Opening Reception: Thursday, January 16, 2025, from 6-8PM
Exhibition on View: January 16-June 26, 2025
This January 16, Artpace proudly presents Songs for Fran and Donny, a group exhibition celebrating the profound legacy of the late scholar, curator, and educator Dr. Frances Colpitt and her husband, Donny Walton. Curated in collaboration with Artpace alumni artists Constance Lowe and Hills Snyder, writer Jennifer Hope Davy, UTSA Gallery Director Scott Sherer, and TCU Gallery Director Sara-Jayne Parsons, the exhibition features new works by Artpace-affiliated artists inspired by their personal and professional connections to the couple.
Songs for Fran and Donny will run concurrently with Do you really believe that?—a touring exhibition opening at the UTSA Main Art Gallery that showcases Dr. Colpitt’s scholarship, pedagogy, and mentorship through selected artworks and ephemera. Both exhibitions honor her critical contributions to contemporary art and her profound influence on artists, students, and the Texas art community.
Participating artists include Andréa Caillouet, Nate Cassie, Meg Langhorne, Ken Little, Karen Mahaffy, Michele Monseau, Juan Miguel Ramos, Ethel Shipton, Randy Wallace, Jack Robbins, Alex de León, Robert Tiemann, Justin Boyd, and Mark Hansen—individuals whose practices were profoundly shaped by Colpitt’s mentorship and vision.
About Dr. Frances Colpitt (1952-2022)
Frances Jean Colpitt was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The eldest of four, she gravitated toward the arts, earning a BFA in painting from the University of Tulsa. While her abstract paintings, influenced by Judy Chicago, showed promise, Colpitt shifted to art history and philosophy. She received her MA in Humanities with a thesis on Élisabeth Vigée LeBrun and French female artists. Colpitt, a Francophile, studied modernism with Professor Susan Larsen at the University of Southern California, earning her PhD in Art History (1982) with a dissertation on Minimalism. She began lecturing at Art Center College of Design and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Colpitt and her partner (and later husband) Donald Walton embraced the evolving LA art scene. She wrote for Artweek and Journal (published by the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art), joining its editorial advisory committee and becoming a correspondent for Art in America. After a year as Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell University (1985-86), she returned to California as Visiting Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara. There, she collaborated with curator Phyllis Plous, mounting exhibitions such as Abstract Options (1989) and Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art (1992).
Back at USC, Colpitt taught for two years as Visiting Assistant Professor, leading a graduate seminar that produced the exhibition and catalogue Finish Fetish: LA’s Cool School (1991). Her dissertation became the acclaimed Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (UMI Research Press, 1990).
While her heart remained in LA, Colpitt accepted a professorship at the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1990. In addition to teaching modern and contemporary art history, she served as Chair of Graduate Studies in Art History (1996-2002) and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History (2002-2005). She advised Linda Pace in the early years of the Artpace residency program, joined the Board of Directors at Blue Star Art Space (now Contemporary at Blue Star), and helped establish the McNay Contemporary Collectors Forum. Colpitt produced critical exhibitions and catalogues at the UTSA Main Art Gallery and inaugurated the UTSA Satellite Space as a working project space for graduate students in the San Antonio arts district. She also published Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century (2002) with Cambridge University Press, which critically examined pivotal essays on abstraction from 1960-2000.
After 15 years at UTSA, Colpitt accepted the Deedie Potter Rose Chair in contemporary art history at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She helped initiate the opening of Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, where she organized exhibitions and continued her scholarship. Colpitt’s exhibitions included Material Culture (2008) and collaborations with artists such as Barry Whistler and Vernon Fisher. Colpitt curated exhibitions like Alicia Beach and Constance Lowe: Double Vision (2004) and Glow: Aspects of Light in Contemporary American Art (2002). She was also a visiting critic at the Glassell School of Art’s Core Residency Program in Houston, a mentor with the Oklahoma Visual Arts Commission, and an invited lecturer at many universities and institutions.