The Art Museum

The Coyote has got my attention as in this piece after a Ute
petroglyph. Acrylic washes on paper by Phillip Hoyle.
Native American art still influences the way I see things.

The first art museum I visited in my early teens (early 1960s) was the Denver Art Museum, the American Indian displays that back then were housed in an old mansion, the Chappell House, located along Grant Avenue on Denver’s Capitol Hill. I viewed the place as an Indian Culture museum since it seemed similar to the pieces I knew from the Kansas State Historical Museum. I also realized it was called an art museum and knew there was much more art elsewhere (but didn’t see the other displays for many years. In Denver I also visited the Denver Natural History museum and really liked its Native American collection. All these American Indian things seemed like art to me, beautiful hand-made items that I might easily desire to hang on the walls of my room, yet ones I’d never be able to have due to their rarity. I liked that I could view them free or for a modest fee. And I determined to make similar items of such rare beauty.

Finally as a young adult I visited the Wichita Art Museum with curiosity. I enjoyed my visit but recall that I couldn’t fathom why people acted so excited by it. I had read somewhere back then that the art museum had replaced the cathedral as a place of worship, but perhaps because I was not Catholic, I didn’t relate to the writer’s evaluation. For me, the museum didn’t compare with the art galleries at Wichita State University. I wondered why. Was I just undereducated? Would such places grow on me as I matured? I had no real idea. Still, at the Wichita museum I realized the museum was more than simply its displays. It was also a membership organization.

Over the years I added more art museums to my experience. For instance, while attending graduate seminary at TCU in Fort Worth, TX, I often visited the Kimbel Art Museum (a collection of European and Asian art), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (meaning largely cowboys and Indians), and occasionally the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum (post WWII art). In these places I saw paintings and sculptures that sometimes connected with my personal interests and that often pushed me to look more deeply at the pieces themselves in search for understanding or simply to see. An offshoot of this activity was that I began going into commercial art galleries as well. The world of fine art was expanding for me.

Since those years I’ve visited many other art museums and have come to feel a special relationship with them, now as a working artist. My appreciation has grown, my insight amplified by education and experience and the insights of friends with whom I visit these places that sometimes thrill, cause me to laugh, or open my eyes to another person’s vision of the world. Maybe that’s why they serve a kind of religious visionary role. I stand in awe before some of the most beautiful or most horrifying. I now understand why one influential scholar created a methodology in which he claimed the Arts raise the questions that philosophy and theology seek to answer. That’s the large picture. For me, the painters, sculptors, and others ask me to think anew about my own work and my life. I go to art museums with regularity and need, something indeed akin to religion.

Denver, 2014