Lot 93: Rare Original Artwork by Beloved CSU Professor & Artist JOHN SORBIE dated 11/11/79

It appears to be an Original Pastel by John Excerpt about John: ART REVIEW Review: Performance on Paper Dances Into the Denver Art Museum MICHAEL PAGLIA AUGUST 3, 2016 6:45AM This summer, the Denver Art Museum is presenting several exhibits devoted to dance; DAM curators are mounting shows within their specialties that somehow touch on that topic. Though it might seem like a stretch for Darrin Alfred, the curator of architecture, design and graphics, to come up with something relevant — the categories covered by his department are defined by their static quality, while dance is all about movement — he’s done just that with the clever Performance on Paper: The Posters of Phil Risbeck and John Sorbie. Dance is just one of several areas of the performing arts featured in these works; still, there are enough dance posters here to provide a connection to the overarching theme. But this show also has an interesting connection to another topic: Western art. Alfred has mounted it in a space in the Western American art galleries on level two of the Hamilton Building; he explains that he made this call because Risbeck and Sorbie are Western artists, as they were/are based in Fort Collins. (Sorbie, who died in 1995, founded the graphic-arts department at Colorado State University in 1958; Risbeck joined the faculty in the ’60s and still teaches there.) Working separately over the decades, the two created remarkable collections of posters announcing upcoming films, plays, concerts and, of course, dance performances on the campus. Though it’s hard to make specific stylistic observations about either designer, both use the juxtaposition of eye-catching representational imagery and blocks of text.