Public programs are the way that colleges and universities connect with the local community. The lectures, art exhibits, concerts and classes they offer primarily serve the needs of students, but they are also a way for these institutions to give back to the cities and towns they call home. They enrich lives; they’re important.
That came to mind as I was wandering the galleries of the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design last week. The college’s three exhibition spaces have long served as a rich (and free) resource for the Front Range. The lecture series that RMCAD presents of world-class visiting artists is one of the most consistently interesting talks in town.
Esteban Cabeza de Baca’s portrait of his mother, painted this year. (Wes Magyar, provided by Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design)
The current exhibitions at RMCAD demonstrate how it works best. The three solo shows feature the work of both regional and national artists who all come at their work from different, and very personal, angles. The artists also gave — or are giving — lectures that are open to both the young painters, designers and sculptors attending the school, and to the public.
Painter Esteban Cabeza de Baca speaks there Wednesday, and it is a highly anticipated event. Cabeza de Baca lives and works in New York City but has deep local connections. He spent a lot of his youth in Colorado and attended the Denver School of the Arts, from which he graduated in 2003.
His paintings, on display in RMCAD’s Philip J. Steele Gallery, feel at home here, too, since he focuses frequently on landscapes of the American Southwest. Cabeza de Baca’s work centers on craggy bluffs, tree lines and snow-capped peaks, scenes he often captures on-site in remote places.
But Cabeza de Baca has a unique way of rendering these pictures. He lays down a coat of dye and then paints layer after layer of scenery on top of that. The layers do not necessarily match up — they cover different places, different angles and perspectives, multiple horizon lines. They come together like collages.
What he accomplishes with this layering process is a transcendence of time and place. His paintings feel eternal — they depict mountains and rivers; things that rarely change visually — but also very contemporary in the way he freely abstracts the view and makes it his own.
This remixing of place makes us question the common assumptions we make when staring at open spaces. Who lives there? Who owns the land? It is hard to discern such things when you do not know if the scene is taking place in the past, the present or the future — or all of those at once.
These paintings are a knowing and thoughtful reconsideration of the classic, Western landscape. It would be something to see them in a show next to a Frederic Remington or an Albert Bierstadt so viewers could make comparisons head-on.
Sharing space in the Steele Gallery is painter Catherine Haggarty with a retrospective of works made from 2014 to the present. The show is a wild mix of sizes and shapes, and also media. Haggarty works in airbrush, acrylics, oils, stencils, oil sticks, wax crayons and more.
The works capture personal scenes from Haggarty’s life, with beds, chairs, windowpanes, houseplants and cats. There are domestic scenes related to a long-term illness suffered by her father. Her compositions are complicated, free-wheeling and layered in ways that do not easily connect.
What pulls it all together, thanks to curator Gretchen Marie Schaefer’s wide view of Haggarty’s output, is the way the scenes in the paintings overlap each other. In painting after painting, Haggarty comes back to the same subject matter multiple times but from different viewpoints and moods. There is, for example, a painting of her bed. But another painting of her wider room has a similar painting of her bed on the wall. You also see that cat, or its shadow, multiple times.
This arrangement turns Haggarty’s singular scenes into something more like a movie. We do not just see a moment, but a whole life as the frames pass us by. There is a lot of mystery to it all, and also an openness, thanks to Haggarty’s willingness to present her most intimate moments.
In the campus’ other major exhibition space, the sunny Rotunda Gallery, curator Jeff Page has organized a series of recent works by local painter Lydia Farrell, and it is a revelation.
This is my first encounter with Farrell’s work, which has one of the most distinctive painter’s voices I have seen in a while. I’m still trying to sort it out.
Farrell paints the suburbs, typical scenes of homes, parks and power lines, but imbues everything with a dark, sinister, satanic edge. Witches, aliens and mad scientists share space with tract housing, driveway basketball hoops and playground equipment.
It is all very dark, but balanced by a primitive or child-like quality that keeps things light. Farrell does not go into depth with details. The human forms in these works are little more than grown-up stick figures, and the artist plays up cliches: Witches, for example, wear pointy witch’s hats, and extraterrestrials drive disc-like spaceships that look like 1950s sci-fi.
Lydia Farrell turns suburban scenes supernatural. This is piece is titled “Oct. 31, 2023.” (Nicole Cassidy, provided by Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design)
There is also the use of very exaggerated color, oranges, blues, reds and pinks that are so bright they border on neon. If there is a bit of violence in these works, it is clearly cartoon violence.
That said, it is relentless, as well. Scene after scene of goblins and ghouls, ominous skies and human experimentation. It does not feel repetitive; rather, it is a bit convincing. If you are thinking of buying a home in Highlands Ranch, these paintings will make you think again.
It’s a lot. But it is also very well composed and connected. The scenes are complicated and well-constructed. They offer focal points but also a lot of extras that make the viewing endlessly compelling. The work has the aura of outsider art but, make no mistake, this artist has an MFA from Boston University and a busy C.V.; these are serious paintings.
Still, it is credit to the curator to see something more in these works than meets the eye and assemble them into a tight show that might not see the light of day if it were not for RMCAD and its open-minded galleries. It is definitely a public service to introduce an artist like this to a wider audience. The show is weird, but I would not miss it.
IF YOU GO
Exhibitions of work by Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Catherine Haggarty continue through March 22. Lydia Farrell’s show will be up until May 17. All are free and on the campus of RMCAD, 1600 Pierce St., Lakewood. Info: rmcad.edu.
Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelancer who specializes in fine arts.