The Art Tourist in Colorado Springs
Manifest Declares Modernism for U at the Springs

Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007

COLORADO SPRINGS  — The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has the same campus feeling as a high-tech headquarters, the fatherland of Focus on the Family or any suburban commuter college. UCCS Contemporary Art

The buildings look the same and so do the occupants. I was surprised to see an older person, who could have been a professor, because there were so few walking around. A few Spanish-speakers worked behind a construction fence pouring concrete into a new building site. There were more people grouped together studying in the library that having coffee in the student center.

Diversity is not the strength of the Colorado University system, but they are trying. One attempt is to stimulate the minds of students in the Gallery of Contemporary Art by bringing in a new curator, Christopher Lynn, who has launched USCS's first rocket in the race to show the most contemporary art to Colorado.

Lynn's first show is called Manifest: Colonial Tendencies of the West and closes November 17, 2007. For this, Lynn brought in several works by Luis Gispert & Jeffrey Reed, Louise Noguchi, Kehinde Wiley, Danny Ledonne, Patti Hallock, Amy Chan and Philip Kwame Apagya.

UCCS Contemporary Art

The work is not from the Ladies Art Club, or old stuff like 60's Feminists art, Lynn told me, or art that is only contemporary because it was made in this year. Lynn has a vision to show students art attempting to talk about issues of the times. He talks about his view of the show in his essay Planting Flag in the exhibition catalogue.

My view is that violence, staged or real, should be looked at and not ignored, thanks to Louise Noguchi who photographed tourist-oriented Wild West shows and captures moments of violent action. I thought about how music isolates people by being so pervasively in everyone ears, or may lead people along to the gas chamber or similarly powerless daily grind in the video by Gispert & Reed from their series called Stereo Mongrels. I played a very slow video game called Super Columbine Massacre RPG. I was Eric Harris, but couldn't find the guns in the basement so I never left the house that morning. Chan's paintings are the type of Asian rice paper painting I ignore from habit but to a little notice of the addition of Ross Dress for Less, and Dunkin' Donuts in her version of the Peaceable Kingdom.

Lynn said attendance at this show has been good, Supporters of the Gallery of Contemporary Art have done their job and supported it, and ideas cannot help but be formed and bubble up from this clean little campus in the Springs.

The next show, to be called Young Moderns, is a collection of newish work of Sarah Braman, Todd Chilton and John McEnroe. No old art, intellectually or actually. The opening will be Dec 14 and closing Feb 9. Lynn is hoping to have these artists present and create opportunities for them to interact with students.

Terry Talty writes the Art Tourist to become the Rick Steves of contemporary art .