Abstract colorblock artwork of green, purple, orange, and more interweaving colors
Image Credit

Ethel Magafan, Springtime in the Mountains (detail), about 1961. Tempera paint on board; 40 x 50 in. Denver Art Museum: Julie and Robert Lewis Collection at the Denver Art Museum, 2018.656. © Estate of Jenne Magafan

Explore Colorado Art in the Galleries

Ethel Magafan, Springtime in the Mountains (detail), about 1961. Tempera paint on board; 40 x 50 in. Denver Art Museum: Julie and Robert Lewis Collection at the Denver Art Museum, 2018.656. © Estate of Jenne Magafan

By Rose Beetem

Rose Beetem is a Communications Staff Aide at the Denver Art Museum.

Side profile of a Native American man on horseback in the middle of the plains

Frederic Remington, A Blackfoot Indian, 1888. Oil on canvas; 21 3/8 x 15 3/8 in. Roath Collection at the Denver Art Museum. 2013.139

Wanting to counter the frozen-in-time depiction of Native people in Edward S. Curtis’s famous series of photographs, contemporary Diné photographer Will Willson initiated the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX). While a Native Arts Artist-in-Residence at the DAM in 2013, he produced numerous black-and-white photographs using the tintype method developed in the mid-1800s, including portraits of DAM staffer Felicia L. Alvarez (citizen of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe) and artist/professor Melanie Yazzie (citizen of the Navajo Nation), who was also a previous Native Arts Artist-in-Residence at the DAM.

Spanish colonization in the American Southwest traces back to the 1500s, and that influence remains strong in the Centennial State through a vibrant Mexican American art tradition. One enduring expression of that is religious art, including retablos (devotional paintings), triptychs like San Hipólito y las secuelas de la conquista, and a range of folk art using symbols and iconography derived from traditional Catholic church art as well as other modern influences.

In the 1800s, Colorado drew many artists to capture its beauty in paint, watercolor, and bronze. Sent back East, works by American and traveling artists such as Albert Bierstadt (Wind River Country), Thomas Moran (Grand Canyon Lodge), and Frederic Remington (A Blackfoot Indian), attracted both tourists and settlers. The tradition of landscape painting was a natural fit for the awe-inspiring and panoramic landscape of the West.

A man tending to his horse in a surreal forest landscape

Allen Tupper True, A Wanderlust Memory, about 1912. Oil on canvas; 37.5 x 37.5 in. Denver Art Museum: Funds from Helen Dill bequest, 1936.2.

That tradition continued even through the Great Depression. The New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) commissioned artists to create murals, selecting several noted artists born or raised in Colorado Springs. Allen Tupper True’s murals can still be seen in the Mountain States Telephone Building, the Colorado National Bank Building, and South High School. Check out two of his smaller works, A Wanderlust Memory and Freighters of ’48 , in the Western American Art galleries on level 7 of the Martin Building. (Step out on the rooftop deck to see some impressive views in real life!)

Ethel Magafan and her twin sister Jenne (both artists and in the museum’s collection) grew up in Colorado Springs and attended Broadmoor Art Academy, later the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. At 26, Ethel was commissioned to paint seven government-sponsored murals by the WPA … the youngest artist in America to receive such an honor. During her long career as an artist, she regularly returned to the Colorado Rockies for inspiration. Magafan’s Springtime in the Rockies reflects her embrace of abstraction. As the quote over her studio door declared: "To name an object is to suppress three quarters of the enjoyment…to suggest, that is the dream!"

Denver-based artist Karen E. Kitchell extends landscape painting into the world of today, energizing and subverting this traditional practice. In her American Grasslands: Prairie, Pasture, Crop and Lawn series, she focuses on native and invasive plants, with themes including agriculture and regional botany. Rest your eyes on greenery that you don’t have to water!

Abstract artwork of a mountain landscape against a green sky

Vance Kirkland, Timberline Abstraction, 1950. Oil paint on linen; 30 x 42 in. The Collection of The Kirkland at the Denver Art Museum: Gift of Vance H. and Anne O. Kirkland, 1982.435. © Estate of Vance Kirkland

Vance Kirkland (1904-1981), for whom the Kirkland Museum was named, was a lifelong painter, art educator, and proponent of modernism. Over 55 years, Kirkland painted over 1,200 paintings, ranging from realism to surrealism to abstract expressionism and abstractions, including Timberline Abstraction and (one on view). At The Kirkland at the Denver Art Museum, you can see works from throughout his career and explore his studio, which was transported from 1311 Pearl Street and incorporated into the new building.

Tokio Ueyama’s work illustrates yet another part of the history of Colorado and the US. A noted painter in California, Ueyama and his family were forcibly relocated and incarcerated in Granada Relocation Center, now the Amache National Historic Site, in southeast Colorado. Throughout his imprisonment, Ueyama continued to create art, including this portrait of his wife, and taught other detainees, displaying resilience, tenacity, and creativity in the face of prejudice.

Multicolored Hayagriva Mandala

Hayagriva Mandala, 1996. Created by monk-artists of Seraje Monastic University, India: Geshe Thubten Sonam (b. 1965, Tibet), Sonam Woser (b. 1964, Tibet), Lobsang Lungrig (b. 1974, Tibet). Sand mixed with mineral pigments. Denver Art Museum purchase with funds from the Asian Art Association, Mr. and Mrs. Yale H. Lewis, NBT Foundation, Fay Shwayder, and the Asian Art Department Acquisition Fund. 1996.54

In September of 1996, three monks from the Seraje monastery in southern India traveled to the museum to create this mesmerizing sand mandala onsite. Visitors came daily to watch the monks’ slow, meticulous work as the mandala, meant to be inhabited by Hayagriva, patron deity of the Seraje monastery who destroys passion and ignorance, took shape. Traditionally, such a mandala is dismantled after it has been completed, to serve as a reminder of the impermanence of all things. However, the mandala at the DAM was preserved with special permission from the abbot of Seraje Monastery.

An artist since his youth, Ed Dwight was an engineer, USAF test pilot, America’s first African American astronaut candidate, and a businessman who quit that world to enroll in the MFA program at the University of Denver. The Colorado Centennial Commission commissioned Dwight to create bronzes depicting the contribution of Blacks to the American West—including the statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Denver’s City Park. In his Evolution of Jazz series, he honored the contributions of African Americans to that uniquely American art form. Check out his Piano Man on view at The Kirkland. (Take a stroll through the nearby exhibit Space Is the Place: Art & Design in the Atomic Age while pondering this … Ed Dwight finally made it into space on a Blue Origin rocket in 2024 at age 90!).