Mary Chenoweth’s passport must have looked as abstract as her art.
The groundbreaking Colorado Springs modernist indulged her wanderlust throughout her life, up until a few years before she died at 80 in 1999 in Sidney, Neb., where she moved after retiring from a 30-year career as an art educator at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and Colorado College.
She traveled the world, often taking cargo liners to Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean and southeast Asia. And she didn’t just visit once and cross the spots off her list; she visited places repeatedly, even living for months at a time in locales such as Morocco and western Australia. Those extensive travels often influenced her work.
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“So many know her because she taught them or because her work was so influential and significant in the Modern art scene in Colorado,” said FAC Assistant Curator of Collections Alana Adams. “You can’t talk about the modern art scene without talking about Mary Chenoweth. Her work in the abstract style that was becoming popular around the time she was a student and shook up the art scene, not only in Colorado, left a distinct mark in her legacy.”
The new exhibit “The Many Travels of Mary Chenoweth” focuses on her travels beginning in 1958 and will feature about 20 works from the permanent collection at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College and the Special Collections at CC’s Tutt Library. It opens Wednesday with a gallery talk by Adams and runs through Dec. 13.
“These trips provided her with inspiration for her art, as evidenced in ‘Untitled (Ocean Freighter).’ This undated painting conveys the image of the ship through squares and circles. Chenoweth the brilliant colorist combines luminous shades with dusky ones, just as she did in the 1940s,” wrote art historian Michael Paglia for Westword in 1999.
Born in Tulsa, Okla., Chenoweth studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Pratt Institute in New York City before getting her bachelor’s in fine arts at University of Denver in 1950, where she studied with the notable artist Vance Kirkland. She went on to get a master’s in fine arts in printmaking from University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1953 before being hired to teach at FAC, which then became the CC art department. She was one of the only women in the U.S. to hold an Master of Fine Arts at the time.
“To have that degree in the 1950s, she was a trailblazer,” Adams said. “She was coming up in spaces that had few female artists. She was one who opened that door for people who came after them.”
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Chenoweth was one of the most significant abstract artists in Colorado during the post-war period, Paglia writes, and was known for her geometric abstractions in the woodblock medium. That passion evolved into a love for carving doors. She’s credited with carving 50 doors, most of them in the Pikes Peak region, including the large, main entry doors at Bemis School of Art at FAC and Broadmoor Community Church.
“There’s such a broad variety in her work,” Adams said. “She’s experimenting with so much. One distinctive thing is how she pays attention to form, but also contrast in black and white and also color. She’s repeating stylistic things through her body of work, in pieces that could be considered more experimental. She has an understanding of form and colors that makes her work stand out.”
Contact the writer: 636-0270
Contact the writer: 636-0270
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