ArtScene: 0307 - American Museum of Western Art

today on our team will feature one of Denver's hidden gems the American Museum of Western art the art students League of Denver's summer art market and a public art dance performance white mirror amid the skyscrapers of Denver sits some amazing pieces of architecture in history there's the Brown Palace Hotel and across the streets and of our building which houses the American Museum of Western art hi I'm Bobby lathy brie and welcome to art thing inside this building there's an amazing treasure of art and we're going to let you in on the secret let's take a look Christa's hi yes hi hey good how are you good good not good nice to meet you thank your beanie airings for having us absolutely where are we we are at the American Museum of Western art the Andrews collection and we are in the Victorian era parlor okay yeah beautiful in here yeah thank you yeah I think so too what year was this beautiful building created so we were built in 1880 as a girls school okay yeah and so 1880 1882 2017 what different iterations has this building gone under a lot so it's change hands many times over the years and so in 1880 it was the printer Collegiate Institute for girls and then it fell into the hands of a couple of known gamblers about ten years after that interest and so they turned it into it became a bordello there are different types of educational facilities and then after that point it became an Italian restaurant and it became a jazz club in the 1960s peanut taco played here okay I'm owned the building and he's the guy that played with guys like Benny Goodman and so kind of a famous jazz musician a lot of history lies of history there's a lot of history in this area of downtown you know they're Brown palaces across the street yeah any connection between this building and the Brown Palace there is yes at little known fact and the tunnel actually so there's a tunnel that runs in between the two buildings and it connects I originally was to connect coal cart so the building could be heated okay but you know I think once this building became a bordello it was a really discrete way for the gentlemen over at the Brown Palace to make their way over to here and so we've heard stories what I mean if these walls could talk I would tell them more so many millions and now there's a museum here there is yeah but how was the museum structured so we've got a salon style interior so that means artwork hanging from wall to wall floor to ceiling on all three floors of galleries Wow yeah so a beautiful space I'm really excited to see more of it and this way is the first gallery right exactly Yeah right through here let's check it out all right let's go this is our gallery space and we've got a ton of paintings on the wall but I wanted to show you this one here this is one of the earlier paintings in the collection by an artist named William Kiley Rani it's titled the last shot painted in about 1850 and he's depicted this lone trapper mountain man out there in the Boundary Waters he's looking over his shoulder spinning around and you can see that he's been spotted there's nude Americans up on the hill behind him there you can see them on the horizon line and so this kind of just epitomizes what it might have felt like to be out there all by yourself trapping surfers in the mountains you know you're all alone all you have is your horse and then here he is its title the last shot so what does that mean sure you're kind of left with this curiosity and wondering what's going to happen next very cool all right so we're going to walk down this way and I want to show you a landscape by Thomas Moran okay so he was an early artist that came out west as well and decided that he was going to show the landscapes of the West it's really hard for people to get out west and the railroads weren't connecting east and west yet and so when he painted this one in 1866 1857 and he hadn't even really made it out West himself and he's going off of stories about the West so yeah so the stories were inspiring artists and they're inspiring people to travel west I'm really there kind of just exploring things that's really really interesting so yeah I never seen this heard about it maybe read about it and then yeah that's what artists do right he had heard so many stories about the West and he was really familiar with another landscape back east it's amazing this kind of inspiration to come up with this made-up you know imaginary scenes Wow so it's really romantic and beautiful that clouds are coming in after a storm and but you know this was a really successful painting for him because he was able to put it up for collateral one that paid his very first trip to the left really yeah so he got $500 loaned for this painting and was able to make it to Yellowstone for the first that's a really really interesting yeah Wow yeah and so those paintings that you did at Yellowstone were what helped Congress persuade Congress to set that land aside as the first National Park copy oh yeah so this painting is really pretty special yeah when they tell you that art is an important that's a good story yeah yeah what is that yeah so this place is full of great stories and a couple of the best storytellers are Frederick Remington and Charles Russell so there is hanging right next to us here today I wanted to show you these and we'll look at Remington first and so he's right here this beautiful sort of yellowy sunlit landscape with this cowboy in the foreground there's riding the bucking bronco and trying to obtain the Bronco really what Remington is saying we're trying to see yeah okay so the West like we saw in the Rani painting earlier right this lone trapper out there all by himself so west of the place of adventure and certainly Remington captures that with this cowboy here yeah yeah that's great there's a lot of movement I mean even in there you could be the dust kicking up here yeah it's a very strong strong piece right yeah this is called a cold morning of range a cold war over yeah and you can kind of feel that that cool crisp air with that Sun kind of coming down and I love how the Cowboys can almost frame during the mountain range in the back and the Cowboys arms are echoing the shape of the horse and so just all that sense of action sure she's captured his hat sort of falling off it is something they're not matching with the mountains too it's kind of yeah yeah it's a really cool painting Wow yeah so I was done in about 1904 and Charlie Russell was another cowboy artist that was painting around the same time so the one actually hanging right next to it here because it's called the Scout and that was done in 1902 so just a couple years apart and these artists are known as cowboy artists or we like to call them the interpreters of the West here because they interpret a West that has already even changed when they were painting sure and these were works that were reproduced in magazines or journals and gave people a sense of what the West was like and the various encounters that you would have and so here Charles Russell has given us a group of Plains Indians kind of scouting their territory and so it's certainly romanticized and ideal sort of landscape he's got you know the sun shining on the pink mountainside and it looks maybe like it's sunrise you know and this guy kind of pointing out into the distance and then just makes you feel like it could be there sure and Charles Russell was an artist that was there he was a cowboy a cattle rustler and you know he kind of lived that lifestyle so he gives us a sense of the accent you would have thought we could be you can almost see the wind blowing through the you know be the plants here sort of tilted you could see the feathers in the headdresses yep sorry we'll leave in the wind we're in a really cool way to tell this narrative you know I think that's a cool story yeah let's go take a look this way and just kind of see the rest of our space we're gonna head upstairs and check out the rest of together third floor third floor here we go come on through third floor a victorian-era parlor here and we've got more paintings just around the bend here can follow me to say alright yeah so let's take a look down this way we're in kind of our Southwest galleries so we've got a large group of paintings on the table Society of artists and we're standing in an area here with four paintings by Ernest lumishine and so he's right here in front of us and he was an artist that was one of the founding group of artists that decided they were going to band together and market their work they were looking for subject matter that was really American especially because they were painting just around World War one they really wanted to find something that felt truly American in their subject matter sure and Taos really spoke to them so not only because of the beautiful landscape you can see in this example but also interesting people that they encountered really interesting architecture on subloan architecture and so they decided that this review is the subject matter for them and so they grouped together and would have these shows and painted a large amount meaning Wow yeah no this is this is beautiful yeah so this is the Sangre de Cristo Mountains this is and you've got the Pueblo village here in the snow scene down below and then you see a penitent 18 happening in the foreground come with these little brushes you know kind of around Network brownies they're almost Art Nouveau in the way that he or she goes playing up down there kind of sticking up to us know my grandfather was one of them really yeah anti-social I got family from the southern Valley for this and the mountain oh okay yeah they kind of look like that when you're you know especially with the sun shining on them and with the shadows rhythmic what's in the way that he painted it you know dark light dark light yeah and that you can kind of see that rhythm and echoed in the action down below yeah but as we've come up on the floor we're getting increasingly modern right so you see that he's a little bit more abstract puzzle and architecture really does lend itself to cubism anyway yeah they're square or cube buildings but you can see that he's playing with that really extreme light and then the dark side by side and then I also noticed that some of the people don't give their faces or exactly yeah they realize I'm not right yeah yeah so they become a little more simplified in their form and really use the little hands I talked about earlier so they're kind of Art Nouveau so he's like bringing in these new modernist style right to be playing a lot of cubism abstracting into buildings and then there's like really linear curvilinear sureit's in those plans yeah so he's playing with his artistic style roughly it's a nice mix of oh yeah yeah yeah so this was done probably my 1925 okay basically yeah so we've got other modernist meetings on this floor as well work side Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin and and other illustrators well-known modernist it kind of illustrators of always Maynard Dixon and you've got a people diet and Elias how did you obtain these works so these were all part of the intrud collection of Western American paintings and they were gifted to the museum which is a 501c3 well and so the building number in and all the paintings are all a part of the museum now the American Museum of Western art and so we're open to the public Mondays Wednesdays Fridays and then we reserved Tuesdays and Thursdays for schools also great loves to have field trips in here very cool yeah yeah so I'll show you a couple other paintings I'm upstairs yeah yeah go to the zoo that way we'll be back with more of the American Museum of Western art later in the show much more art scene coming up on the other side including the Art Students League of Denver's summer art market and white mirror and we're back on our team every year the Art Students League of Denver hosts an incredible summer art market with more than 250 artists what's unique about the summer art market is that so many of the artists are your neighbors and friends and family so you have an opportunity to meet and interact with all of the artists in their booth and talk to them about what their creative muses are what their inspiration is and really understand what's behind the work that they're selling fantastic kind of blown away by how many artists are today beautiful or there are a lot of great pieces here it's really nice I've never come to this before have you been here for a half minute before it's bigger I like it this bandit kind of like everything else in Denver so it's going to get bigger a lot more variation in artistic style envenomations canvas like that so definitely very cool very cool use of colors for right now too a lot of warm colors right now it also makes it harder to take exactly yeah I've seen like five or six pieces that is your purchase yeah yeah it's cool oh I love it every time because we have kids activities taking place in our buildings we also have artist demonstrations there's great live entertainment during the festival I just love seeing so many of our students and faculty out showing their work and I love how many people come and get to learn about the Art Students League and interact with amazing artists really wonderful we were just saying it's really cool to see so many different types of artwork and the first time coming so it's been been a great day so far awesome now for the first time ever Denver arts and venues commissioned dance is public art if the piece commemorating the Holocaust white mare a park presentation and that makes that you know art culture available to anyone regardless so there come now it's time to finish up our private tour of the American Museum of Western art we'll end up over here by one of the most modern works in the collection Wow by an artist named Kim Wiggins yeah I met Wilde yeah I love his use of color is so bright and his trees are almost like dr. Seuss trees how they're really cool curvy and he's a really cool guy so he's a living artist he works at a new Roswell New Mexico okay he actually is our guest speaker on our audio guide here as well and so he kind of brings the artists perspective from you know contemporary artists yeah to talk a little bit about the history of Western art because Western art can be wild colors certainly you know neon orange rock you got here so this painting is called merging of cultures and it was done in 1997 and it's showing just the rich sort of assembly and you know know the type of characters that we have especially them in south way this piece is very different than everything we've seen today it is yeah yeah vibrant yeah it's also it's like you know what Western art was or what the West was and what it is now you know we've got cars you know bicycles sure we still have you know Church procession happening here we've got mariachi fan we've got Native American drugs and artisans and we've got santero as well and so everybody's kind of converging together in a sign of a flash out here yeah that's really really cool I mean when you go to you know New Mexico and places where these things exist this really is representative of those you know town markets and squares or people congregate and hang out recent listings happening yeah a lot of life here yeah yeah oh yeah so this is a really lively painting in it it definitely shows you kind of just this great melting culture I'll see ya and so he's an artist that was inspired by Remington and muscle that we saw earlier and there's he's part of the whole group of artists that really are still excited by the West and move to the West right so he grew up in the West and the artist I was going to show you next on a sad didn't grow up here but it's really inspired by it so I wanted to show you this one by an artist named mo bass drum who is actually Hungarian born and wound his way to Taos New Mexico and fell in love with the space so we've seen that before right artists that are really drawn to whether it's the landscape or the people or whatever the southwest it's like this magnet for art oh yeah and so he's one of them and he experimented in this one with cubism and so it's called Eagle dance and you can see the feathers moving and you can see the dancers legs moving and it's all and within this kind of like circular motion so it's it's a really cool painting I really like it and he's an artist that not a lot of people know about but he really changed kind of the base of Western art and that human experimenting with all of these interesting styles that's what's really cool about this space is that we walk through today you told me about you know the artists where they come from what their influences were there's a diversity of artists that have contributed to this collection which is yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah we bet you know probably 180 artists you're wanted in this collection and 300 plus paintings hanging great and so you know this is just one of many right that you've seen but we could take all day to talk about all the month we're here no you know the one bag yeah yeah so and the other artist I wanted to show you is further down because we haven't really seen anyone nervous yes that's great so we've seen you know great diversity but let's get to our lady friend on the regular yeah yes around the bend over here okay so these are kind of hung like somatically so we've got landscapes again here the left and then we have some older works and California works here so this one and the one next to it are by an artist named grace carpenter Hudson she doesn't get a lot of attention a lot of people don't even know where she is I think because she was a woman artists working around a turn-of-the-century so here we've got portraits of chief roan and his wife and grace carpenter Hudson was working in California for the majority of her career and was kind of immersed in pummel culture and it was Friends of a lot of palma indians and so she would paint them and their children a lot and then her husband was an anthropologist for Chicago Field Museum and collected komal artifacts and we took photographs as well they were invited by the ceiling fans to go down Oklahoma to the reservation and capture images and kind of get a sense of the lifestyle of the planet as well so these two paintings are from that trip so these are upon me chief and his wife chief around here life yeah that's a really really cool story although it's also a little bit sad right you have this this person who was a very very talented artist who may not you know be as well recognized you can simply she was a woman right right and I think we can sort of make that same argument today that is important as you continue to highlight women artists in this way right yeah exactly I think it's really special that the collection incorporates women artists and and you know kind of tries to said you like and what other artists were doing at the time absolutely you okay so we've got one final parlor here and they're all so cool and unique though yeah yeah yeah a huge broad collection here I'm glad you enjoyed it no thinking of showing us around I really think that this is a gem in our city that more people need to know about this so thank you for showing us the collection oh yeah happy to meet you thank you thank you yes yeah thanks so much to the American Museum of Western art for having it if you love Western art or if we piqued your interest also check out Denver art museums the Western in art and film through September 10 and history Colorado's backstory Western art and context to February 11th 2018 plus the McNichol Civic Center building features to exhibit diversity in the Wild West Buffalo Bill posters and diverse voices of the modern West both due August poinsettias hey thanks for watching I'm Bobby with Seabury we'll see you next time as we discover more of Denver's art scene

Channel: City and County of Denver

Views: 7,163

Rating: 4.8400002 out of 5

Keywords: denver8, city of denver, colorado, government, American Musuem of Western Art, Western Art, Denver Museum, Art, Denver Art, Anschutz Collection, Anschutz, Navarre Building, Bobby LeFebre, Summer Art Market, Art Students League of Denver, Denver art market, White Mirror, Arts & Venues Denver, Lemon Sponge Cake, Babi Yar Park

Id: 267eMydpNDU

Length: 26min 15sec (1575 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2017