Since 1974, dozens of New Mexico's best artists, authors, musicians, and philanthropists have earned the honor of calling themselves Governor's Arts Awards winners. This year, one of the eight is from right here in Lea County: Curtis Fort. Examples of Curtis' sculptures can be found in the Museum throughout the galleries and outside in the Nature Trail.
CURTIS FORT
Sculptor, Tatum
It’s one thing to be a cowboy artist. It’s quite another to be a cowboy artist who occasionally puts down his tools to participate in a cattle roundup. Curtis Fort earned his spurs on legendary New Mexico spreads like the Bell Ranch and the Vermejo. He still lives on his family’s ranch in Tatum, down in the state’s southeastern corner. And despite possessing ranch skills that other cowboys envied, he turned to sculpting in 1980, soon earning accolades, sales, a story in Smithsonian magazine, and collectors as far away as Germany.
Sculptor, Tatum
It’s one thing to be a cowboy artist. It’s quite another to be a cowboy artist who occasionally puts down his tools to participate in a cattle roundup. Curtis Fort earned his spurs on legendary New Mexico spreads like the Bell Ranch and the Vermejo. He still lives on his family’s ranch in Tatum, down in the state’s southeastern corner. And despite possessing ranch skills that other cowboys envied, he turned to sculpting in 1980, soon earning accolades, sales, a story in Smithsonian magazine, and collectors as far away as Germany.
“Those of us that live the cowboy way recognize his ability to get even the very smallest detail exactly right,” says State Senator Pat Woods, Fort’s longtime friend. His bronzes combine cowboys, Native Americans, wildlife, and landscapes to tell a true story of Western life and its required amounts of grit.
Like any good cowboy, Fort has also mastered the campfire tale, and he is compiling essays he wrote for the New Mexico Stockman into what promises to be a rollicking book. He also faithfully abides by one of the codes of the West: Help your neighbor. When someone’s in trouble, he regularly whips up an artwork for auctioning off and has crafted Western-themed awards for numerous groups, including New Mexico State University, where he earned a degree not in art but in range science—and made the dean’s list doing it.
What’s Next: “I just installed a big piece in Hobbs’ Center of Recreational Excellence—life-size quail on rocks, a wagon wheel, and other things, with water flowing through. It’s a peaceful thing. I’m fixing to do a four-foot piece of a flamenco dancer for a Las Cruces collector. It’s people like that, the ones who’ve been supportive, buying your pieces. They put you in the position to get the hang of your art. I was just gonna punch cows for life otherwise!”
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