‘Do you really believe that?’ Retrospective at TCU features works by 25 artists
If you knew Fran Colpitt, you knew she would eventually ask you the question.
She asked it to her students at TCU and University of Texas at San Antonio. She asked it to her colleagues. She asked it to artists in interviews.
It was blunt and with her raspy voice it also sounded demeaning and intimidating.
But when Colpitt, an art historian who died in 2022 asked, “Do you really believe that?” she wanted to know.
The public now has the chance to ask that question of themselves with a retrospective of Colpitt’s life “Do you really believe that?” from Aug. 30 through Nov. 16 at TCU’s Fort Worth Contemporary Arts.
It’s a homecoming. When she joined TCU in 2005 as the inaugural Deedie Potter Rose Chair in Contemporary Art, Colpitt established the satellite gallery on campus, accompanying the Moudy Gallery inside the art school building. It’s become one of the best galleries to see contemporary art in the region.
On display are works by 25 artists who were in her orbit, such as the late Vernon Fisher. Alongside them are items from her personal archives at the Smithsonian and the Donald Judd Foundation, including correspondence with artists Donald Judd and John McCracken and her personal copy of Ed Ruscha’s artist book “Every Building on Sunset Strip.”
“’Do you really believe that?’ encapsulated so many things Fran, including her sincerity [and] inquisitiveness. It’s not about whether or not you can make a good case, it’s whether or not you really believe it,” said Jennifer Hope Davey, who studied under Colpitt as a graduate student at UTSA.
The curatorial team is a blend of personal friends and outside experts. Three of them (Davey and artists Constance Lowe and Hills Snyder) knew Colpitt intimately. The other two (Art Galleries at TCU director Sara-Jayne Parsons and UTSA professor and galleries director Scott Sherer) knew of her. Parsons and Colpitt overlapped at TCU while Sherer worked with her colleagues.
In their long discussions, they concluded she was someone whose relationships with artists, scholarship and critical writing and teaching all overlapped.
That’s even proof in her democratic curatorial style, which they emulated. Where Colpitt would develop a theme and choose artists, her graduate students, as opposed to outside experts, would write the catalog essays. The team also solicited essays for the catalog by former students.
While at UTSA, she burnished a reputation as a force in Texas’s contemporary and modern art scene while maintaining a national profile, including publishing the seminal books “Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective” (1990) and “Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century” (2002), which she brought to TCU.
But her interests span the canon. While a leading expert on minimalism, she advocated for and wrote about Texas artists in different media. Her doctoral thesis was on an 18th century painter.
“Her scholarship is so broad and engages artists,” said Sherer, also a contemporary and modern art expert. She’s so influential he’s teaching a course in the spring about Colpitt, accompanying the exhibit, which travels to the university and runs Jan. 22–Feb. 28, 2025.
“She was thinking about ideas, and how those ideas become art. Presenting that approach — how we engage with our thoughts and experiences — is part of the show,” he added.
Davey described the multiple layers of the show, including art and ephemera, to memorialize and another way to experience art.
“Reading notes and correspondences with artists and understanding how important those relationships are to each other and the larger community and her hands-on approach and firsthand experiences offer not only insight but inspiration. It’s another way to learn, another way to see,” she said.