CLARA HATTON: A VISION FOR ART AT CSU
Curated by Dr. Emily Moore, Associate Professor of Art History and Associate Curator of North American Art, Colorado State University; and Bill North, Director of the Clara Hatton Center, Salina, Kansas.
In 1936, Clara Hatton (1901-1991) came to Colorado State College of Agriculture & Mechanic Arts as one of the earliest faculty members to teach design in the Division of Home Economics. Over the next thirty years, Hatton built an art curriculum at the college, teaching a variety of media herself and hiring the faculty who would help her establish the Department of Art in 1953. This exhibition demonstrates the breadth of Clara Hatton’s art–from bookbinding to oil painting, printmaking to calligraphy, ceramics to weaving–and honors the founder of the Department of Art & Art History at Colorado State University.
Born in rural Kansas in 1901, Hatton earned both a BA in Design (1926) and a BFA in Painting and Drawing (1933) from the University of Kansas, where she also held her first teaching appointment. On sabbatical from KU in 1935-36, she studied in London at the Royal College of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, the latter which deepened her interests in "handcrafts" with teachers descended from the British Arts & Crafts Movement. In 1943-44, while on sabbatical from CSU, Hatton earned an MFA from the recently established Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, writing a thesis on "Design and the Graphic Arts" and focusing her work on printmaking.
Hatton moved to Fort Collins in 1936 to become assistant professor in the Division of Home Economics. She taught the few design courses that were already part of the curriculum and within one year had added courses in fine art, handcrafts, and art history. By 1949, these courses were enough to justify a new department of "Related Art" within the Division of Home Economics, headed by Clara Hatton. It officially became the "Department of Art" in 1953 and moved from the College of Home Economics to the College of Science & Arts (the predecessor of the College of Liberal Arts) in 1962.
Over the course of thirty years of developing the Department of Art at CSU, Hatton taught a stunning variety of media, leading one colleague to describe her as a "Renaissance woman." She also explored these media in her own artistic practice, as this exhibit shows. But her non-hierarchical approach to art and craft clashed with the increasingly modernist focus of post-war American art, and she was forced to retire early from CSU in 1966. Her role as the founder of the Department of Art was recognized in 1975, when she was the guest of honor for the dedication of the new Visual Arts Building on CSU's campus, with the Clara Hatton Gallery at its center. Today, the Department of Art & Art History honors the vision and tireless efforts of Clara Hatton to establish an art department at CSU.
NB: Colorado State University has had many names over its 150 years, from Colorado Agricultural College (1870-1934) to Colorado State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (1935-1944), Colorado A&M College (1945-1949) to Colorado Agricultural and Mechanical College (1950-1957), and finally, beginning in May 1957, Colorado State University. For simplicity, labels in this exhibit use "CSU" to refer to the land-grant university in Fort Collins, rather than tracking its official title at the time.
This project is made possible by the FUNd Endowment at CSU. Museum operating support is generously provided by Colorado Creative Industries. CCI and its activities are made possible through an annual appropriation from the Colorado General Assembly and federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
