Exhibit Wall: Wall 2

Deckers Old Bridge, Zoe Davis, Graphite on Paper

Early Autumn, Jean Gumpper, Woodcut

Artist Statement 

My work hovers between representation and abstraction and often focuses on the edges between water and land. Walking, hiking, and looking are the beginnings of
my prints. This contemplative, restorative practice is an intimate and direct approach to visualizing nature.

I’m intrigued with the rhythms of markmaking and the possibilities of color, texture, and movement. I hope to capture the sense of being in the landscape, hearing the sounds, feeling the air. I work within a structure, the tradition of woodcut, which allows me to freely explore the layers and shifts within it.

The subject matter of much of my work is the changes in seasons, such as these leaves just beginning to turn, but the content is often about the inevitable changes in our lives.

Love Letter, Sydni Griffin, Watercolor on Paper

Spacious Skies Over Florissant, CO, Emily Kilne, Pastel on Paper

Reflections, Anna Wise, Watercolor on Paper

Crocuses, Alice Stewart Hill, Watercolor on Paper

Artist Biography 

In 1894, Alice Stewart Hill joined her family in Colorado Springs, having lived with them earlier in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Her father, George H. Stewart, was a judge. She arrived in Colorado with solid credentials in art, having studies in New York at Cooper Union’s School of Design. In her new Colorado home, she opened a studio offering classes in drawing, watercolor, and oil painting.

Colorado Springs was barely underway at the time, having been founded in 1871 by the railroad builder, William Jackson Palmer. Though Hill’s new home was still a frontier town when she arrived there, the largely monied and educated newcomers who settled the city were appreciative of art and culture. Because the city was new and small — hardly a city at all — its natural surroundings were unsullied. During mild seasons, wild flowers grew everywhere. Hill took notice, studied and recorded them in drawings, watercolors, and etchings. Her evolving plant expertise draw acclaim from profession botanists, including Asa Gray of Harvard, a leader in botany studies.

Hill’s flower illustrations appeared in several publications, among them Helen Hunt Jackson’s The Procession of Flowers in Colorado (1886). Tutt Library at Colorado College and the Denver Public Library have copies from the limited edition of 100.

Hill was married to Francis Hill, regarded as an “austere Englishman,” who founded the region’s Humane Society in 1896 and is buried at Evergreen cemetery in Colorado Springs.

Stained Glass Iris, Ginger Quinn Munoz, Quilting Cotton and Thread

Inspired by the windows of the El Paso County Courthouse (now CSPM), and made for the Capture the Courthouse exhibit.

Kinnikinnik, Ann H. Zwinger, Colored Pencil on Paper

Artist Biography

Ann Zwinger, author and naturalist, was born March 12, 1925 in Muncie, Indiana. Graduating from Wellesley College, she was working on a doctorate at Harvard when she met and married Herman Zwinger, an Air Force pilot. They settled in Colorado Springs with their three daughters in 1960.

Ann was a naturalist at heart, finding and sketching numerous plants and describing places she travelled. When she was “in the field”, her descriptions of where and when she saw and drew the plants around her were complete. One observer remarked that her writing was “science in the hands of a poet”.

In 1969 Ann was introduced to Marie Rodell, Rachel Carson’s literary agent. When asked what she would “most love to do”, she replied “write about our land”. This became Ann’s first book, Beyond the Aspen Grove, published in 1970. Over the next thirty-one years, Ann published twenty more books, becoming a specialist on Western rivers. By walking the canyons and riding the rivers, she learned the land of which she wrote, becoming an “artist of the written word.”

Zwinger was nominated for a National Book Award in Science in 1973, the Western Arts Federation Award for nonfiction in 1995, and the “Spirit of the West” Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association in 2001, demonstrating how her writing inspired and pleased so many different people and fields of study.

Ann was an outstanding role model to young people across the country, teaching at Colorado College, Carleton College, and Smith College among others, encouraging her students to explore the countryside and write about what they saw and experienced.

Ann was proud of the twenty years she served on the board of American Electric Power Company from 1977 through 1997. She was the first woman to serve on a major utility board, and it was the largest private utility in the U.S. She co-founded the Utility Women’s Conference in 1984, as a Chair and member through 1997.

Ann Zwinger died on August 30, 2014 in Portland, Oregon.

The Mine Dumps, Victor, CO, Laura Gilpin, Graveluxe Photo Print

Artist Biography

Laura Gilpin born on April 22, 1891, was the first child of Frank and Emma Gilpin. At the time, her father was a rancher on Horse Creek, south of Colorado Springs, and had to take Emma to a friend’s home in Austin Bluffs so she would be near a doctor when delivering Laura.

For her 12th birthday, Laura was given a Kodak Brownie Camera. This began her interest in photography which lasted her lifetime. Her mother sent 12-year-old Laura to visit Laura Perry, Emma’s closest friend and her daughter’s namesake, who lived in St. Louis. Perry was totally blind, and the two visited the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, every day for a month, tasking Gilpin to describe in detail every exhibit at the fair. Gilpin later said “The experience taught me the kind of observation I would have never learned otherwise.”

Gilpin was educated in several eastern schools at the insistence of her mother. While in the East, Laura met Gertrude Kasebier, a famous photographer who later became Laura’s mentor and lifelong friend.

When Laura returned to Colorado Springs from her trips to the east, she often visited General Palmer, founder of the city. He would take her horseback riding, and on walking excursions around his home, teaching Gilpin about the plants, animals, and wildlife that they encountered.

In 1918 , while in New York, she became seriously ill during the influenza epidemic. Back in Colorado Springs she was nursed back to health by “Betsy” Forster who became her dear friend and companion for over fifty years.

Her continued study of photography took her to the Clarence White School in New York City where she developed her interest in expanding from art photography to commercial photography. It was here that she learned about platinum printing, which she would continue to work with the rest of her career.

Back in Colorado Springs, Gilpin joined artists associated with the Broadmoor Art Academy. She made her living during this period by printing platinum portraits of local people who preferred the lower cost of photographs to having painted portraits.

Her interest in making photographic books took her to the published study entitled “The Enduring Navaho” which won the Western Heritage Award in 1969, one of numerous awards given her in her later years. Gilpin died on November 30, 1979. In 2012, Laura Gilpin was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.

Mining Scene, Grace Landell Bartlett, Watercolor on Paper