CHAPUNGU FOUNDER REMEMBERED
Loveland art community mourns loss of South African who brought vision
Roy Guthrie, the man who brought the Chapungu Sculpture Park to Loveland, died March 5 at his home in Zimbabwe. He was 89. He leaves behind his longtime partner Marcey Mushore and two children.
A native of South Africa, Guthrie was an art collector, curator and dealer who brought the stone art of the Shona people to prominence around the world. In 1970, he founded the first Chapungu Sculpture Park in Harare, Zimbabwe, to showcase a new generation of artists leading a renaissance in the art form.
“Since its inception, Chapungu has been instrumental in promoting the arts in Zimbabwe and beyond,” reads a press statement from the park on Guthrie’s death. “Many of the greatest artists can attest to Mr. Guthrie’s influential role in shaping their work and propelling them to fame.”
Loveland sculptor Dan Ostermiller met Guthrie many decades ago on a trip to visit friends in Zimbabwe, and was immediately impressed by the beautiful pieces in Chapungu and the singular style of the artwork.
“These artists have been isolated for so long without any influences,” he said. “So you have this absolutely pure, pure work that they came up with on their own, without any Eastern and Western influences.”
Ostermiller was also impressed with the collector’s generous support of local artists and the opportunities he offered for them to thrive.
“I thought this is probably one of the greatest things that you could ever do for an artist,” he said. “To suddenly provide them with the tools they need and a place where they can make it and the venue where they can actually monetize it. That was just amazing to me.”
It wasn’t long after that Ostermiller, then a member of the
High Plains Arts Council, invited Guthrie and some of the Zimbabwean stone sculptors to come to Loveland for the annual Sculpture in the Park show, where their artwork created a “frenzy,” said city Cultural Services Director Susan Ison.
“People were actually arguing over purchasing the pieces,” she said. “Nobody had ever seen anything like it in Loveland. You had to snap it up as soon as you saw it.”
Ison snapped up two of them for herself, including a piece she keeps on her desk at the museum. The city also owns two other Shona sculpture pieces from Guthrie’s collection, Ison added: Entranced by the Mbira, at the Civic Center, and The End of Hope, which is in front of the Loveland Museum.
Plans to bring a permanent collection of Zimbabwean stone art to Loveland were hatched around 2004, Ison said, after she and members of the city’s Visual Arts Commission traveled to Denver for Guthrie’s exhibition at the Botanical Gardens.
Three years later, in 2007, a second outpost of the Chapungu Sculpture Park was opened in east Loveland, on land donated by the Mcwhinney family. It features 82 stone pieces from Guthrie’s collection, reflecting Zimbabwean history, culture and wildlife.
“It’s a beautiful sculpture park with some incredible pieces,” Ison said. “Many of us in the arts community think of it as a hidden gem. And I don’t think there’s anything like it anywhere near us.”
Both Ison and Ostermiller said that Guthrie will be remembered in Zimbabwe and in Loveland for his generosity, kindness and unwavering support for art and artists.
“He was a remarkable person,” Ison said. “He was so dedicated to the artists in Zimbabwe and spent most of his life trying to promote them around the world. He was a very gentle, kind-hearted, soft-spoken man, and you could just feel the love that he had for the sculptures and the sculptors.”