Don’t expect to see Movado watches, Venini vases, Barcelona chairs or any other luxury item in Substance: Diverse Practices From the Periphery, the large and ambitious design show at Metro State’s Center for Visual Art in LoDo (1734 Wazee Street, 303-294-5207, www.mscd.edu). Instead, curator Lisa Abendroth has given the show…
The idea of creating contemporary art that refers back to traditional art while still breaking new ground is called conceptual realism. Though the movement embraces a range of expressions, what connects it all is recognizable imagery used to some kind of conceptual end, and often with a sarcastic, sardonic or…
Last weekend, during the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) convention in Denver, the Denver Art Museum announced the hiring of Darrin Alfred (pictured) to the newly created post of AIGA assistant curator of graphic design. He was introduced by DAM director Lewis Sharp and AIGA executive director Richard Grefé…
In August, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center unveiled its new wing, designed by Denver architect David Owen Tryba and his team. The addition is attached to the original John Gaw Meem building, which was built in 1936, a masterpiece of the art moderne that melds Pueblo-style design with early…
For his swan song as the outgoing director of the Phillip J. Steele Gallery at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design (1600 Pierce Street, 303-225-8575, www.rmcad.edu), Eric Shumake is presenting the spectacular Stefan Kleinschuster: 10 Ways to Kill a Hero. Kleinschuster is one of the area’s most exciting…
For its first big extravaganza of the fall, the Denver Art Museum will unveil Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures From the Louvre on October 5 in the Frederic C. Hamilton Building. Bringing the show to Denver was a smart move, as it’s guaranteed to have broad popular appeal. You don’t…
The Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-904-1088, www.spacegallery.org) is one of only a handful of spots in the Santa Fe Arts District that can be counted on to have exhibits worth seeing. For its first effort of the fall, Space director Michael Burnett has paired two interesting abstract solo…
Well, those little thinkers with the big ideas are at it again — trying to mess with our beloved Civic Center. Didn’t the powers-that-be downtown (from city officials to civic boosters to developers) learn anything from last year’s fiasco? I’m starting to think they all have some kind of mob…
For his annual solo, Oh Me! Oh My! Whatever Does It Mean?, Michael Brohman shows off his usual approach to contemporary sculpture at Pirate Contemporary Art (3655 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058). The metal and mixed-material pieces have been set on organically shaped risers that some may recognize from the Eames show…
Contemporary art is in a strange period right now. Conservative approaches, notably conceptual realism, have taken center stage, while more progressive tactics, such as abstraction, have been pushed to the side. Contemporary German, Japanese and Chinese art, which have played increasingly important roles in the international scene, seem to be…
Mark Brasuell is using his solo, Magellan, at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173), as a celebration of his twenty years of exhibition history in Denver; the title refers to a spiritual journey. He began his career in Denver in 1987 after moving from Texas and enrolling in graduate school…
Some people follow art as though it were a religion, and I’d include myself in that eccentric group. But I think it’s just a coincidence that onetime houses of worship so often wind up as art galleries. That’s the case with the church-then-synagogue that is the Emmanuel Gallery on the…
Even if you didn’t get a chance to visit the mountains this summer, the area’s galleries and art centers provided plenty of closer-to-home opportunities to take in our world-famous scenery as interpreted by artists. There was Colorado & the West, at David Cook Fine Art; Masterpieces of Colorado Landscape, at…
The Sandra Phillips Gallery, situated about halfway between El Noa Noa and the Sandy Carson Gallery on the 700 block of Santa Fe Drive, is a little hard to see as you drive by. Even on foot, the quaint little storefront is easy to miss from the sidewalk. Once inside,…
Denver printmaker Diana Vavra Strong died on July 24 after a nearly twenty-year battle with cancer. Vavra Strong was most active as an artist in the 1960s and ’70s, so until recently, her work was known mostly to a handful of old-timers. Last year, Kirkland Museum director Hugh Grant mounted…
Even though Shannon Corrigan has been at the helm of the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria campus for a couple of years now, there’s still something of a breath of fresh air to the place — and she’s apparently the one who’s brought it. Why Emmanuel needed air in the…
Summer — especially as hot as this one’s been — strikes me as an odd time to be thinking about quilts, but that’s what’s on the mind of Judy Hagler, owner of Translations Gallery (773 Santa Fe Drive, 303-629-0713), in her new exhibit, Flow. Then again, the cloth pieces in…
What constitutes Western art has been a hot topic among curators over the past twenty years. The answer is obvious when applied to material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it gets murkier and murkier after the 1930s. What caused the confusion, of course, was the rise of…
Denver artist Jason Appleton takes the role of the outré bohemian, the perfect pose for a longtime member of Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis (3656 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058, www.pirateart.org). Over the years, I’ve come to learn that although he’s always ambitious, he’s also always uneven; a typical Appleton show has…
If you’re from somewhere else — or if you aren’t paying attention — you may have a misperception about the art scene in metro Denver. I was led to this observation by a conversation I had recently with San Francisco-based art-and-culture critic Glenn Helfand, who was in the area to…
Oh, it has been a scorcher lately, hasn’t it? That’s why it strikes me as being extremely counterintuitive for Ironton Gallery (3636 Chestnut Place, 303-297-8626) to be doing Glacial right now, an exhibit organized around a wintry theme. Then again, Glacial may be about the cold, but it’s definitely hot…
The culture boom that’s been hitting the Front Range has reached another milestone: On Saturday, August 4, at 10 a.m., a ribbon-cutting ceremony will open the new two-story, 48,000-square-foot wing that has been subtly added to the magnificent and iconic Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, a 1930s modernist masterpiece that…
