Double Take: Introducing Gifts from the Graham Collection

Griffin Foundation Gallery

January 28–August 15, 2027

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In 2025, the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art received a gift of more than four hundred works of art from the collection of Ray Graham. Encompassing a wide range of artists, media, and subjects, the gift offers significant opportunities for research, teaching, and the continued development of the museum’s collection.

Double Take uses pairings as an initial point of entry, with comparative looking as its central curatorial method. Selected works from the new gift are placed in conversation with works from the museum’s existing collection. These pairings allow viewers to consider the artworks through relationships of similarity, difference, influence, tension, and historical or cultural connection. Rather than attempting to summarize the entire gift, the exhibition offers a series of focused encounters that encourage deeper engagement with individual artworks and the broader collection.

Closely associated with the work of art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), side-by-side comparison has long been used to identify formal similarities and differences between works of art. Building on this tradition, Double Take approaches comparative looking as a tool for sharpening observation, complicating familiar interpretations, and making visible qualities that may be difficult to recognize when either work is considered alone.

This emphasis on looking closely has particular significance at a time when daily life is saturated with rapidly circulating digital images. An in-person museum encounter offers a form of experience that digital circulation cannot replace: the opportunity to attend to the scale, materiality, surface, texture, and spatial presence of original works of art. By bringing two objects into a shared physical space and inviting visitors to remain with their relationship, the exhibition slows the consumption of images and creates room for observation, reflection, and conversation.

Through this approach, Double Take directly advances the museum’s mission to invite individuals to engage with art and each other, inspire fresh perspectives and wonder, and foster visual literacy and critical thinking.

The exhibition was developed as a teaching project for ART 409, Museum Collections: From Storage to Exhibition, taught by Suzanne Hale, Associate Director and Senior Collections Manager of the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art. Students undertook extensive object-based and contextual research, catalogued works, investigated artists and historical contexts, refined the proposed pairings, developed thematic questions, contributed to the gallery layout, and wrote interpretive materials.

Exhibition Pairing Examples

Existing Collection (left) and recent gifts from the Graham Collection (right)

An image of a women in a hat — Glenn Brown, Untitled

an image of a person scrolling on their phone — Alyssa Eble, Doom Scroller

Support for the museum’s exhibitions and programming is generously provided by Colorado Creative Industries, the City of Fort Collins Fort Fund, the FUNd Endowment at CSU and the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment.

Fort Fund