art

Loving the art but not the artist

Anonymous — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 19:45:24 +0000

Loving the art but not the artist Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/21/2024 - 13:45

Adamari Ruelas

CU Boulder philosopher Iskra Fileva explores the complexities in separating the magic of a story from the controversies of its teller

The transition from summer to fall—trading warm days for cool evenings—means that things are getting … spookier. Witchier, maybe. For fans of the series, the approach of Halloween means it’s time to rewatch the Harry Potter movies.

This autumn also marks the 25^th anniversary of the U.S. release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, book three in author J.K. Rowling’s seven-book series about a boy wizard defeating the forces of evil with help from his friends. Many U.S. readers of a certain age cite Azkaban as the point at which they discovered the magic of Harry Potter.

However, in the years since the series ended, Rowling has gained notoriety for stating strongly anti-trans views. Harry Potter fans have expressed disappointment and feelings of betrayal, and asked the question that has shadowed the arts for centuries, if not millennia: Is it possible to love the art but dislike the artist? Can the two be separated?

CU Boulder philosopher Iskra Fileva notes that, "Even if you are an aestheticist, you probably cannot separate the art from the artist if the background information is affecting the proper interpretation of the story.”

“In principle, you can try to focus on the purely aesthetic properties of an artwork. This is the aestheticist attitude,” says Iskra Fileva, a University of babyֱ��app Boulder assistant professor of philosophy who has published on topics of virtue and morality. “But even if you are an aestheticist, you probably cannot separate the art from the artist if the background information is affecting the proper interpretation of the story.”

The Impact of Knowing

Fileva offered as an example the work of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro. In a short story called “Wild Swans,” Munro depicts a young girl on a train who is sexually assaulted by an older man sitting beside her, but who pretends to be asleep and does nothing because she is curious about what would happen next.

Munro’s daughter came forward several months after Munro’s death in May to say she’d been abused by her stepfather and that her mother, after initially separating from her stepfather, went back to live with him, saying that she loved him too much.

Fileva points out that in light of these revelations, it is reasonable for readers of “Wild Swans” to reinterpret the story. Whereas initially they may have seen it as a psychologically nuanced portrayal of the train scene, they may, after learning of the daughter’s reports, come to read the story as an attempt at victim-blaming disguised as literature.

Fileva contrasts Munro’s case with cases in which an author may have said or done reprehensible things, but not anything that bears on how their work should be interpreted—as when Italian painter Caravaggio killed a man in a brawl, but the homicide is considered irrelevant to interpreting his paintings.

Fileva points out also that the question of whether the art can be separated from the artist may seem particularly pressing today, because modern audiences know so much more about artists than art consumers in the past may have. If no one knows facts about the author’s life, art consumers would be unable to draw parallels between an artwork and biographical information about the author.

“These are things that, historically, few would have known about—the origin of a novel or any other kind of artwork. Art might have looked a little bit more magical, and there may have been more mystery surrounding the author and in the act of creation,” says Fileva, explaining how the personal lives of artists have begun to seep into the minds of their consumers, something that has recently become common.

"The Crowning of Thorns" by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (ca. 1602-1607). Philosopher Iskra Fileva notes that even though Caravaggio killed a man in a brawl, the homicide is considered irrelevant to interpreting his paintings.

In 1919, poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “I have assumed as axiomatic that a creation, a work of art, is autonomous.” And in his essay “The Death of the Author,” literary theorist Roland Barthes criticized and sought to counter “the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person.”

However, early 20th-century movements such as New Criticism, which considered works of art as autonomous, have given way to more nuanced considerations of art in relation to its artist.

“I do think that if you want to understand what work literature does in the world, starting with its historical moment is an important step,” Amy Hungerford, a Yale University professor of English, told author Constance Grady in a 2019 story for Vox. “But I also am fully committed to the idea that every generation of readers remakes artworks’ significance for themselves. When you try to separate works of art from history, whether that’s the moment of creation or the moment of reception, you’re impoverishing the artwork itself to say that they don’t have a relation.”

Too many tweets

The growth of social media has added a new layer to the issues of art and the artists who create it. According to Fileva, social media have made it more difficult to separate the two because of how much more the consumer is able to know, or think they know, about the artist: “Artists are often now expected to have a public persona, to be there, to talk to their fans, to have these parasocial relationships, and that might make it difficult to separate the art from the artist,” she says.

In Fileva’s view, all this creates a second way in which facts about the author seem to bear on the public’s perception of an artwork. While learning about the revelations made by Munro’s daughter may lead some readers to reinterpret “Wild Swans,” other readers and viewers may feel disappointed and “let down” by the author even without reinterpreting the artwork or changing their judgment about the work’s qualities.

This fall marks the 25th anniversary of the U.S. release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which many U.S. readers of a certain age cite as their entry point into the series.

This is another way in which it may become difficult to separate the art from the artist: The work becomes “tainted” for some audience members because of what they have learned about its creator.

It may have always been the case, Fileva suggests, that people who really loved a work of art, even when they knew nothing about its creator, imagined that they were connected to the artist, but this is truer today than ever. Fans are able to follow their favorite artists on social media and feel that they know the artist as a person, which creates expectations and the possibility for disappointment.

Perhaps inevitably, greater knowledge of the artist as a person affects how consumers interact with his or her art—whether it’s Ye (formerly Kanye) West’s music, Johnny Depp’s films or Alice Munro’s short stories.

So, where does that leave Harry Potter fans who have been disappointed by Rowling’s public statements?

Different books by Rowling illustrate the two different ways in which biographical information about the author may affect readers’ interpretation of the work, Fileva says. Rowling’s book (written under the pen name Robert Galbraith) The Ink Black Heart, featuring a character accused of transphobia, is an example of the first way: Facts about the author’s life may bear directly on the interpretation of the work.

When, by contrast, a transgender person who loved Harry Potter in her youth and loved Rowling feels saddened by statements Rowling made about gender, the reader may experience the book differently without reinterpreting it, Fileva says. Such a reader may think that the book is just as good as it was when she fell in love with it; it’s just that she can no longer enjoy it in the same way.

Some art consumers are more inclined to be what Fileva calls “aestheticists”—Barthes’ account of the death of the author resonates with them. Aestheticists may find it easier to separate the art from the artist in cases in which biographical information about the author is irrelevant to understanding and interpreting the work.

Whether any reader, whatever their sympathies, can separate facts about Munro’s life from the story “White Swans” or Rowling’s public pronouncements on gender from the interpretation of her book The Ink Black Heart, Fileva says, is a different question.

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CU Boulder philosopher Iskra Fileva explores the complexities in separating the magic of a story from the controversies of its teller.

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Form and function with a hummus appetizer

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 15:50:04 +0000

Form and function with a hummus appetizer Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/21/2023 - 08:50

Rachel Sauer

Hands-on project lets CU Boulder intermediate ceramics students create functional and unique pieces for Boulder’s Café Aion restaurant

A bowl is not just a bowl.

It may seem like the simplest thing in the world, but it exists at the nexus of form and function—able to live as art, but not useful in a restaurant if it can’t contain the gazpacho.

So, Kim Dickey’s intermediate ceramics students learned a particular kind of balance, meeting the needs of clients as well as their own artistic vision—and doing it in multiples of 12.

See more photos of the intermediate ceramics dishes made for Café Aion

“I enjoyed creating pieces that would actually be used for their intended purpose instead of sitting on my shelf or being dumped into a trash can,” says Dylan Xu, a senior majoring in strategic communications-advertising. “What I learned is that you will break more than half of the plates you make.”

Dickey, a professor in the University of babyֱ��app Boulder Department of Art and Art History and associate chair for arts practices, and her intermediate ceramics students recently completed an unusual project in which they partnered with Café Aion in Boulder to create one-of-a-kind ceramic dishes for some of the restaurant’s menu items.

For the week beginning Nov. 6, Café Aion patrons enjoyed French onion soup and chocolate torte, crispy cauliflower and kale salad and shakshuka from ceramics the students custom made for the dishes and the restaurant. At the end of their meals, patrons were invited to complete comment cards, sharing their experiences of eating from handmade dishes.

CU Boulder Professor Kim Dickey and her intermediate ceramics students created hand-made ceramics in partnership with Café Aion chef and owner Dakota Soifer.

“I thoroughly enjoyed all of the unique styles of dishes!” wrote one, while another patron noted, “It was nice, and I loved looking at them.”

“It was so exciting to have the opportunity to work with a wonderful restaurant, to learn how to work with a client and meet their needs, to work to a deadline, and then experience what it means to have your art received in the real world,” Dickey says.

An artistic and practical challenge

At the beginning of the fall semester, Dickey contacted Dakota Soifer, owner and chef of Café Aion, about a possible collaboration. She was involved in a similar project at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received her bachelor of fine arts degree, and knew how much students could learn from “developing pieces for a client and having that kind of public reception,” she explains.

Soifer, a CU Boulder graduate in architecture, was immediately on board: “I went to CU and have a sweet spot for being in school and being creative and that whole scene,” he says. “Café Aion’s a small, independent restaurant. It’s funky; it’s not super big, so we have the opportunity that a larger, more corporate restaurant can’t do if we decide we’re going to change all of our plates. Plus, I really wanted to support students and give them a chance to have this real-world experience.”

Early in the semester, Dickey and her students visited the restaurant to talk with Soifer, discuss his menu and get a feel for the restaurant’s atmosphere. Then, they each designed a prototype dish for a specific menu item based on the cuisine and Soifer’s needs. Dickey asked the students to not only create their dishes based on the menu item, but to bring in two outside influences to inform their designs.

Soifer visited the ceramics studio to offer rigorous but generous feedback, so the students adapted their designs as needed.

“We talked about how, first and foremost, it needs to be functional,” Soifer says. “If it’s going to have some sauce in it or a broth, it needs a rim on it, and we don’t want the edges to be too sharp or too angular. We want guests to be able to get that spoon in the corner and get that last bit of taste. We also have to think about how are we going to set this down without getting our fingers in customers’ food? Is it going to sit level on the table?”

The initial goal was to produce 20 plates each, “but we realized that was too many and decided to reduce it to 12 finished pieces per student,” Dickey says, adding that during each class period students were making between five and 10 dishes so that they could experiment with weight, size and finishes.

“I learned a lot about making multiples and trying to get each bowl to be the same and to be stackable,” says Micaela Del Cid, a senior double majoring in art practices and sociology. “I also learned that I don’t enjoy making things exactly the same, because I am not skilled enough and I love uniqueness. I learned that I could make it enjoyable by doing different designs on each bowl.”

Intermediate ceramics student Katie Sieker at Café Aion packing dishes she made.

Ivy Edberg, a senior studying art practices, added that she “learned a lot about the standards of restaurants when it comes to the quality of tableware.”

Bringing people together

After completing their 12 dishes, Dickey and her students took them to Café Aion, where they were used in place of some of the restaurant’s regular dishes for the week of Nov. 6.

Alicia Bolstad, a senior majoring in art, created a dish for the restaurant’s baked brie dessert, drawing inspiration from Moroccan architecture and tile motifs, and creating a plate shape that was based on a beautiful doorway. Bailey Diamond, a senior majoring in art practices and journalism, created a dish intended for the kale salad, “but they ended up being used to serve a number of dishes, which was really exciting.

“I love wheel throwing and knew from the start that I wanted to create a wide, wheel-thrown bowl,” Diamond says. “I took inspiration from the dish itself—the visual fullness of a big salad, and the comforting nature of it being shared among people.”

Dickey and her students returned to Café Aion Nov. 13 to gather their dishes and, if they wanted, leave one there as a memento of the week. Soifer says that restaurant patrons loved the project—during the week the students’ dishes were in use, each table had a small sign explaining who had made them—and that the students successfully aligned their artistic ideas with the restaurant’s needs and funky, eclectic vibe.

“I was so heart-warmed by this project,” Diamond says. “Seeing my dishes used in a restaurant was something I had dreamed about and wanted before this experience, and having that desire fulfilled was incredible. It was a beautiful experience to see how much this project brought people together.”

Top image: plates made by intermediate ceramics student Amanda Jack

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Hands-on project lets CU Boulder intermediate ceramics students create functional and unique pieces for Boulder’s Café Aion restaurant.

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CU Art Museum earns first-time accreditation

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 17:42:22 +0000

CU Art Museum earns first-time accreditation Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/15/2023 - 11:42

Rachel Sauer

Following a rigorous, five-year process, the museum joins peer institutions with a recognition of its quality and credibility

The University of babyֱ��app Boulder Art Museum recently joined an elite group of peer institutions when it received first-time accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums.

This distinction recognizes “a museum’s quality and credibility to the entire museum community, to governments and outside agencies, and to the museum-going public,” the American Alliance of Museums notes, adding that the accreditation program ensures the integrity and accessibility of museum collections, reinforces the educational and public service roles of museums and promotes good governance practices and ethical behavior.

“This is an important milestone,” says Sandra Q. Firmin, museum director. “It increases our credibility as a trusted resource and partner on the CU campus and in the community and also among our peer institutions. It applauds the work we do to fuel imagination and collaboration through art.”

Top of the page: "Pool" by Sandra Kaplan is featured in the current Lush: Prolific Nature exhibit. Above: Sandra Q. Firmin is director of the University of babyֱ��app Art Museum and led the successful accreditation process.

Of the nation’s estimated 33,000 museums, more than 1,099 are accredited. The CU Art Museum is one of 26 museums accredited in babyֱ��app. “We are thrilled to join this esteemed community of museums in babyֱ��app and nationwide,” Firmin says.

Reflecting on purpose

The road to accreditation traversed a winding five years, extended by a global pandemic that saw the museum close from March 13, 2020, to Aug. 17, 2021. “We knew the process was going to be rigorous, but that added a whole new dimension,” says Maggie Mazzullo, head registrar and collection manager. “It really gave us an opportunity to reflect on our role and our identity.”

The accreditation process began in 2018 with submitting key operational documents for evaluation, then completing a more in-depth self-study. The first prompt in the self-study was deceptively simple: “Briefly describe what stories and messages the museum wants to convey; and the museum’s interpretive philosophy, educational goals and target audiences.”

“That was a whole-museum effort,” says Hope Saska, chief curator and director of academic engagement. “It was so much more than asking whether we’re good stewards of the collection, which is a great strength of this museum. It was looking at how we create learning opportunities and partnerships with babyֱ��app and students. Reviewers recognized our student-centered perspective and noted the excellence of students in our Museum Attendant Program.”

Maggie Mazzullo, CU Art Museum head registrar and collection manager (left), and Hope Saska, chief curator and director of academic engagement, helped guide the five-year accreditation process.

In the self-study, museum staff noted, “We are a collecting institution with artworks representing 10,000 years of human history. Because of the historical depth and geographic scope of the collection, the museum is able to mobilize the collection to relate a wide range of stories and messages. Our exhibitions are designed to contextualize our collection, make visible campus research through collaborative projects, and present new artistic productions.”

Saska highlights as an example the recently opened Lush: Prolific Nature exhibition, which brings together artworks from the museum’s collection that focus on the natural world. Not only are different geographies and time periods represented in many different media, but several pieces are on display for the first time.

One such piece is “Volcán” by artist Fernanda Brunet, a fiberglass, wood and metal sculpture abundantly blooming with vibrant migajón flowers made from a bread-based clay. “We’re really excited to be displaying this for the first time,” Saska says. “We’re thinking about so many things as we’re envisioning our exhibitions, and an important aspect of that is the idea that any babyֱ��app member can find an artwork here that relates to what they’re teaching in class, and any student can come here to see what they’re learning about.”

In-depth peer evaluation

Another important aspect of the accreditation process is a multi-day, on-site evaluation completed by peer reviewers. These reviewers considered not only practical aspects of museum operations—such as whether environmental conditions are appropriate for the collection and whether the interpretive materials are accurate, informed and professionally presented—but also how well the museum encourages and facilitates community discourse and how it asserts its public service role.

In their final evaluation, the peer reviewers note that not only do museum staff take pride in the power of strategic planning to guide the museum to new heights, but also ground their work in student-centeredness and a commitment to the museum’s educational mission.

Tim Whiten: Tools of Conveyance was a featured exhibit in 2021.

The CU Art Museum “emphasizes its learner-centeredness through its interdisciplinary teaching, using its strong and developing art collection to educate audiences about subjects well beyond the boundaries of art and art history,” the peer reviewers observed. “Additionally, students and babyֱ��app learn through collaborative label writing for exhibitions and object writing for the newsletter, as well as exhibitions that they curate with staff guidance (these include thesis work for art students).”

Firmin adds that while the accreditation process was long and rigorous, achieving the distinction “is validating and acknowledges the expertise of our staff and all the ways the museum supports education and our partners in the community. It recognizes the museum as a dynamic and growing institution.”

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Following a rigorous, five-year process, the museum joins peer institutions with a recognition of its quality and credibility.

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How art can mobilize ‘preventive publics’ against barbarism

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 20:53:18 +0000

How art can mobilize ‘preventive publics’ against barbarism Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/27/2023 - 14:53

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU Boulder art history professor explores how art can create community to counter violence

Leo Tolstoy once mused that art could thwart violence, writing, “Art should cause violence to be set aside, and it is only art that can accomplish this.”

A CU Boulder art professor tends to agree.

In her upcoming book, Don't Look Away: Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe (Duke University Press, May 2023) University of babyֱ��app Boulder Assistant Professor of Art and Art History Brianne Cohen delves deeply into the role that art can play in creating public commitment to curbing structural violence in Europe.

Art often looks at past violence, and has, at times, enabled it. In Don’t Look Away, Cohen explores how it can be used to prevent violence, particularly by helping to create a “shared social sense of vulnerability” and “mass stranger relationality.”

Brianne Cohen’s research and teaching focuses on contemporary art and visual culture in the public sphere. Her new research addresses questions of ecological devastation and the formation of critical publics in Southeast Asia, particularly in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore.

“Art can have a critical role to play not only in challenging injurious public discourse but also in actively reconceiving the groundwork of more ethically self-reflexive, pluralistic public spheres,” she writes. “I wish to transform a question of informed public action in the aftermath of violence to one of the informed public prevention of both direct and more indirect aggression.”

Cohen grew up in Dallas and spent four years living in Germany as a child. She later did graduate work in Germany, London, Brussels and elsewhere in Europe. Her experiences— including moving through German society with a traditional Jewish name, to Irish Republican Army terrorist threats against her brother’s British school, violence in response to the publication of cartoons depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad in Denmark and rising anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and anti-Roma sentiment in Europe—all helped shape her interest in broader questions about “public spheres.”

“Those real instances of violence raised questions of who belonged, in terms of community,” she says, “and the meaning of a pluralistic society.”

Her book approaches the question of “what it means to make a public sphere through a visual realm and how to bring strangers together around common matters of concern” via an examination of the work of three participatory, “recursive” artists, German filmmaker Harun Farocki, Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, and the art collective Henry VIII’s Wives.

I’m really interested in how we prevent violence in transnational space, and the question of art as nonviolent action. I’m trying to think about how we can prevent violence in the first place, not just thinking about the aftermath, what kind of images and artwork can change public attitudes and the conditions that allow this kind of recurring violence to happen.

Reflecting on violence and vulnerable populations in Europe, which has often generated “fear-based publics,” Cohen argues that their backward-looking art is a more potent tool to prevent future violence than art focused on current events or bringing perpetrators to justice.

“I’m really interested in how we prevent violence in transnational space, and the question of art as nonviolent action. I’m trying to think about how we can prevent violence in the first place, not just thinking about the aftermath, what kind of images and artwork can change public attitudes and the conditions that allow this kind of recurring violence to happen,” she says. “Maybe it’s utopian, but art can change public mindsets.”

She examines Farocki’s 2007 film, Respite, which he created from 1939 Nazi footage of a Dutch refugee camp for Jews fleeing Germany that was subsequently converted into a labor camp and stopover for prisoners who were later sent to death camps.

Cohen highlights the image of a 10-year-old girl named Settela Steinbach, which became “a quintessential image of the Jews’ subjugation in the Netherlands.” But as a 1990s documentary revealed, the girl was “in fact Sinti,” Cohen writes, highlighting a “lesser-known genocide.”

The film “recursively brings into public circulation and awareness questions of slow and direct violence for contemporary Romani peoples, a fact that has not received any in-depth interpretation in film or art historical scholarship,” Cohen writes.

“Without a historically self-reflexive attention to how publics have perpetuated such violence, it would arguably be impossible to begin the project of actively envisioning a pluralistic, nonviolent social imaginary in the future.”

Without a historically self-reflexive attention to how publics have perpetuated such violence, it would arguably be impossible to begin the project of actively envisioning a pluralistic, nonviolent social imaginary in the future.”

Hirschhorn’s installation of his “Batailles Monument” in a Turkish-German neighborhood in Kassel, Germany, generated controversy, in part because he was perceived as an outsider imposing his vision on marginalized people. But Cohen argues that his installations in “banlieues”—a derogatory French term for immigrant suburbs—effectively link “disparate, embodied, and virtual publics around such common matters of concern.”

With the atomization of information and people in the internet age, art can play a role in countering violence by creating community, she says.

“Typically, you can solve questions of civic relations or matters of concern through the local community,” she says. “But once you get to a huge, transnational space—online, social media—how do you connect strangers in ethical ways? Artists are part of that. They can create publics that ethically bind people together.”

At the top of the page: A scene from Harun Farocki's film Images of the world and the inscription of war, 1988 film. Courtesy Goethe-Institut London.

CU Boulder art history professor explores how art can create community to counter violence.

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At 91, once-skeptical art prof still paints in vibrant strokes

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 14:41:44 +0000

At 91, once-skeptical art prof still paints in vibrant strokes Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/05/2019 - 08:41

Marysia Lopez

Thirty years after retirement, Frank Sampson is steadily creating work in his studio behind his home in Boulder; creating art is not just something he does—it’s part of his spiritual makeup

In today’s art world of oversized dog balloons and anonymous political graffiti, you would be hard pressed to find something that can still shock its viewers. But Frank Sampson’s artwork is able to do just that.

Artist Frank Sampson withsome of his artwork. Photo by Marysia Lopez. At top of the page is a portion of "Animals in Reflection," courtesy of the Sandra Phillips Gallery.

Unlike many contemporary artists, the 91-year-old University of babyֱ��app Boulder art professor emeritus doesn’t shock his audience with explicit imagery or taboo themes. It’s his masterful execution of a painterly style, in which each brush or palette stroke is vibrant and visible, combined with a fresh exploration of fantastical characters and subject matter, that makes Sampson’s work stand out.

Though Sampson is now one of the most prolific artists that Boulder calls its own, his early life was a far cry from the galleries and museums his work now frequents.

Growing up on a farm in North Dakota in the 1930s, Sampson didn’t experience much in the way of art appreciation. But from an early age, he showed a keen interest in his mother’s book of Renaissance paintings, often copying the artwork.

Sampson also recalls getting wrapped up in his mother’s wild storytelling. The artist’s mother enjoyed spontaneously creating lengthy, outlandish tales often featuring animals as main characters. Sampson reminisces fondly on this aspect of his childhood, claiming his mother was “almost hypnotic with her storytelling.”

Instilled with a love of storytelling and European Renaissance paintings, Sampson eventually left the farm he grew up on to study history and art at Concordia College in Minnesota. In 1952, he received his MFA from University of Iowa. While there, Sampson studied art history alongside studio art. Despite his professors’ urging him to get a PhD and become an art history professor, Sampson decided that he loved the studio above all else and decided to be an artist.

After receiving his MFA, Sampson had little time to celebrate—he was drafted into the Army during the Korean War. Luckily, Sampson was stationed in Germany (rather than Korea), allowing him to explore other parts of Europe and see the very paintings he admired while growing up.

A few years after completing his service, Sampson received a Fulbright grant to create artwork in Belgium, where he was placed in a private home with his own studio. In Belgium, home to some of Sampson’s most beloved Flemish Renaissance artists, his love of painting was reinforced.

When asked how he got into teaching art, Sampson admits that he was skeptical of it at first. The adage “Those who can’t do, teach” made the artist feel a little hesitant when a close friend working at CU Boulder recommended that Sampson come teach for a year to take over for a professor on leave.

When Sampson first arrived in 1964, CU Boulder’s fine art program had no central building for classes. Because classes were dispersed throughout campus, Sampson says it was difficult to feel a sense of unity.

In the late 1960s, they got their own building and began focusing on attracting guest artists, including well-known and celebrated English painter David Hockney. Sampson says these additions helped make it a more viable program and a close-knit community.

Soon, Sampson’s skepticism dissipated as he found that teaching art was not just a great way to make a living, but also a great way to feel challenged artistically.

“I learned a lot from my students… they had natural instincts that were wonderful,” explains Sampson. He found himself having to think through processes such as line work and tonality a lot more to teach them to his students, something he felt benefited his artwork in the end.

Thirty years after retirement, Sampson is still steadily creating work in the studio behind his home in Boulder. For Sampson, creating art is not just something he does—it’s part of his spiritual makeup and tied to his sense of wellbeing.

Sampson feels that creating paintings, while therapeutic, is a little like taking a gamble. Sampson explains, “If you’re in a good mood and the forces are working with you, the gamble works out.”

While the colors and tones he works with have changed slightly over the years, his work has largely stayed within the same style. This unique style is often referred to as “magic realism.”

"Dark Waters" by Frank Sampson. Image courtesy of the Sandra Phillips Gallery.

The term refers to Sampson’s union of realism and fantasy. Sampson’s anthropomorphic portrayal of animals, often placed in the same scene as humans, gives his art a certain magical mysticism while the thick brushstrokes impart a blurred, dream-like quality. At the same time, the figures and settings in Sampson’s work are portrayed realistically in a stylistic sense, rarely straying into the abstract realm.

Sampson’s masterful incorporation of dark, rich colors in densely populated compositions demonstrates his love of Flemish Renaissance artists such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Though the colors and tones of his paintings give off a brooding moodiness, this is quickly transformed by the inclusion of lions, bears, elephants and other animals that seem to be plucked straight out of a storybook.

While Sampson will first credit his mother’s storytelling as an artistic influence, he also credits his childhood fascination with Native American folklore. Fables and literary characters from other regions were also influential, including Northwest Europe’s Reynard the Fox and Italy’s Punchinello, who sometimes make appearances in his work.

Sandra Phillips, director and owner of Sandra Phillips Gallery in Denver, has been representing Sampson for more than a decade and is one of his greatest admirers. To keep up with the demand from her visitors, Phillips plans one solo show per year for Sampson’s work.

When explaining why she loves representing Sampson’s work at the gallery, Phillips says, “It’s wonderful to be showing an artist that visitors really spend time with… The surfaces (of his paintings) are so lush and beautiful. No one paints like Frank Sampson.”

To see Sampson’s work, you can find it on display in Boulder at Bedell & Co., a fine antiques shop on Pearl Street. His work is regularly exhibited in Denver at Sandra Phillips Gallery and is part of the permanent collection at Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art. Later this summer, Sampson will get to realize his dream of showing work in his home state with a solo show at North Dakota Museum of Art.

Thirty years after retirement, Frank Sampson is steadily creating work in his studio behind his home in Boulder; creating art is not just something he does—it’s part of his spiritual makeup.

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