The Fine Arts Center will be showcasing the works of late artist Clarence Shivers, a Tuskegee Airman and Colorado Springs luminary.

The exhibit will run through July 6 in the Holaday and Seagraves Galleries.

“For us, this was an exciting opportunity to feature work by this really important artist, who of course is from our community, and show the incredible range of creative expression,” said Michael Christiano, director of the Fine Arts Center Museum. “We will bring back together work that has been kind of dispersed across the nation. It just feels like a nice homecoming.”

Christiano, who curated the exhibit, said it will feature 35 to 40 works by Shivers, including paintings and small-scale sculptures. The pieces featured in the exhibit span several decades, from the early ’60s to the late ’90s.

Shivers, who died in 2007, worked across mediums. One of his most notable pieces stands on the grounds of the Air Force Academy, a statue honoring the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, unveiled in 1998.

“I have been humbled to be the beneficiary of lots of stories from those who knew Clarence,” Christiano said. “What I consistently hear is Clarence was an exceptionally generous human being, and spent a lot of his time in his creative work mentoring other artists and really making space for other artists to develop their own artistic practice. He was also a really funny, humble guy who had a really interesting and exciting life.”

In curating the exhibit, Christiano found several points of interest throughout Shivers’ body of work, including portraits, cityscapes and landscapes, civil rights, spirituality and an interest in flight.

“It’s always important to follow the lead of the artist and to amplify the intent of the maker,” he said. “But with Clarence, in getting to know his work, there’s not one consistent interest or theme; rather he would move very fluidly between different interest and style.”

Christiano admires Shivers for his creative curiosity, which he described as unbound by convention. “He’s a genuinely curious human; one of the things I find so interesting about his work is his range of stylistic expression is so vast. He paints in some instances portraits, and then he might move into work that is utterly abstract and geometric. From what I understand, there’s no dogma to how he works. It’s really, for me, the unbound enthusiasm for making.”