Dr. Rosemarie Wipfelder Kumpe: Four Decades of ‘Arts Around’ at CA

“What do you see?”

This simple, profound question—posed by Dr. Rosemarie Wipfelder Kumpe to generations of Colorado Academy Lower School students through her Arts Around initiative—planted seeds of curiosity and wonder to inspire countless lifetimes of art appreciation.

For four decades—from 1986 to 2025—Kumpe and her legion of carefully trained parent volunteers drew, on an almost weekly basis, from the vast collection of prints she amassed on travels around the world to bring glimpses of what seemed to be the entire universe of fine arts to CA’s Lower School classrooms, where along with teachers and her helpers she invited young viewers to look closely at pieces from Picasso, Hopi craftspeople, Japanese textile artisans, and everything in between. 

The more than 10,000 prints, artifacts, and original works in the Arts Around collection, painstakingly organized and catalogued in a space in the Ponzio Arts Center, made an impact on thousands of children and adults alike during the 40 years Kumpe personally built and managed an educational outreach program unlike any other, helping to cement CA’s reputation as a champion of the arts alongside stellar athletics and rigorous academics.

Public art had been a fixture on the Colorado Academy campus since the 1960s, but it was not until 1986, when Kumpe first proposed Arts Around to then Head of School Frank Wallace, that CA’s arts culture truly began to flourish. A few years earlier, in 1984, Kumpe and her husband, Dr. David Kumpe, were looking for a school for their oldest son, Carl, a rising Seventh Grader, that offered the same balance of academics, sports, and the arts that the family had cherished at Red Rocks Elementary, near their home in Morrison, Colo. Learning about CA’s robust offerings in choral music, theater, and studio art, says Rosemarie, “We decided: This is it. Carl came here, and I came with him.” Their younger son, David, would follow three years later.

Drawing on her experience creating a similar but much smaller arts outreach program at Red Rocks Elementary, Kumpe appealed to the CA Parent Association for funding to begin building the Arts Around collection from scratch. Interest in the idea was immediate. “I had 12 parent volunteers sign up to help right away,” she notes. 

With a degree in Physics from MIT, a graduate degree from Harvard’s School of Public Health, and a successful medical career in Radiology, Kumpe brought a unique philosophy to training those first Arts Around volunteers—and the many who would follow. “Radiology is about seeing,” she observes. “Professionally, I have learned so much about seeing: both the physical and the psychological factors that affect it, the science of seeing.” With a large circle of friends involved in the arts, Kumpe continues, “I knew that so many people look, but they do not see. How do you teach that? How do you teach someone to truly see?”

Kumpe knew it wasn’t lectures that could inspire a child’s ability to appreciate art; it was learning through close viewing, asking questions, and seeking connections—emotional and intellectual—between the observer, the work, and the world.

That intuitive approach is what Kumpe and her Arts Around volunteers carried once a week, along with carefully selected prints, into Lower School classrooms over the next four decades. “In the course of our conversations with the children, they learned that what they see in an image depends on what they bring to it. They learn that the artist’s home, when they lived, the colors and shapes they chose—all these facts also play a role.”

Kumpe shares the story of a Fourth Grader whose father told her he worried young students wouldn’t “get” her laissez-faire approach. Not long after the conversation, the parent sought her out a second time to share something that changed his mind. “My daughter’s best friend came for a visit,” she recalls him telling her, “and there happened to be a beach towel with a flower pattern draped over a chair. ‘Oh, that’s Toulouse-Lautrec,’ the Fourth Grade friend said casually”—proving the impact of arts education that challenges children to see deeply in order to find deeper meaning in their lives.

After leading the expansion of Arts Around to Raether Library as well as the Middle and Upper School—where teachers have relied on Kumpe’s expertise with all the world’s art to help them add curated selections to their academic curriculum—today this volunteer educator’s tremendous impact at CA is fittingly recognized with the Rosemarie Wipfelder Kumpe Gallery, where future generations of artists will continue to share passions in many ways inspired by Kumpe’s own.