Best Historic Show — Solo

Emerson Woelffer: Life in the Abstract, at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, wasn’t large, but it was definitely grand. Woelffer, one of the best of a generation of abstract expressionists working in southern Colorado in the ’50s, is mostly remembered instead as a Los Angeles artist. When he lived here, he was director of the now-defunct-but-then-famous Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center’s art school. Hunter Frost, a friend and former student of Woelffer’s, curated this gorgeous show and also wrote its catalogue. Frost’s selections reveal that Woelffer did some of the finest paintings of his lifetime not in L.A., but during his years in Colorado.