The Kirkland Museum has positioned itself as the great defender of art made in Colorado during the 20th century. Without its formidable collecting stamina, home-state artists like Angelo di Benedetto, Edward Marecak, Phyllis Hutchinson Montrose and William Joseph might be headed toward obscurity.
Instead, through the Kirkland’s exhibition programs, the local community has gotten to know these creative minds as cultural pioneers — and as civic brethren we can be proud of.
The Kirkland’s Colorado collection has its highs and lows; it is overly inclusive to be sure and could use some editing, and the still-young, 15-year-old museum has yet to demonstrate the sort of significant creative connections that might suggest a true “Colorado style.”
But its dedication to Colorado has elevated the region as a place worthy of serious artistic consideration and it has amassed a body of painting, sculpture and textiles that will allow serious curators to look back at the era with genuine authority.
The Kirkland’s latest rediscovery is Elizabeth Yanish Shwayder, who — at the age of 96 — is being celebrated with a major retrospective at the museum’s recently opened headquarters at 12th and Bannock streets.
The show, the first in the new rotating exhibition gallery and titled “Welded and Fabricated Poetry,” showcases about 50 works, most memorably in metal, but also the artist herself who is captured in glamorous, historic photos that accompany the show.
Don’t let the delicate bracelets or the form-fitting dresses or the movie-star blonde hair fool you. Shwayder has a way with a blowtorch. She knows how to assemble chunks of bronze into interesting, three-dimensional pieces that illustrate the modern art age she contributed to in her small and personalized way.
“There may be more lady-like things to do, but I like this,” she is quoted in the show’s catalogue, from an October 1963 Rocky Mountain News article about her work. Gender, for better or worse, was an unavoidable topic in the Kennedy era.
Still, as the Kirkland exhibit shows, Shwayder was more influenced by the times she lived in than by the fact that she was a female working in a genre dominated by men. She was was born in 1922, the same year as Doris Day, Jack Kerouac and Charles Mingus and, like those artists, her sculptures are firmly planted in a mid-century sensibility that was particularly American and wildly expressive.
The centerpiece is “Wings of Gold,” from 1965, an enthusiastic sculpture that connects a dozen-plus triangular chunks of bronze-coated steel into an assemblage that stands more than 6 feet by 7 feet.
It is her legacy work of art — earthy with its rough surfaces and old-world materials, and yet ethereal at the same time, in the way its heavy metals are lightened up, connected gracefully together at their smallest points and lifted off the ground using only a single, slivery rod at the center.
Shwayder employed that bottom-up sensibility in multiple ways, at different scales and in a variety of media. Her “Extroverted Tower,” from 1965, connects scores of thin bronze rods into a 28-inch-high table sculpture that resembles a metal utility tower, only with various odd and unpredictable extrusions jutting out at various heights.
More logical is her “Copper Cactus” sculpture from the early 1970s, which stacks a series of copper spheres, 14 inches in diameter, along a tall, thin rod set on the ground. It is more symmetrical than some other works, but still a puzzle standing 6 spindly feet high while only 14 inches in diameter.
Shwayder is her best at her most abstract, when object titles — like “Spanish Dancer” and “Burning Bush” — don’t suggest what things ought to look like and viewers are freed from trying to see representation in her work. That puts the focus on her skills for shaping metal, which can be impressive.
The best example of that may be a series of table-sized, untitled works from the 1960s that are complex woven assemblages of bronze “tree trunks” that rise up off wooden pedestals while intersecting in and about each other. They are delightfully free-form and yet they stay within the confines of their maximum vertical width and depth. In other words, they are gnarly and complicated yet still feel like perfect rectangles.
“Welded and Fabricated Poetry” is a true survey of Shwayder’s work. It follows her over a half-century and shows her investigative path as an artist. Her style of connecting small parts into a greater whole may have been assumed early in her career, but she clearly experimented with it, delving into Lucite, paint, paper and other media. Not everything works, some of it looks dated and some of it frivolous. The later, paper works toward the end of the Kirkland exhibition don’t hold up as well as the early bronzes.
But that’s a strength of the show because we really get to know Shwayder as an artist, with successes and shortcomings along the way. She may have had her glam moments, but she has worked hard, learned and expanded her skills. That’s how it goes with art: That’s the most any artist can give, and Shwayder has given it.
And that’s how it goes with the Kirkland, too. It stays true to its Colorado mission, through thick and thin, and it reflects with great honesty the up-and-down history of art in the region.
Welded & Fabricated Poetry: The Artistic Life of Elizabeth Yanish Shwayder continues through Jan. 6 at the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, 1201 Bannock St. Info: 303-832-8576 or kirklandmuseum.org.
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