Navigating Art Languages

James M. Shelton Jr.  Collection

More than 200 people gathered at The El Paso Museum of Art recently to explore the unique art collection of local El Pasoan James M. Shelton, Jr.

Important art collections that stand out are uncommon in most major cities around the world, and in El Paso such a collection is rare indeed and definitely the reason for a major celebration.  Gathered gradually over twenty years Shelton focused on late Modernist works and the responses to Modernism often referred to as Post-modernism.

The Shelton collection could serve as any museum’s foundation of this period, and includes paintings, sculptures and drawings by late modern giants such as Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hoffman and Willem De Kooning as well as the Abstract Expressionists Franz Kline, Morris Louis, Cy Twomby, Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, the Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and Wayne Thiebaud, and the Minimalists Donald Judd, Sol Le Witt and Ellsworth Kelly.

In addition to masterworks by these artists the Shelton Collection also offers the opportunity to the public to learn about other more recent artists such as Fritz Scholder and Jean Michel Basquiat who responded to earlier modernist movements, but also represent a broadening of the once mostly Euro-centric art world. This exhibition is sponsored, in part, by the El Paso Museum of Art Foundation.

The Shelton collection may be viewed through February 2, 2014.

Photographed by Laura Bustillos