BMoCA Looks at AI and Art, a Halloween Boo Bar Pop-Up and More New Art in Denver

What’s brewing in galleries this week? A fascinating new show at the Denver Art Museum, forays into new media, documentary photography capturing the signs of climate change and a Día de los Muertos spectacle of giant Catrinas in Denver’s Sculpture Park, to name a few destinations.

Find the details for these and other shows below:

Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks
Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway
Through February 19
Tickets: $5 to $27 here, includes museum admission
The new exhibition Amoako Boafo: Soul of Black Folks generated quite a buzz as soon as it opened last weekend at the Denver Art Museum, and there are good reasons for that. Boafo, a native of Ghana, paints startling portraits with his fingers of Black men and women staring candidly into the viewer’s gaze, eliciting a deep sense of thinking, breathing humanity and the meaning of pride. Boafo’s hands-on technique makes loud statements, lending a raw, natural power and purity to his subjects. It doesn’t hurt, either, that he’s created a playlist on Spotify offering more context.

MediaLive: Technology as Healing
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), 1750 13th Street, Boulder
Thursday, October 12, through January 14
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 12, 6 to 9 p.m. (member preview, 5 to 6 p.m.), free
Love Letter to the Rave: Wednesday, November 8, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., free, RSVP at Eventbrite
Healing Frequencies: Thursday, November 16, 5:30 to 7 p.m., $20 to $25 at Eventbrite
Homecoming Queens: Thursday, January 11, 5:30 to 7 p.m., $10 to $15 (more info TBA)
The boundaries of what we now call art in this age of technology are eroding at lightning speed. AI is a reality, for better or worse, and the frontier of new media is hitting the mainstream. That’s why BMoCA’s exhibition, MediaLive: Technology as Healing, is so exciting. The group show’s eight artists mine new ways to present visual media, incorporating soundscapes, animation, projections and light manipulation. But the trend creates more than a sensory experience: MediaLive also channels new ways for maneuvering the challenges our world of higher technology demands.

Tom Linker and Bill Ballas, Explorations
Angela Larson, Just As it Is, North Gallery
Spark Gallery, 900 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, October 12, through November 5
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 14, noon to 5 p.m.
As the group show Nine nears its end at 931 Gallery, two of the nine artists, Bill Ballas and Tom Linker, move on to solo co-op shows at Spark Gallery. Ballas mixes mediums freely for ordered abstracts in oil and litho ink on canvas, wood and paper, as well as oil-based collages with metal elements on illustration board and wood. Linker continues expressing himself in conversation with mixed traditional art mediums. In the East Gallery, Angela Larson shows encaustic works inspired by patterns in nature.

Rising and Falling
Colorado Photographic Arts Center, 1200 Lincoln Street
Friday, October 13, through November 18
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 14, 5 to 8 p.m. Virtual Artist Panel Talk: Thursday, November 2, 6 to 7:30 p.m.; register here for Zoom link
Four photographers — Alexander Heilner, Kalen Goodluck, Martha Ketterer and H. Jennings Sheffield — address the way climate change affects specific landscapes, resources and communities across the nation for the Rising and Falling. Heilner focuses on the drying Colorado River Basin from overhead to demonstrate how the scope of this crisis stretches out to seven states and across the border in Mexico; Indigenous photojournalist Goodluck documents tribal fights for Rio Grande water rights into New Mexico; Ketterer foretells the future in a visual study of how rising waters in the Bay Area will slowly change the landscape; and Sheffield shows the progressive land loss over time on Tangier Island, a community located off the coast of Virginia in Chesapeake Bay.

Jeff Fierberg, 72 Hours: Seoul, Pop-Up Exhibition
Bitfactory Gallery, 851 Santa Fe Drive
Friday, October 13, 4 to 8 p.m.; Saturday, October 14, noon to 6 p.m.; and Sunday, October 15, noon to 3 p.m.
Opening Reception: Friday, October 13, 4 to 8 p.m.
Meet the Artist: Sunday, October 15, 1:30 to 2:30 p.m.
Denver photographer Jeff Fierberg dove into a three-day marathon shoot of life, places and people in Seoul, South Korea, capturing a multitude of colors, flavors and singular experiences in every frame. Go journey along with him at Bitfactory.

UAP Gallery Grand Opening: Art by Brian Kane, and live media performance by Phillip David Stearns
Unidentified Artistic Phenomenon (UAP) Gallery, 115 East 4th Street, Loveland
Friday, October 13, 6 to 9 p.m. (performance at 8 p.m.)
UAP Gallery, a new art entity in Loveland, will host a true 21st-century grand opening Friday, with pop sculptor and light-art wielder Brian Kane, as well as new-media and fabric artist Phillip David Stearns, who’s been popping up a lot in experimental spaces since he arrived in Colorado.

Park Hill Open Studio Tour
Art Garage Denver, 6100 East 23rd Avenue
Saturday, October 14, and Sunday, October 15, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily
It turns out that the Park Hill neighborhood is hiding hordes of working artist studios among its bungalows and mansions. Get to know the artists of Park Hill and buy their paintings, collage art, pottery, glass, jewelry and more during this weekend’s Park Hill Open Studio Tour. There is no charge to visit the studios; get maps and brochures at the Art Garage, where ten artists will also be chatting up their work. And for anyone still game, the Park Hill Wine Walk starts up (Saturday, 4 to 9 p.m., $35 or two for $60) as the studio tour winds down.

Catrinas en Mi Ciudad
Sculpture Park, Denver Performing Arts Complex
Saturday, October 14, noon to 6 p.m.
The Mexico-born, Los Angeles-based artist Ricardo Soltero will display his handcrafted “Gigantes,” larger-than-life Catrina skeletons sculpted from papier-mâché, recycled materials, wood and Styrofoam, at Sculpture Park at the Denver Performing Arts Complex on Saturday. The accompanying afternoon Día de los Muertos family fiesta will include music, face painting and sugar skull decorating, as well as food vendors, but the main ingredient will be Soltero’s thirty lovely bony ladies, having an outing in the park. Think of the photo ops! Learn more here.

100 BUCKS: New Works by Lindsey Kuhn
Black Book Gallery, 3878 South Jason Street,
Englewood
Saturday October 14, 5 to 10 p.m.
Renowned rock and skate poster artist Lindsey Kuhn is the artist feature and party boy of the night on Saturday evening at Black Book Gallery, where a show of Kuhn’s screen-printed, reimagined $100 bill collection emblazoned with portraits of popular figures, from Salvador Dalí and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Joey Ramone and Johnny Cash. The free reception includes live music with the Nuns of Brixton and Cyclo-Sonic, and Kuhn will hold court throughout.

Molly Gruninger, Utopia 
Ryan Joseph Gallery, 2647 West 38th Avenue
October 14 through November 8
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 14, 5 to 11 p.m.
Ryan Joseph Gallery hosts fantasy artist Molly Gruninger’s first solo show at the space. Gruninger’s Utopia series grew out of our current collective concern about climate change and the idea that it’s not being solved fast enough — or at all. She asks how humanity can retain hope, depicting portraits of women holding on to remnants of nature or overtaken by the trappings of technology, all looking forward with blank eyes. Still, these elegantly rendered depictions can be taken at face value and appreciated all the same.

The Little Galleries: Stacey B., Retro Spectacle
Hypnotic Turtle DreamBox, 115 Garnet Street, Broomfield
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 14, 6 to 10 p.m.
The Hypnotic Turtle DreamBox tiny gallery concept is back on a suburban street in Broomfield, with Retro Spectacle, a mini-gallery installation by artist Stacey B. Drop by on Saturday night for a showing with live entertainment and a sense of humor.

Halloween Art Show and Boo Bar Pop-Up
3639 1/2 York Street
Saturdays, 7 p.m., and Sundays, 3 p.m., October 14 through October 22
Tickets: $10 at Eventbrite (includes snacks and drinks)
A Halloween-tiki-themed pop-up art show in a private home artist studio? Yes, please! Eric Matelski opens his studio for a group show of artworks, including his own, with curated drinks at the Boo Bar, an Ohana wall honoring celebrities who’ve passed and a collection of Hawaiian ghost figurines. You might even be one of the first fifty attendees, who will each receive a commemorative lei.

Golden Legacy: Original Art From 80 Years of Golden Books
Freyer-Newman Center, Denver Botanic Gardens, 1007 York Street
Sunday, October 15, through February 18
First published in 1942 by Simon & Schuster, Little Golden Books have survived the test of time, going strong in the hands of Penguin Random House. One can still buy a new copy of the The Poky Little Puppy, written by Janette Sebring Lowrey with illustrations by Gustaf Tenggren; until The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Harry Potter came along, it was the top-selling children’s book of all time in the United States. That means Little Golden Books and their retro illustrations are almost instantly recognizable after eighty years in book stores. Now the Denver Botanic Gardens is opening a show of 36 original illustrations on paper and first-edition copies of Golden Books organized by the National Center for Children’s Literature, with a reading nook that can be enjoyed together by people of several generations.

Interested in having your event appear in this calendar? Send the details to editorial@westword.com.