Summervail Art Workshop Legacy Project kicks off 50th anniversary celebration
The workshop, started in 1971, boosted Vail’s art scene and livened its summers
The Summervail Art Workshop Legacy Project kicked off with a special evening celebrating a legacy 50 years in the making on Monday.
Summervail is a historic art event that took place in Vail for 14 years, every summer during the years 1971-1984. It all started in the summer of 1970, when three recent college art grads were sharing a beer in Vail.
Jim Cotter and Dan Telleen had opened a jewelry shop a couple of years prior, and Randy Milhoan was a recent resident. Although Vail had been incorporated as a town in 1966, it had yet to make much traction overcoming its image as a ski resort. Business was slow — summers were dead. Milhoan floated the idea of starting some sort of summer arts program as a way of attracting artists to the area as well as boosting the local economy.
Milhoan had learned that Colorado Mountain College was interested in establishing classes in Vail. The group thought that CMC might be interested in offering art classes as a part of the college’s continuing education curriculum to be staffed by visiting artists. A few calls to friends around the country inquiring of their interest in teaching these classes elicited an enthusiastically positive response. Colorado Mountain College was agreeable, so the first Summervail Workshop in Art and Critical Studies debuted the summer of 1971 featuring 17 faculty, teaching 14 classes to an enrollment of 248 students.
For the first two years the workshop was located in Antholz Ranch (now Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater and Park) in Vail. Between 1973 and 1978 it was housed at the abandoned A-frame water and sanitation plant in Vail.
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In 1979, the move was made to Maloit Park, a 110-acre parcel of land owned by the Eagle County School District just south of Minturn and only 8 miles from Vail. The 40,000-square-foot facility was the former home of Battle Mountain High School.
The Summervail Art Workshop ran until 1984. In its 14-year span, the Summervail Art Workshop served more than 9,000 students taught by 500 internationally prominent visiting artists like Dale Chihuly, Pulitzer Prize winner Jerry Saltz, Oscar winner Donna Dewey, sculptor Robert Arneson and painter Ed Ruscha; through 850 different workshops and symposiums. Students came from 15 different nations and nearly every state in the U.S. Participants from the workshop even got the opportunity to work under Christo and Jeanne-Claude during the second installment of the “Valley Curtain” project in 1972. The Summervail Workshop had projected Vail and the Upper Eagle Valley as a leader of arts in the United States.
To celebrate this 50th anniversary, SAWLP is hosting events in Vail through July 30. To learn more about SAWLP and see a schedule of events, visit SAWLP.org.
