first gallery, co-curated by Franco and Southern Ute Tribe member Cassandra Atencio, greets visitors with Arthur Dove's "Fog Horns," a 1929 oil painting by one of America's earliest abstract artists. Franco particularly loves this piece, calling it "the one work I needed to be in the show."
However, the painting presented a unique challenge in an exhibition designed to prioritize Southwestern art. Dove was born in New York and painted "Fog Horns" from a boat on waters outside New York City. "Arthur Dove had nothing to do with southern Colorado," Franco explained. "The painting ended up there because of collectors, because they had their eyes towards New York."
The FAC's founding collection represents a fascinating blend of artistic influences. It combined Native and Hispanic art collected by Alice Bemis Taylor with modern American and European art collected by Elizabeth Sage Hare. Taylor, Hare, and Julie Penrose, who donated the land, established the multidisciplinary Fine Arts Center in 1936 as an extension and expansion of the famous Broadmoor Art Academy, which had been founded in 1919.
Franco explained the dynamic between these different collecting approaches: "The East Coast works gave the collection its credibility, while the Southwestern works gave the collection its edge. Having Alexander Calder and Martha Graham, that was validity. It implied, like, we're valid because we can bring New York here, which is interesting. And those are great artists. But you know, what about the stuff that's great about Colorado?"
Franco and Atencio focused their gallery on the theme of belonging, with assistant curator of collections Alana Adams summarizing their approach as exploring "Who am I when I'm here?" "Fog Horns" stands as the sole exception to the rule, being the only piece in the gallery that wasn't collected from Colorado or the Southwest. The gallery features Ute moccasins alongside numerous landscapes, with photographs of Pikes Peak from the 1970s sharing space with paintings of the same summit from the 1920s.
"The landscape is here for millennia, of course it changes, but it's an icon because it lasts so long," Franco observed. "But who's looking at the landscape changes it, and that's so cool. That's one of the goals, right? We want people to leave the show with new eyes for exactly where they are."
The second gallery, curated by James Cordóva, an associate professor of art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, takes a different approach. Cordóva, who specializes in santos—traditionally devotional images of Catholic saints that became characteristic of New Mexican artisans during Spanish colonial times—is also a santero, someone who creates these religious images himself.
Cordóva began his gallery presentation with a striking observation: "Not everything we're going to look at here was meant to be looked at here." His gallery features an interior space with dimmed lighting and haunting hymns—recordings from the 1930s and 1940s borrowed from the Library of Congress. The presentation is designed to evoke the chapels where santos are traditionally displayed, "without turning it into an actual chapel," Cordóva said flatly. "That would not be appropriate for a museum."
Outside of the chapel-like space, the santos, which range from the early 17th century to the present day, are displayed alongside Indigenous pottery pieces and paintings by artists from the Eastern United States. Cordóva explained that his gallery challenges traditional scholarly perspectives: "The old perspective, at least in the scholarship, was that early New Mexico was so isolated from everything else happening on the planet, that art was made only out of necessity, that it was folk art. That was not the case."
In reality, New Mexico was once deeply integrated into the Spanish colonial empire. The early santeros drew imagery from objects that the Spanish imported from Mexico, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. However, the real focus of Cordóva's gallery is demonstrating how santeros interacted with Native American objects from the same region. "They created a visual vocabulary and aesthetic that crossed ethnic and cultural lines," Cordóva explained. "That vocabulary then becomes greater than just the santos, it becomes greater than just pueblo ceramics. It created a regional language that's greater than its individual parts."
Cordóva was careful to clarify that this doesn't mean santos hold identical significance for people from different cultural backgrounds. Rather, he explained, "It means that the two groups—sometimes consciously, often unconsciously—borrowed imagery, motifs and symbols from one another," which his gallery aims to highlight. He also included works by East Coast contemporaries of the santeros, created during travels to New Mexico, including the 1917 painting "The Santero" by Bert Geer Phillips, a New York artist and founding member of the Taos Society of Artists, and a painting of a Penitente ceremony by Isaac "Doc" Udell, a beloved Michigan-born man who left medical school to live and work in Taos.
The third gallery, curated by Pat Musick, focuses on the institutional history of the Fine Arts Center itself. Musick approached her curation through the lens of ecology, explaining, "The metaphor for my gallery is an ecotone," referring to a zone where different ecosystems meet. "Where the Rocky Mountain foothills meet the Great Plains, that's an ecotone. Each of them has their own species, but where they meet, there is this richness and intermingling."
Musick brings a unique personal perspective to the institution's history. Her father, painter and muralist Archie Musick, began his fine arts career at the Broadmoor Academy in 1927. He moved around the country as a working artist, first to New York, then to Los Angeles, before returning to Colorado Springs and taking up teaching at the FAC in the 1930s. "There have been a number of recent directors that didn't seem terribly interested in the background of the institution," Musick observed. "But they are," she said of Christiano and the current curatorial team, "And they realized that I have a long history with it."
Musick was determined to display items from the permanent collection that had either never been shown or had been off-view for extended periods. She selected works from students of the Broadmoor Art Academy, including her father, to demonstrate how their artistic styles evolved as they pursued their careers. "Virtually all of these artists had that regionalist 1930s style, but in their later careers went in all different directions," Musick explained. "Ethel (Megafan) went to semi-abstracted and abstracted mountain scenes, others went toward a sort of whimsical realism, or a pleasant surrealism. So I put those side by side."
Her gallery also features frescos, colchas, and Native pottery alongside works from East Coast artists who dramatically altered their approaches to paint the West. "The color schemes that they were using back East just didn't work here, with the bright Western light," Musick noted. The institutional divergences haven't been limited to artistic styles. "There was one director who wanted to turn the center into a decorative arts museum," Musick recalled. "It didn't last very long." She described how different directors had varying visions: some showed "zero interest in Native American and Hispanic parts of the collection," while others "hoped to become contemporary arts hubs to rival Denver or, I don't know, Metropolitan Museum in New York or something," she laughed. Still others insisted that local and regional arts were the collection's greatest strength.
Despite these changing times and tastes, Musick sees a continuity that Christiano and his team are working to preserve while orienting the FAC toward contemporary relevance. The final gallery represents a collaborative effort between Christiano, Adams, and Rivera, organized around the theme of movement—specifically, how people, goods, ideas, and religions have moved throughout the region over time.
In order to tackle the enormous 18,000-piece permanent collection, Christiano and his team had to embrace a philosophy of selectivity. "This is just one exhibition with four different chapters, nothing we do can ever be fully comprehensive," Christiano explained. "Realizing that was liberating." The plan is to keep "Gathering Places" on display for three to four years, while rotating out certain light-sensitive works, such as those on paper and textiles.
Christiano hopes the exhibition will leave visitors with a broader understanding of both the institution and the cultural histories it represents. "I hope people leave with a sense that neither this institution nor those histories that we present are fixed," he said. "That our understanding of, and the meaning we make from them, will shift over time." This philosophy represents a fundamental shift for an institution that has weathered decades of turmoil and is now positioning itself for a more inclusive and dynamic future.
