Elisabeth Spalding (1868–1954)

 

Elisabeth Spalding was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. When she was six her family relocated to Denver, where she spent most of her life. She studied painting in New York, Pennsylvania, as well as Europe. She is known for her Colorado landscapes using both oil and watercolor in a post-impressionist style. 

Spaulding was both an important Colorado artist and an initiator of the arts community of Denver. She was a founding member of the Artists Club of Denver which later became the Denver Art Museum. She was also one of the fifty-two founding members of the Denver Artists Guild, which included most of the city’s professional artists. In 1943, the City Club of Denver awarded Elisabeth Spalding its Medal for Distinctive Achievement in painting. She died in Denver on May 21, 1954.

 

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Eppie Archuleta (1922-2014)
 

Eppie Archuleta was born in northern New Mexico. She was a master weaver who preserved historic ways of dying wool and weaving in the southwestern Hispanic tradition. Her style blended Spanish colonial and Chimayo Indian designs. She taught many in her family of ten children and others how to weave, keeping centuries-old weaving techniques alive. After World War II, Archuleta and her husband Frank moved from New Mexico to the San Luis Valley of Colorado where she purchased a wool mill in La Jara, Colorado. There, she opened the San Luis Valley Wool Mill which produced yarn she sold to weavers throughout the U.S., set up a weaving school, and created much-needed job opportunities in the Valley.
 

During her lifetime, Archuleta received many awards and honors. Some of her weavings are on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Archuleta was a recipient of a 1985 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1995, she received an Honorary Doctorate in Arts from Adams State University. She was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 1997.

 

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Betty Woodman (1930–2018)
 

Betty Woodman synthesized sculpture, painting, and ceramics in a highly original way. Her work speaks to gender, modernism, craft, architecture, and domesticity. She began her career making functional pottery, but in the 1970s she completely abandoned her functional approach. Woodman’s art was inspired by diverse sources, ranging from Etruscan and Minoan to Tang and majolica Majolica ceramics. In the 1950s, Woodman convinced City of Boulder officials to fund the Boulder Pottery Lab, making it one of the first recreational pottery programs in the U.S., resulting in around 100 kilns being constructed in the Boulder area.

 

Woodman was the first living female artist to have a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. Her work is in numerous permanent collections worldwide. She has won many awards, including the Colorado Governor's Award in the Arts and the Visionary Award of the American Craft Museum. She was a professor of art at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1978 to 1998 and divided her time between Colorado and Italy.

 

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Senga Nengudi (1946–present)

 

Senga Nengudi was born Sue Irons in Chicago. She is an African-American visual artist best known for her abstract sculptures that combine found objects and choreographed performances. She was raised and educated in Los Angeles where she was influenced by the strong performance and installation scene on the west coast at the time. Senga’s work reflects this mix of genres and focuses on issues surrounding gender, Black women’s bodies, race, and ethnicity. Her performance-based sculptures and installation helped bring traditional African forms into mainstream contemporary art. 

Nengudi now lives in Colorado. She is retired from teaching at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Along with making art, Nengudi is strongly committed to arts education and brings arts programs emphasizing diversity to her communities. Her work has been featured at major museums such as the Denver Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She received the 2010 Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Senga Nengudi, whose five-decade-long career has mined everyday materials to explore concepts of ritual, femininity, Blackness and the fragility of the body, is the winner of the 2023 Nasher Prize. The international award, in its sixth year, includes a $100,000 cash prize, an exhibition and a series of public events in Dallas in March and April. It is less a lifetime achievement award, said Jeremy Strick, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, than a recognition of an artist with a significant body of work “who is continuing to speak with great force to the contemporary moment.”

 

In a phone conversation, Nengudi, 78, said, “I think about so many artists who are now gone, and I’m just grateful that I’m here in body to receive all this.”

 

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Jean Smith (1951-present)

 

Jean Smith is a ceramic artist who has been a full-time artist since 1986. Some of her ceramics are functional, though most of her work is sculptural or decorative. Using geometric shapes, patterns, textures, and precise color arrangements, she creates pieces that are often free-standing, including tall totems made from individual elements, while others are affixed to the wall and grouped. Her work is influenced by Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, and Joan Miro, as well as Anne Truitt, Carmen Herrera, and Etel Adnan. Her art reflects her interest in abstraction, surface, color, and her affinity for the Mid-Century Modern aesthetic.

 

Smith is a beloved veteran of the Denver art scene as an artist, curator, and board member and co-op member of Core New Art Space for decades as well as a member of Zip 37 co-op gallery in Denver from 2000 until its closing in 2018. She has also been a member of the Colorado Chapter of the Women's Caucus for Art since its inception in Denver in 1990 and is a founding member of D’art Gallery in Denver. She is the glue that has held together many of the co-ops as they have served the arts community in Denver over the years.

 

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