Ethel Wallace: Modern Rebel revisits the work of a little known, locally beloved artist whose adaptation of batik, a Javanese technique of dyeing cloth, made her work a coveted modernist trend among New York’s elite in the 1910s and ‘20s. Wallace’s story spans decades of culturally transformative eras in United States history, including first-wave feminism, the Roaring Twenties, the World Wars, and the Great Depression. Featuring batik “paintings,” garments, oil paintings, and archival ephemera, this exhibition is the first public display of her work in decades and the first ever solo exhibition of hers to be held at a museum.

Curator: Tara Kaufman, Associate Curator of Clothing and Textiles at History Colorado