Linny Frickman had plenty of reasons to beam last week as she showed a visitor around Colorado State University’s newly opened art museum — its first ever.
The school has had exhibition galleries before but none with the kind of museum-level amenities this 3,800-square-foot space provides, including proper lighting, security and climate control.
Indeed, these features have already enabled CSU to secure a loan for the first time from a museum — nine silkscreens from the Andy Warhol Museum that will be exhibited as part of a marquee summer show, titled “Warhol’s Flowers.”
“It’s just going to exponentially change our ability to exhibit better material here and to borrow from different institutions,” said Frickman, director of the University Art Museum.
While the museum and the higher-profile shows it allows CSU to present are likely to attract considerably more visitors from Denver and other cities along the Front Range, Frickman is especially excited about what the space means for Fort Collins.
The city already has the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art, but it is a noncollecting institution with a smaller scope and few of the amenities that CSU’s new space provides.
“So, we’re going to be able to do things for this community that nobody has been able to do before,” Frickman said. “We’re filling a gap for the northern Colorado region more than anything else.”
The museum is the last component of the University Center for the Arts to be unveiled. The space is located just inside the front entrance of the former Fort Collins High School, a 1924 building at 1400 Remington St.
The long-vacant school underwent a multiyear, $45 million renovation, transforming it into a multidisciplinary arts center, which includes the 555-seat Griffin Concert Hall and 285-seat Organ Recital Hall, as well rehearsal rooms and faculty offices.
The museum is divided into four, flexible galleries, which can be used for either separate exhibitions or one large one. At the moment, two of those rooms, including a central space with built-in display cases fashioned after those in the Asian galleries of the Denver Art Museum, are devoted to selections from the university’s collection.
The holdings, primarily accumulated from gifts, number nearly 3,000 objects. It is principally concentrated in the areas of African art, Japanese woodblock prints and contemporary art.
The biggest challenge for Slaterpaull Architects, a Denver design firm that oversaw the arts center’s overhaul, was minimizing the disruptive visual impact of the space’s 15 columns. In the end, it managed to hide all but three in the partition walls.
Elsewhere in the building, the museum has 4,000 square feet of storage and work space, with an adjacent seminar room providing students unprecedented ease of access to the collection. Next semester, a class is set to study little-researched selections of African art.
The Hatton Gallery, where the university staged its art exhibitions previously, has been ceded to the university’s art department for student shows and other offerings.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
