The remarkable Clarence Shivers—a multifaceted artist, Tuskegee Airmen fighter pilot, and Colorado Springs philanthropist—is remembered in a retrospective exhibition at Colorado College.
COLORADO SPRINGS—If you lined up a series of Clarence Shivers’s works next to each other with no context, it might not be obvious that they were all completed by the same artist.
“There’s an impressive range of stylistic approaches,” says Michael Christiano, director of visual arts at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. “There’s a kind of experimentation that seems to be at play in his work where you might see something that looks representational, reminiscent of the Ashcan School, and then you look at something else and think about Abstract Expressionism and Cubism.”
That range is the glue throughout a new exhibition at the FAC. Clarence Shivers: Experimenting with Form runs through July 6, 2024, and showcases thirty works from a bevy of media, including paintings, prints, and sculptures.
Shivers, who lived in Colorado Springs until his 2007 death, also flew with the Tuskegee Airmen, a World War II program that trained the nation’s first Black military pilots. After the war, Shivers—a lieutenant who finished flight training too late to see any combat—completed college in Illinois and taught art before he was called back to serve in the Korean War until his retirement as a lieutenant colonel in 1969.
For the next decade, he and his wife Peggy lived in Madrid, Spain. That era of Shivers’s life gave way to paintings of Spanish Guardias, vibrant abstractions, and a recognition for his art across Europe.
“There are a number of works in this show that he produced during his time in Spain, and you can get a sense of how the architecture and the landscape formed his work and approach to abstraction,” Christiano says.
By 1980, the couple returned to America, where Colorado Springs became their permanent home. Soon, Shivers embarked on more artistic endeavors that would further plant his legacy full of experimentation. Again, his surroundings inspired his techniques and subject matter.
“With portraiture, which is a hallmark of his and runs throughout the exhibition, it’s a lot of friends, family, and people he cared about and connected with, including iconic Civil Rights leaders. There’s a sort of affinity for the people he’s painting that really shines through in the way he represents them.”
The Miller Brewing Company commissioned Shivers to create its 1983 and 1986 historic calendars, one paying homage to Civil Rights leaders and the other to Black political firsts. In 1985, he was asked to sculpt a life-sized memorial to the Tuskegee Airmen, which is still displayed at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
While fully delving into new media and taking artistic risks, he also laid the groundwork for an art community in his chosen home.
“There were a string of exhibitions here in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, so I have to think that Clarence had some significant impact on our cultural community through showing his work during that time of his life,” Christiano says.
Curating the exhibition has been like a reunion, for both the breadth of his work and the people who collect it.
“He seems like he was very generous and so his work is dispersed across many friends, family members, and people he came across,” Christiano says.
He was also a humanitarian to the community of Colorado Springs. In the early ‘90s, the Shivers established the African American Historical and Cultural Collection at the Pikes Peak Library District to tell an accurate and thorough story of African American history.
“I’m coming to understand Clarence as both a prolific artist and also as someone who is incredibly giving and cared deeply about the people around him,” Christiano says. “He mentored several other artists, and lifelong friends, some of whom are from the region, some of whom he met throughout his long career as an artist or in the Air Force, where he would find and support spaces of creative making. It’s a privilege to get to know him and understand his legacy.”
