A month or so ago, I received a call from John Davenport, a noted local photographer and a boardmember of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. He was annoyed because although CPAC had organized one show and co-organized another among the exhibits that had received Best of Denver awards in March,…
The current art season, which is just approaching its final bell, has been one for the record books. With the opening of the Denver Art Museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building this past fall, there’s been an unprecedented upswing in art-related activities. At the DAM itself are several important displays, particularly…
There are two member shows at Spark Gallery (900 Santa Fe Drive, 720-889-2200) featuring work by established artists. On the gallery’s west side is the self-titled Susanna Cavalletti; in the space to the east is Mysteries of Babylon, which highlights recent paintings by Peter Illig. The two are as different…
The influence of Latin American culture, and Mexican in particular, is easy to find in Denver. For more than a generation, Chicano artists have been front and center here, creating a distinctive category of art based on ethnic, religious and cultural identity. Also a generation back, local visionary José Aguayo…
As an outsider, I’ve been worried about Pirate (3655 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058), the once-funky alternative space that during the past quarter-century became one of the city’s key art institutions. To put a fine point on it, the problem is the low quality of exhibits. Did anybody catch the anniversary show…
There’s something about abstraction that keeps it keeping on, despite a fairly successful assault from postmodernism’s conceptual realism that posits a sharp rejoinder to abstraction’s decorative tendencies. And sure, painting itself has long been said to be dead — particularly a style as quaint as abstract painting — but it’s…
The stable of artists featured at Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585) work in a range of styles, but one stands out: magic realism. This painterly hybrid combines realism with surrealism, makes folk-art references, and is influenced by comic-book and children’s-book illustrations. Distinctive variants of it are currently…
More than any other institution in the city, the University of Denver should be credited with establishing and nurturing contemporary art in the early to mid-twentieth century. But despite the school’s important role, the accomplishments of artists associated with it have not been properly documented. Dan Jacobs, director of the…
Michael Chavez, the curator at Foothills Art Center (809 15th Street, Golden, 303-279-3922), has organized Pattern Recognition, which looks at art that considers repetition. This is the second show that Chavez has put together at Foothills that surveys a contemporary stylistic category being done in Denver. The first examined contemporary…
The news coming out of the Denver Art Museum over the past few weeks has been shocking. More than 200 staff members spread across every department were offered modest buyouts in exchange for their resigning from their jobs. As of Monday, April 9, thirty had complied. These include some fairly…
The radical forms of Daniel Libeskind’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building have been difficult for the Denver Art Museum’s staff — and builders — to tame, so thank goodness for that old reliable friend, Gio Ponti and James Sudler’s North Building, where, without any fanfare, changes are afoot inside. The North…
I was talking with an artist friend the other day, and as usual, the topic was current aesthetic trends. He told me how tired he is of all the art that looks like minimalism but actually isn’t. Sometimes this kind of thing goes by the name of post-minimalism, which is…
Frequently the alternative art spaces in town feature work that only a mother could love, but every once in a while they feature a show that’s as good as anything else around. That’s the case with the stunning exhibit now at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173), the city’s front-running…
Historic preservation in Denver is really in trouble right now, despite its many successes. The easy-to-understand community benefits of landmark protection are all over the central part of the city — lower downtown, Country Club, Seventh Avenue Parkway, Potter-Highland, Montclair, Larimer Square and on and on — and they make…
Western art and contemporary art would seem to be mutually exclusive, but they’re not. There are many artists in the area who combine the two sensibilities to create what’s called — you guessed it — contemporary Western art. This type of work has gotten a big boost from the Denver…
I’ve sometimes been criticized for promoting our own art scene too much, though my detractors often misunderstand my position. It’s not that I want our local institutions to feature only artists from around here, but rather to better integrate them into their exhibition schedules. In championing this cause over the…
Some time ago, Bobbi Walker, owner of Walker Fine Art, accused me of always making fun of her titles. I strongly made the claim that she was wrong. Honestly, I don’t always do it, just most of the time. But, come on, she makes it so easy. This time the…
The University of Colorado is the state’s premier learning institution, and Boulder is the region’s only true college town, on par with Madison, Wisconsin, or Ann Arbor, Michigan. Changes initiated by Hank Brown, the school’s president, have put a damper on the famous party atmosphere there, but there’s still a…
The University of Colorado’s Department of Art and Art History, as good as it is and as talented as some of the faculty are (see review, page 46), has long been the campus stepchild, as indicated by the rundown building in which it’s been housed for decades. While other academic…
Just last year, Japanese-American artist Yoshitomo Saito moved to Colorado, and he’s already the subject of a major solo: 108 Blue Cranes, at Rule Gallery, one of Denver’s top venues. I don’t need to tell you that this is no mean feat. Born in Tokyo in 1958, Saito attended Jiyugakuen…
Michael Chavez has been the curator at Foothills Art Center (809 15th Street, Golden, 303-279-3922) for a little over a year, but the current exhibit, REALationships: Works of Surreal Inspiration is the first show he’s had the opportunity to put together. The idea for the show is twofold, with Chavez…
A specialty of the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture is presenting multi-disciplinary projects that combine art shows, films, lectures and panel discussions. The Mizel’s current creative and intellectual enterprise focuses on war — quite timely in the context of what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. The art exhibition,…
