Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

About this property

The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College (FAC) is an arts center located just north of downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado. Located on the same city block are the American Numismatic Association and part of the campus of Colorado College. The center uses a thick red outline of a square as its logo. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since July 3, 1986, under the former name Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. With $600,000, Alice Bemis Taylor funded the 1936 construction of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and provided a $400,000 donation for an endowment. Constructed during the Great Depression, Taylor saw the project as a means of employment for unemployed laborers. Taylor donated her extensive Indian and Hispanic art and her collection of 6,000 volumes of Americana and appointed Mitchell Wilder as curator. She envisioned a place that would be accessible to all people, with no admission charge. The Broadmoor Art Academy previously stood on the grounds of the current art center, on land donated by Julie Penrose. Elizabeth Sage Hare also collaborated with Taylor and Penrose on the center, the nation's first combined art museum, art school and performing arts venue. The Fine Arts Center was designed by New Mexico architect John Gaw Meem in a revolutionary design combining modernism and indigenous Pueblo style architecture Pueblo Revival Style and Spanish Colonial into "Santa Fe Style" architecture. In 1940, Meem's most modern design earned a Silver Medal at the Fifth Quadrennial Pan American Congress of Architecture. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. At the original Grand Opening in April 1936, Martha Graham performed Lamentation-Dance of Sorrow; Frank Lloyd Wright lectured about the building, Manuel de Falla performed an opera with life-size marionettes, and Alexander Calder created the stage design for a sung dialog, Eric Satie's "Socrate." Among the art school's instructors were Boardman Robinson, Adolf Dehn, and Jean Charlot. On July 1, 2017, the FAC joined with Colorado College to become the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. The Fine Arts Center is a modern poured concrete Pueblo-inspired structure that integrates Southwestern, Art Deco and Classic architectural elements. It has one, two and, for the theatre fly tower, four stories. Within the building are galleries, art studios, performing art facilities including a 400-seat theater, a music room, retail shop and storage and office space. The murals on the exterior of the building were produced by Boardman Robinson and Frank Mechau. The auditorium includes three aluminum relief panels over the doors depicting Pueblo and Hopi Indian Kachina masks, all by noted Denver sculptor, Arnold Rönnebeck, murals in the original theater lounge (now restaurant) by Andrew Dasburg, Kenneth Adams, and Ward Lockwood, and a downstairs lounge mural by Archie Musick.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in El Paso County

Historic places, battles, and census history across El Paso County.

More historic places in Colorado

Browse all historic places in Colorado.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Colorado history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.