The committee overseeing historic preservation at the Colorado Capitol is mulling whether to replace the presidential portraits hanging in the building’s third-floor rotunda with paintings of the state’s former governors.
The idea was floated at the panel’s meeting last month in response to the controversy earlier this year that followed President Donald Trump’s complaints about how he looked in his Colorado Capitol portrait. Trump called the portrait “truly the worst.”
The painting was removed in response and there’s currently an awkward blank space in the rotunda above a placard marking Trump’s White House terms.
Dawn DiPrince, president and CEO of History Colorado, told fellow members of the Capitol Building Advisory Committee that the controversy presents an opportunity as Colorado prepares to celebrate the sesquicentennial anniversary of its statehood next year.
“Capitols for a state should really be a celebration of the state,” she said. “I feel like Colorado’s 150th birthday is a really wonderful time to do that. It does not make sense to me to take up such a significant amount of space in our state’s Capitol when we don’t even have space to hang all of our governors’ portraits.”
Right now, a limited number of gubernatorial portraits are displayed on rotation on the first floor of the Capitol.
The Colorado Capitol has a portrait of every president. Most state capitols do not.
The conversation around replacing the presidential portraits with gubernatorial ones began before the Trump controversy, which became a worldwide news story. But the Trump drama kicked it into high gear.
“The fact that the White House asked that the current portrait of the current president be removed gave us an opportunity to think about all of this and how we want this space to be used,” said former state Sen. Lois Court, chair of the Capitol Building Advisory Committee. “It is, in fact, our state Capitol. It is our space.”
History Colorado has portraits of all but four of the state’s governors. The missing portraits include one of Gov. Jared Polis. But DiPrince said that could be addressed with photographs of those governors.
Another issue is that the gubernatorial portraits are not uniform in size. The presidential portraits are. Displaying the paintings of the former governor on the curved walls in the third floor of the rotunda would require some planning.
Finally, Colorado’s former governors aren’t quite as well known as the nation’s former presidents. That presents a problem.
“Someone would have to develop the interpretation to go along with the governors’ portraits so that those things could be explained and made important to the children and other people who are looking at them,” said Georgi Contiguglia, former president and CEO of History Colorado, who also sits on the Capitol Building Advisory Committee.
Not everyone on the Capitol Building Advisory Committee is keen on swapping out the governors for the presidents. Some called it a “knee-jerk reaction” to the Trump saga.
“That seems to be a very poor reason to open that discussion,” said Kurt Morrison, deputy Colorado attorney general.
State Rep. William Lindstedt, D-Broomfield, said the Trump situation is probably a one-off.
“I think this particular scenario is unlikely to occur again.”
The committee is also considering whether to accept a donated portrait of Trump to replace the one the president didn’t like. That offer has apparently been made to state leaders
The original portrait was paid for by donors after Republicans launched a fundraising campaign. It was painted by Sarah Boardman, who said Trump’s complaints upended her career. She said the situation “directly and negatively impacting my business of over 41 years, which now is in danger of not recovering.”
The Capitol Building Advisory Committee put off a decision on the portraits to a later date.
