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| On the roof of the Museum of Contemporary Art on 15th Street |
My friend, Patrick, and I went down to Denver last week to check out a couple of museums. The Museum of Contemporary Art is a fine piece of architecture with a great roof garden and cafe. It was hosting a series of exhibits on the folk arts of the "counterculture" communes and collectives which sprung up in the late 60s and early 70s throughout the west. These included light shows, psychedelic paintings, costumes, performances, posters, and inflatable sculptures.
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| Inflatable sculptures from the Ant Farm Collective |
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Having seen the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, we spent some time in the museum's gift shop. I came across a book, Huerfano, written by Roberta Price, a memoir of her life on a commune in southern Colorado. A copy of the book was given to me by my son's college roommate some years ago. His parents were part of an adjacent commune...after its dissolution, they stayed on and worked a wholesale nursery. Roberta, now an intellectual property rights lawyer, is coming up to Denver for a panel discussion at the museum in a few weeks.
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| Cover of Roberta's Memoir |
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Patrick and I then crossed over downtown and went to the new Clyfford Still museum. Still was an initial founder of the movement of abstract expressionism in New York in the 1950s. His will stipulated that on his death all of the works in his possession would be given to a city that built a museum solely for his paintings. Denver finally won the right to build the museum. It opened a few months back. Four of his paintings, donated by his wife, had been sold in New York for $114 million to support the operations of the museum.
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| Galleries at the Still Museum |
So this clearly is not folk art but rather the rarefied "high" art of billionaire collectors, glossy art magazines, and auction houses. No inflatable sculptures here. The contrast between the two museums' shows was stark. And, yet, both come from the same desire to create, to express one's self or a collective's spirit, and to share that by interacting with an audience. Or at least with two guys on a day trip down from Fort Collins...expanding their sense of the world they live in.
