With $600,000, Alice Bemis Taylor funded the 1936 construction of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and provided a $400,000 donation for an endowment.

Taylor donated her extensive Indian and Hispanic art and her collection of 6,000 volumes of Americana and appointed Mitchell Wilder as curator.

[5] At the original Grand Opening in April 1936, Martha Graham performed Lamentation-Dance of Sorrow;[6] Frank Lloyd Wright lectured about the building, Manuel de Falla performed an opera with life-size marionettes, and Alexander Calder created the stage design for a sung dialog, Eric Satie's "Socrate.

[5] The auditorium includes three aluminum relief panels over the doors depicting Pueblo and Hopi Indian Kachina masks, all by noted Denver sculptor, Arnold Rönnebeck, murals in the original theater lounge (now restaurant) by Andrew Dasburg, Kenneth Adams, and Ward Lockwood, and a downstairs lounge mural by Archie Musick.

[10] For the National Register of Historic Places, it was described as follows: Its monolithic pueblo massing, its undisguised modern use of concrete, aluminum and glass; its southwestern details, its Native American designs abstracted into Art Deco ornamentation; its streamlined elegance; and its classical proportions - all result in a timeless character - with fundamental roots to the region and the time as well as manifesting an innovative architectural reflection of the building's underlying function, which is to preserve culture and to honor the contemporary.

It is near the city's business district, in a combined residential and office building zone, in the Colorado College campus.