Sarah Haas, Gilpin County. In the wintery cold of Saturday night, a crowd of unfamiliar faces gathers outside of Central City’s Washington Hall Gallery for the “Just Between Us” art show. In any other city, at any other art opening, such an anonymous group would be the status quo, but not in Central City where everyone knows everyone, and not at Washington Hall where events are typically by and for the locals, and certainly not in February in a building that, up until last year, didn’t even have heat. But with hot air now pumping through the gallery’s ducts it’s as if the Gilpin County Art Association has been born again.

Inside everything feels a bit different, even though art is still hanging on the walls just like it has been for the last 72 years. A quick look around and the paint seems just a little whiter, the room just a little bigger, the crowd a bit more robust. And, on closer inspection those gut feelings are confirmed: the smell of fresh paint lifts off recently dried walls, space has been cleared as the gift shop moved from the main space to a room of its own, and the crowd is as full as the front stoop suggested.

Having thus regained your bearings, the first thing you’re likely to hone in on is a large painting of a woman hanging through the opening at the top of the stairs. The background all but dismissed by a woman dressed in a bold yellow kimono, her smirking expression overshadowed by the gesture of her hand—a two foot tall middle finger thrusting out into the room.

In any other town and in any other gallery the painting would be par for the contemporary art course, but not here at Washington Hall where, since the gallery opened in 1947, the walls have resigned themselves to landscape paintings and photography. With a mission to promote local art, the Western tradition has been not just the gallery’s bread and butter, but its standard fare, so much so that GCAA seemed to have forgotten that to do this was a curatorial choice. But recently, out of both economic necessity and cultural hunger, the gallery and its patrons have developed an appetite for something new, something different—something with a little edge.
Gallery manager Michele Roussel pops out of the room like a piece of art herself. Dressed in an emerald green gown she floats around the room introducing patrons to the show’s artists, painter W. Max Thompson and sculptor Walter Barton. Proud as she is of the show, Roussel is proud of what it represents, a new chapter for GCAA—although the pride was not earned without the requisite trepidation.

While hanging the show admits to wondering if it was too much; to hang the woman with the middle finger so prominently is risky. It might send the wrong kind of message. But as she watched people enter Saturday’s opening reception and as, one-by-one, the young and old, local and strange approached the painting, she saw them respond not with indignancy but with delight. “I guess it’s just the sort of change we need.”

The painting is just one of Denver based Thompson’s fifty paintings in the show, which contains nearly the entirety of his existing and unsold works. At large, the collection suggests an artist who is less concerned with tradition than he is with the mood of the day, a fitting description of the artist himself who is also the owner of the Denver art collective, Bit Factory, where Thompson has built a reputation, in fact built a community, on his innovative and experimental ways. The show is a smörgåsbord of subject matter: ballerinas, blue-collar work, Japanese women, blue tinted portraits, black and white lovers, vintage neon signs. Without the name plates it would be easy to accredit each series to a different artist, but up close there is a familiarity in the brush strokes that lay the always vibrant color on the canvas.

Meanwhile, tucked away in the back room, is the work of Denver sculptor Walter Barton acting as the show’s most satisfying digestif. For “Just Between Us,” Barton takes a departure from his typical heavy wood and metal sculptures, usually toned in beige and brown, for four brightly colored and airy statues carved in foam, surrounded by a larger than life set of equally vivid Tarot cards. When placed atop a pedestal, the sculptures could just about look the audience in the eye, except that the heads atop the human bodies have been replaced by other objects—a briefcase, a set of antlers, a boat, and a grindstone.

In the context of our “Orwellian” political environment, Barton’s says his installation is less a reaction than a reconsideration of 21st century spectacle. He intends the work as a subtle invitation to viewers to flip what they think they know upside-down, perchance to turn cataclysms into absurdities. Considering these subversive themes, Barton’s departure from his previous works comes as no surprise. His neutral palates and natural materials needed to transform to give way to his new questions, new processes, new conclusions, and so new chapters.

“Just Between Us” is not just another art show at the 72 year-old gallery at Washington Hall but the signal of a new direction of art at GCAA, and perhaps of Central City itself. Just as W. Max Thompson flicks off the crowd, just as Walter Barton asks us to replace our heads, so does GCAA ask the Peak-to-Peak region to embark on a new chapter of its understanding of art and history. Western art may very well be rooted in landscapes, plein air festivals and pottery, but just as art evolves over time and just as a city evolves over the course its life, so does our sense and interpretation of place. “Just Between Us” marks a turning point in Central City as GCAA seeks to further the organization’s mission by evolving its curation and so extending the relevance of its reach.

(Originally published in the February 28, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)