Artists duel over the West at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

By Mary Voelz Chandler, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 11, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Edie Winograde's 2004 Sitting Bull Decides To Fight, archival inkjet print on watercolor paper.

Walt Kuhn's 1918 oil on canvas Commis- sioners.

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Using two bodies of work to build on a conceptual base requires the most delicate of intellectual engineering.

But Blake Milteer, curator of 19th- through 21st-century American art at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, has organized a two-prong exhibition in which the sets of work not only complement each other but, taken together, prompt a thoughtful and expansive view of how we perceive this region.

If the West hadn't accumulated mythology as well as history, if we didn't see the region in disparate ways over the course of time, it would make this place no different from other parts of the country.

To examine the West of our dreams, Milteer first turned to the Fine Arts Center's collection to bring out of storage a suite of early-20th- century paintings by New York- based artist Walt Kuhn. In "Walt Kuhn: An Imaginary History of the West," Milteer showcases a wonderful gift to the center but also offers viewers work that displays figuration as it evolves into the ab- straction of modernism.

Then Milteer looked to pair Kuhn's striking visionary paintings from the early 20th century with something different yet on that same wavelength: late 20th- and early 21st-century photographs of reenactments of pageants in the region by Edie Winograde. Now based in Denver, Winograde also has a vision of the myth/history of the West, as created by those who not only recall it but relive it.

Milteer has a strong background in photography; that was his specialty when he worked in the Denver Art Museum's modern and contemporary department. Here he gives the medium its due by choosing Winograde's perceptive, cleareyed work.

So it's old and new, painting and photography, intensely personal view and detached observation, all coming together in a pair of exhibitions that help put the Fine Arts Center near the top of the pecking order this fall.

Milteer said he'd heard from the community that it wanted to see a sign of the center's commitment to Western art, but he decided to not just haul out a slew of paintings from the collection. The Kuhn suite was a gift from the artist's family a year after his death in 1949 (a long-ago center director had tried unsuccessfully to acquire them).

The 30-odd paintings are all about the artist's concept of the place: One trip to the West fueled Kuhn's beautifully composed, compact scenes with titles straight out of a Hollywood storyboard - Attack on the Stagecoach, Bar Room Fight, Brothel Scene, Commissioners, Indian Raid and such. They are installed simply but elegantly.

The same is true of Winograde's sweeping images, which hang in a nearby gallery. She began shooting these assemblages in 1999 when she learned about the practice of reenacting crucial moments in the region or a specific town.

So an encounter in Lusk, Wyo., soon led her to Lewis and Clark in Whitehall, Mont., Custer's Last Stand and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. What's important to note in these works is not just the action at hand but also the evidence of contemporary life - for example, a camper or a nearby refinery that gives the historic event an unusual context.

Taking into account this thought- provoking partnering, the stunning installation of the bountiful "Designing Women" show and the exhibition of numerous other works retrieved from the collection, new center chief executive officer Sam Gappmayer has curators he can rely on to organize shows that challenge as much as they please.

And that's what all arts institutions should consider as they plan for the future.

Walt Kuhn/ Place and Time

* What: Kuhn's paintings of an "imaginary history of the West" and Edie Winograde's reenactment pageant photographs

* Where and when: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St., through Jan. 4

* Information: 1-719-634- 5581, csfineartscenter.org

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