Richard Carter has lived in Aspen, Colorado, for over five decades. He has exhibited in the Denver Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Aspen Art Museum, The Aspen Institute (Aspen and Berlin), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, Aurora Arts Center, and the Santa Monica Art Museum. Carter’s paintings are in a number of these institutions’ permanent collections, and he has been represented by galleries across the U.S. In March 2022, he was honored by the Colorado Business Council for the Arts with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his constant dedication to enriching lives and communities with cultural activism. He works daily in his Basalt, Colorado studio.

Richard Carter’s current series of drawings fuses a lifelong passion for traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcut prints with contemporary themes born from the pandemic. Carter is most inspired by prints from the Ukiyo-e period, also known as “The Floating World.” In these prints, it is the intimate, beautiful take on life that he finds most engaging. Starting in the 1980s, he has collected prints by Japanese artists such as Utamaro, Sharaku, Hiroshige, and Hokusai. During the COVID pandemic, Carter developed his red bunker imagery, symbolizing isolation, protection, and defense. For this series of drawings, Carter uses Prismacolor and graphite pencils. The Bunkers’ two vivid reds give it an assertive character, while a small yellow window glows mysteriously as a beacon of light and a portal to unknown possibilities. Placing Bunkers precariously in the historic Japanese imagery provides a dialogue between traditional art forms and contemporary themes. While respecting the legendary original prints, Carter allows the Bunkers to introduce unexpected tension, aiming to inspire curiosity and a new way of seeing things.

Jean Gumpper was born in Hawaii, grew up in Michigan and spent time in several states, before moving to Colorado. Gumpper, Senior Lecturer Emerita at Colorado College, now works in her home studio in Colorado Springs. Gumpper’s prints are held in in collections of The Art Bank at the Department of State, Washington D.C; in museums, universities, and art centers as well as in collections across the United States, Canada, Finland, Germany, Japan, Nepal and Sweden. She received a Visual Artist Fellowship award from the Colorado Council on the Arts.

Gumpper has taught print workshops at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and she was a visiting researcher exploring new technologies in print at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She has participated in in artist residencies at the Anderson Center (Minnesota), Art Print Residence in Spain, Goldwell Museum (Nevada), Grand Canyon (Arizona) and Rocky Mountain National Parks (Colorado), Mackinac Island State Park (Michigan), and the Ucross Foundation (Wyoming).

“My work hovers between representation and abstraction and often focuses on the edges between water and land. Walking, hiking, and looking are the beginnings of my prints. This contemplative, restorative practice is an intimate and direct approach to visualizing nature. I’m intrigued with the rhythms of mark making and the possibilities of color, texture, and movement. I hope to capture the sense of being in the landscape, hearing the sounds, feeling the air. I work within a structure, the tradition of woodcut, which allows me to freely explore the layers and shifts within it. These limitations of process offer unlimited possibility.”