Matt O'Neill: Thrift Store Sublime Abridged

Check out this interview with Denver artist Matt O'Neill, whose show Thrift Store Sublime is running at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center through July 13.

See our previous blog post for more detailed info on Matt O'Neill!

Matt O'Neill: Thrift Store Sublime

Check out this interview with Denver artist Matt O'Neill, whose show Thrift Store Sublime is running at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center through July 13.

Since relocating to Colorado from Chicago in the 1980s, Matt O’Neill has remained one of our region's most exciting artists. Naturalistic realism has defined his style for most of the time since and has earned his the high regard of many longtime regional artists, curators, and art critics. Whether portraits of his neighbors in the Five Points area of Denver or of spotty teenagers taken from yearbook photos, O’Neill’s subjects often derive from cultural nostalgia combined with surrealism and humor. In many of his paintings, such as the FAC's F.F.A. Sweetheart, the O'Neill takes a uniquely western subject and renders it through the prism of Picasso’s simultaneous reverence and bizarrely mocking abstraction. This kind of work set O’Neill on a path to some of the more purely abstract works he has focused on for the past decade.

“A painter can still go into the studio with an armful of crude materials and like a shaman can summon something up. It’s a type of magic.” 

—Matt O’Neill, 2014

Youth Rep Alum Gets Major Scholarship at Marymount Manhattan College

FAC Youth Rep alum Jennie Leski has not only been accepted into Marymount Manhattan College (where alumni include Annaleigh Ashford, who starred as Glinda in Broadway’s production of Wicked and Moira Kelly, who voiced the animated character Nala in The Lion King) she also has been awarded the prestigious Presidential Scholarship and Leadership Scholarship.

Jennie appeared in our recent regular season production of The Wizard of Oz and is seen here in the Youth Rep show Pippin.

We're so proud of Jennie and all our Youth Rep alums! 

FAC wins big in Gazette's Best of the Springs

Tara moving and shaking

She’s moving. She’s shaking.

Our fab Education Director Tara Thomas won a Silver for Best Mover and Shaker in the Arts in The Gazette’s Best of the Springs poll.

Take a bow, Tara!

We’re also grateful for the other awards that came our way (and to those who did such great work with us.)

BEST MUSEUM: Gold (with a nice writeup that also mentioned the theater and school.

BEST ARTS CAMP: Gold for Youth Repertory Theatre

Birgitta De Pree

BEST THEATER COMPANY: Silver for our theater.

BEST MUSICAL: Silver to The Wizard of Oz

BEST PLAY: Bronze to Noises Off

BEST ACTRESS: Gold to Birgitta De Pree (Other Desert Cities, Noises Off);

Bronze to Amy Sue Hardy (Drowsy Chaperone, Play It Again, Sam)

EXPERT PICKS:

Amy Sue Hardy

Production That Left Me (Jennifer Mulson) Singing for Days: The Drowsy Chaperone

Best Small Ensemble Performance (David Sckolnik): Veronika String Quartet for Mastery at the FAC.