New Year / New View
New Year / New View
Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts (Reopened to the public August 27, 2021)
1201 Bannock Street, Denver, CO 80204
January 22-March 14, 2021 (Closed February 15 due to museum flood)
Admission: General admission (13+): $10; Seniors, Teachers, Students, and Active Duty Military: $8; Members: free
Review by Madeleine Boyson
Standing at the mouth of the temporary exhibitions gallery at Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts, I glance up to find Angelo di Benedetto’s Untitled (Mobile) twisting softly in the air. Associate Museum Director Renée Albiston and Deputy Curator Christopher Herron, both of whom have graciously conducted me through the galleries during my visit, have also spotted the orange and yellow disc in motion. We chuckle about how the museum’s state-of-the-art HVAC system is so good that you can literally see it in action, and it occurs to me again that newness still saturates good art experiences, even in the subtlest of ways. Before the pandemic, I paid little attention to an institution’s air filtering system. Now, I consider it an essential feature. That’s new.
Kirkland's exhibition New Year / New View, presented by Herron and scheduled to be on display until March 14, 2021, is a study in novelty. The show highlights recent additions to their Colorado and regional art collection and signals a museum-wide reset after the crises of 2020. Showcasing 33 never-before-seen works by 31 artists and spanning the years 1918 to 2016, New Year / New View is also the first exhibition in the museum’s history to present new acquisitions. [1] Nine of the artists on display have never been shown at Kirkland before this year.
An installation view of the exhibition New Year / New View at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, with Edward Goldman’s Asteroids, 1976, acrylic on canvas board, in the center and Angelo di Benedetto’s Untitled (Mobile), c. 1965, acrylic on shaped canvas, hanging in the upper left. Image by Madeleine Boyson.
The museum began acquiring the works in this exhibition in 2014, after the institution announced its move to a new building. The anticipated gallery space specifically made room for larger and heavier pieces like Edward Goldman’s 1976 acrylic painting Asteroids, which was accepted with the Bannock location specifically in mind. [2] Shining like headlights from the center wall and brandishing its green geometric forms with pixelated precision, Asteroids easily becomes the focal point of the exhibition. Herron reveals that the show was built around this 105 pound work, and it’s easy to see why. [3] Walking up to the massive canvas board feels like jumping into an early video game, and the visitor can feel a tangible push-pull from Goldman’s masterful green and blue gradients, testaments to the artist’s interest in technology and continued dedication to Op Art.
In the foreground, ceramic works on display in New Year / New View, including (from left to right) Sara Ransford, Defending the Eddy, 2015, porcelain paper clay; Paul Soldner, Pedestal Vessel, probably late 1960s or early 1970s, raku; Nan McKinnell, Bowl, 1980s, porcelain; and Jim McKinnell, Punch Bowl, date unknown, ceramic. Image courtesy of the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art.
Balancing the Goldman painting’s glow are a handful of earthen ceramics by James McKinnell, Nan Bangs McKinnell, Paul Soldner, and new artist Sara Ransford. The McKinnells’ pottery marks yet another museum innovation: separate from the exhibition ceramics (which will remain part of Kirkland’s collection), seventeen pieces by both artists have been made available by a private collection for purchase in the shop. These McKinnell ceramics range from platters to large pots, offering visitors the unique opportunity to become collectors themselves.
A view of New Year / New View with Beverly Rosen’s quadriptych Volcano—Where Life Begins, 1997, acrylic on canvas in the background and Maynard Tischler’s Josef Stalin JS-3 Tank, 2006, wood-fired ceramic in the foreground. Image courtesy of the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art.
Viewers familiar with Colorado art will also recognize a few other names in New Year / New View. Popular Colorado Springs artist Boardman Robinson makes an appearance in a light watercolor and in four jaunty portraits of him by Kenneth Evett and George Vander Sluis. Opposite Robinson, Beverly Rosen’s Volcano—Where Life Begins, 1997, hangs in quadriptych. The four heavily marked canvases are indicative of Rosen’s late, pure-abstractional style a departure from her crisp geometry of the 1970s-80s. Here black and graphite-colored lines blur into reds and oranges in a wash of lava with an urgency that mirrors the artist’s experiences with Alzheimer’s.
Ellen O’Brien, Monarch, 1960s, oil on canvas. Image by Madeleine Boyson.
Homare Ikeda, Sea Monster, 2007, acrylic and oil on canvas. Image by Madeleine Boyson.
Yet more gems lie in wait behind the center wall. Ellen O’Brien’s Monarch takes the viewer back to the chunky, cubist-inspired abstraction of the 1960s in this region. Next to her is Edward Marecak with Nabucco, a playfully chromatic exploration of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera about the biblical Nebuchadnezzar. [4] Further along the wall, visitors are greeted by hard-edged, but soft-hued, Reyes Point III by Sidney Guberman, and it’s opposite—Homare Ikeda’s plasmic and slippery Sea Monster. And around yet another wall resides early visitor favorite Freedonia (2007) by Jeffrey Starr. Starr’s contemporary surrealism draws the viewer into a precariously-built, monochrome hilltop that makes strategic use of yellow light. As Associate Director Albiston explains, Freedonia is a perfect example of the museum’s dedication to collecting works that are relevant to Kirkland’s regional focus and stylistic scope, regardless of their date of completion. [5]
In the end, New Year / New View centers newness but also contributes to a conversation about collecting practices: whose art is being acquired, and why? The artists in this exhibition reveal an increasingly diverse cast for Kirkland—in style and medium as well as nationality, ethnicity, and gender. Looking up at di Benedetto’s stretched canvas mobile (the first of its kind in the museum archives), Herron reminds me of the institution’s dedication to taking stock of collection gaps and mindfully filling them with unique artists and pieces. While there’s certainly more work to be done, New Year / New View steps into 2021 with a hopeful eye for Colorado art and celebrates the novelty of an ever-evolving museum collection.
Madeleine Boyson is an independent writer, curator, lecturer, and artist located in Denver, Colorado. Her scholarship is concentrated American modernism and (dis)ability studies, including issues of care and dependency as well as the wholeness of the body. She has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History and History from the University of Denver.
[1] Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, New Year / New View Press Release, January 14, 2021.
[2] From the Kirkland Museum website, https://www.kirklandmuseum.org/new-year-new-view/, and from my discussion with Deputy Curator Christopher Herron.
[3] From my discussion with Herron.
[4] Nabucco has also been made into a limited edition puzzle game for Kirkland’s shop.
[5] From my discussion with Associate Museum Director Renée Albiston.
