Garrison Roots, an artist known for public-art installations including the terrazzo floor of the new Denver Justice Center, liked to say that the Airstream trailer where he lived as a young child was his first experience of American public art — practical, relatively inexpensive, with iconic status.
He overcame difficult early years to build a life of achievement, working as a professor of sculpture and department chairman of art and art history at the University of Colorado while creating public art in such places as Miami and Memphis, and overseeing the design and construction of the $63 million Visual Arts Complex on the Boulder campus.
“He had a pretty humble beginning,” said Yumi Janairo Roth, current chairwoman of the department of art and art history. “But he always loved to draw.”
Roots, who died Dec. 21 at age 59 of complications from pancreatic cancer, grew up in Texas. He dropped out of school, left home at 15, worked some blue-collar jobs and then joined the Navy.
He used the GI Bill to go to college, where professors noticed his talent at art and encouraged him to follow that path.
He earned his master’s in fine art from Washington University in St. Louis in 1981, and the following year he landed a job as assistant professor of fine arts at CU.
“He was deeply committed to social, racial and global justice,” said Graham Oddie, former associate dean at CU-Boulder.
Roots was a founding member of Artnauts, a Colorado artist collective that promoted visual dialogue between economically diverse artists around the world.
Through this group, “Garrison was able to have his work work viewed by global audiences, including Brazil, China, Colombia, Guatemala, Palestine, Peru, Russia and Spain,” said George Rivera, a CU art professor and co-founder of Artnauts. “This was important to him because he was keenly aware of the misunderstandings that can arise between people from different nationalities and cultures, including our own country.”
Roots met his wife, Veronica Munive Alvarado, on an Artnauts trip to Mexico City, where she worked at National Autonomous University of Mexico.
“He was a person who breathed art,” Alvarado said. “Every spare minute he had, he was always developing ideas and working with projects, even in the hospital.”
To his students and colleagues, his attitude was just as important as his work.
“He believed you have to make the life you want,” Roth said. “He was living proof of that. You could never really bemoan anything unfortunate because he’d done all this stuff under those circumstances.”
Roth remembers driving with him one day to Fort Collins when he spotted a slow-moving dust devil, “like a convection, with dry corn leaves slowly levitating up and all these ravens floating above.”
“We pulled the car over and stared,” Roth said. “Everything was an opportunity like that for him, something worth noticing. He was always looking.”
A memorial is planned for 2 p.m. Jan. 21 in the Visual Arts Complex Auditorium at CU-Boulder, followed by a reception in the British Studies Room on the fifth floor of Norlin Library.
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083 or coconnor@denverpost.com
Other Deaths
Bill Janklow, 72, a flamboyant politician who left a lasting mark on South Dakota politics by serving four terms as governor but resigned as the state’s congressman after causing a fatal traffic accident, died Thursday of brain cancer. Janklow, a Republican, was credited with saving rail service in the state, attracting credit card banks and leading the nation in connecting classrooms to the Internet. The Associated Press
