A Celebration of Colorado: A Juried Exhibition of Northern Colorado Artists
A Celebration of Colorado: A Juried Exhibition of Northern Colorado Artists
Museum of Art Fort Collins
201 S. College Avenue, Fort Collins, CO 80524
June 26–September 13, 2026
Juror: Beth Venn
Admission: Adults: $10, Fort Collins residents and seniors: $8, youth 18 and under, museum members, SNAP recipients, military personnel, veterans, and CSU and Front Range Community College students: free, all other students: $4
Review by Rebecca Tabb
The current exhibition at the Museum of Art in Fort Collins, titled A Celebration of Colorado: A Juried Exhibition of Northern Colorado Artists, features diverse artists from around Northern Colorado with a wide range of practices, mediums, and interests. What unites these works is their focus on our embodied experiences.
An installation view of the exhibition A Celebration of Colorado: A Juried Exhibition of Northern Colorado Artists at the Museum of Art Fort Collins. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
A Celebration of Colorado includes sixty-five artists working in Larimer and Weld Counties. The works were selected by the juror Beth Venn, Executive Director at the University of Wyoming’s Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity and the Arts. She chose pieces that explore the environmental and social landscapes influencing Colorado artists. The exhibition is split into three spaces.
Christy Bush, Work In Progress: 2026, 2026, linen, silk, and thread, 3 x 54 x 28 inches. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
In the gallery to the left of the museum’s main hallway, a small platform keeps Christy Bush’s Work In Progress: 2026 off the ground. A predominantly navy blue silk and linen work, the piece is a textural break from the sharp corners of framed prints and canvases. It sits loosely formed without appearing unintentional and, as the title suggests, a threaded needle is wedged between the folds in the manner of a work in progress. One of the two fabrics is richly patterned with black blossoms illuminated in royal blue dots, and the other is a solid navy. Sewn together with red and yellow threads, they catch the light. The thread’s color alone asks us to look closer.
A detail view of Christy Bush’s Work In Progress: 2026, 2026, linen, silk, and thread, 3 x 54 x 28 inches. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
This invitation to look closer, or see differently, is at the crux of the exhibition. From woven textiles to giclée prints to bottle caps, the works offer fresh perspectives. With over 700 submissions, the juror Venn notes that each of her selections for the show “invite[s] a tactile response and prove[s] that art is not only visual but has a physical presence.”
Jane Lawton, But I Know You II, 2026, plaster, casting slip, glaze, and wool, 6 x 20 x 20 inches. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
Kimberly Lovett Noel, Vacancy, 2024, hand embroidery on vintage linen, 22 x 22 inches. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
The largest exhibition space, located just through the gift shop, is a first stop for most visitors. Here, we find the juror’s first place choice, Jane Lawton’s But I Know You X, a glazed plaster slip-cast work framed with wool, and Kimberly Lovett Noell’s mixed media collage, Let Me Show You the View, the second place piece. A few other striking works vie for viewers’ attention: Elizabeth Morisette’s ephemeral sculpture Grandma’s Cocoon, Clint Eccher’s graffiti paintings, and Patty Ringer’s Emergence #15.
Elizabeth Morisette, Grandma’s Cocoon, 2024, crochet yarn and balloons, 6 x 2 x 3 feet. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
Morisette’s sculpture resembles a crocheted body suspended in the air—a six-foot-tall, bulbous, vertical form that hangs from the ceiling with a fishing line. Made up of granny squares, blanket scraps, and pompoms stretched over a structure of balloons, the brightly colored yarn collage emphasizes line, shape, and form, organic yet abstract.
A detail view of Elizabeth Morisette’s Grandma’s Cocoon, 2024, crochet yarn and balloons, 6 x 2 x 3 feet. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
The artist collected the sculpture’s tightly crocheted squares from family members and thrift shops. Meandering lines of red and pink yarn crawl across the crocheted structure in vein-like ridges, like connective tissue. The overall effect is of a mangled body. Moved by a close family member’s traumatic experience, Morisette produced Grandma’s Cocoon and similar works with the intention of crafting literal protection for loved ones.
Lexie Skeen, Get Me Outta My Head, 2025, inkjet, paper, foam board, Styrofoam®, and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 96 inches. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
On one of the walls adjacent to Morisette’s sculpture hangs Lexie Skeen’s mixed media work Get Me Outta My Head, the third place award winner in the show. A black and white composition of Styrofoam®, acrylic paint, inkjet prints, and paper on a four-by-eight-foot canvas, the collage is made up of naturalistic drawings of consumer objects from modern life interspersed amongst black Styrofoam rocks that form an undulating, almost symmetrical shape in the center of the white canvas.
A detail view of Lexie Skeen’s Get Me Outta My Head, 2025, inkjet, paper, foam board, Styrofoam®, and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 96 inches. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
From the side, we can see that the black Styrofoam balls speckled with white bulge off the canvas. The cut-out drawings depict a variety of everyday items: a composition notebook labeled “2021- ,” a bench, a house, a stack of pancakes, a rabbit, a rotary phone, and a beer can, among others. Each item calls to mind the icons of a wealthy nation’s late twentieth-century middle-class. The way Skeen scatters them on top of the black Styrofoam forms renders such icons as decontextualized and abstract.
Clint Eccher, Imagination Encircles Knowledge, 2024, multimedia on canvas, 48 x 48 inches. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
Opposite and adjacent to Skeen’s work are three large paintings from Clint Eccher’s bathroom graffiti series. Imagination Encircles Knowledge, on the far left, has a black ground with painted imagery, stickers, and text in paint marker and spray paint covering the surface, and it is filled with Colorado references. For example, Eccher represents the famed ski resort Crested Butte with a “Busty crut” sticker. The words “fata morgana” sit in the stern of a hand-drawn fishing boat rowed by a nude figure, calling to mind the frequent fata morgana effect in the state’s high-mountain valleys.
A detail view of Clint Eccher’s Imagination Encircles Knowledge, 2024, multimedia on canvas, 48 x 48 inches. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
Other phrases on the four-by-four foot canvas include “Every Cloud Has a Silver Cliche,” “No. 1 Extra Fancy,” and “Will My Death Be Painless?,” as well as the title in large, light blue spray paint letters: “Imagination encircles knowledge.” This and other works in the show seem to ask where our lived experience comes from, and how much of it manifests itself in our art.
Patty Ringer, Emergence #15, 2026, mixed media, 48 x 48 inches. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
A painting from Patty Ringer’s Emergence series brings another voice to the conversation. In her artist statement, she notes that she creates this work to “capture nature’s patterns and energies,” asking viewers to perceive what they see with “gut-level feelings.”
A detail view of Patty Ringer’s Emergence #15, 2026, mixed media, 48 x 48 inches. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
Emergence #15 features a rich ochre and yellow background on a round board that is four feet in diameter. Multicolored, richly detailed imagery resembling lichen or specimens in a petri dish float on top of the yellow. To these details the artist applies molded sand and salt that hold the imprints of branches, painting them over with successive washes of acrylic pigment that recede to the edges of the mold images. To experience Emergence #15 is to root oneself firmly in perception and emotion.
An installation view of the exhibition A Celebration of Colorado: A Juried Exhibition of Northern Colorado Artists at the Museum of Art Fort Collins. Image by Rebecca Tabb.
Throughout the exhibition, the varying forms, materials, and representations in the works ask viewers to contemplate the natural and human-made world and how we experience it. A Celebration of Colorado: A Juried Exhibition of Northern Colorado Artists leaves much to gravitate towards.
Rebecca Tabb (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator in Lafayette, Colorado. They hold a BA in English with minors in creative writing and africana studies from Bryn Mawr College, and an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University. You can view and read their work at beccalettuceandtomato.com.
