Artbeat

With blockbusters sweeping in and out of the main-floor galleries at the Denver Art Museum (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, 720-865-5000), it’s easy to forget that there are many fine smaller shows upstairs (see review, previous page). A compelling example can be found on the fifth floor, which is devoted…

Far and Wide

Last fall, a national search was conducted to find a replacement for Cydney Payton, the respected former director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art who has taken over at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In January, BMoCA’s board of trustees announced its selection, Ken Bloom. It’s taken a few…

Artbeat

It’s hard to know what to call the Mizel Arts Center (350 South Dahlia Street, 303-399-2660). Its real name is the Mizel Family Cultural Arts Center, but the shorter Mizel Arts Center has been a convention for years. Confusing the issue is that the institution has been merged with the…

The More Things Change…

A couple of months ago, the Denver Art Museum and the city’s office of planning unveiled the latest model for a new addition to the museum. The wing, which is being designed by Berlin-based architect Daniel Libeskind, along with Denver’s Davis Partnership, is to be built adjacent to the existing…

Artbeat

The Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) is currently presenting three quirky solos. In the front space is I Need It ‘Cause I Want It, a sculpture show made up of recent pieces by Jill Nasman. All the pieces concern the consumer culture. In “Candy” (seen above), Nasman has built…

Up, Up and Away

When Cydney Payton announced last summer that she was resigning as director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, groans of despair were heard all along the Front Range. Even worse was that she had no plans to continue working in the art world. This circumstance represented a genuine tragedy,…

Summertime Views

Photography is unavoidably linked to the summer, because nearly everyone takes a camera along on vacation. This point was brought home to me last week when, stopped at the light at Colfax Avenue and Lincoln Street, I saw a group of Buddhist monks in traditional robes taking snapshots of one…

Artbeat

Jeanie King’s Fresh Art Gallery (208 South Broadway, 720-570-2255) is pretty crowded right now, filled to the max with The Colorists, a show featuring abstract paintings and sculptures by a quartet of Denver artists. The floors of the two small rooms that make up Fresh Art are littered with sculptures,…

It’s a Guy Thing

Flying way below the region’s art radar right now — it hasn’t even appeared in most of the city’s gallery listings — is Fetem, a thematically linked exhibit of sculptures by Bryan Andrews, a twenty-something artist who has been exhibiting locally for the last few years. The show is on…

Artbeat

In the park informally known as the Charles Heartling Sculpture Park, located northwest of the intersection of Ninth Street and Canyon Boulevard in Boulder, well-known sculptor Bill Vielehr is the subject of an outdoor exhibition titled 3-D Drawings (Search for the Mark). The exhibit, which is visible from the street,…

Metamorphic

Some interesting news has just come out of Boulder. Susan Krane, director of the CU Art Galleries at the University of Colorado, is leaving for the greener pastures — or would that be the sunnier skies? — of Arizona. This fall, she’ll take over as director of the Scottsdale Museum…

Artbeat

At the beginning of last week, after forty years in operation, the White Spot, a quintessential 1960s coffee shop and restaurant, closed its doors. The contents were liquidated a few days later. Soon the site will be scrapped to provide a location for a new multi-building complex. It’s a sad…

Melbourne Calling

The current blockbuster at the Denver Art Museum is an enormous show with the exhaustively informative title of European Masterpieces: Six Centuries of Paintings From the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. Filled with compelling pieces, it occupies both the Hamilton and Stanton galleries, which comprise some 18,000 square feet at…

Artbeat

Working Drawings, at the Philip J. Steele Gallery in the design building at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design (6875 East Evans Avenue, 303-753-6046), is a charming little show. Steele director Lisa Spivak, who organized the show, invited the faculty and staff of RMCAD to participate, as well…

Western Expansion

Ron Judish Fine Arts, which will close for several months on Saturday, is set to decamp from its tony Wazee Street location within weeks and move into new and greatly expanded accommodations on the ground floor of a historic church in northwest Denver. And, while gallery director Ron Judish has…

Artbeat

In the last couple of months, the Denver Art Museum (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, 720-865-5000) has acquired some important new pieces. The department of painting and sculpture has received “Bords de l’Oise a Pontoise,” a painting by French impressionist Camille Pissarro, which has been hung on the sixth floor…

The Joys of Summer

It is the happiest news imaginable. The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center has finally, if reluctantly, abandoned its plans to build an addition on the facade at the southwest corner of the building next to the main entrance. Any addition placed in this spot, no matter how inspired, would have…

Artbeat

Spark (1535 Platte Street, 303-320-4547) is currently presenting Wasteland, a show featuring two of the co-op’s members, Annalee Schorr and John Davenport. The Schorr portion readdresses television as a topic. Schorr had produced photo-based works on this subject for about a decade before abandoning it in recent years in favor…

It’s in the Air

Photographer R. Skip Kohloff is well known in Denver, but he only rarely exhibits his work. In fact, déjà-view: A Retrospective Exhibition: R. Skip Kohloff, on display at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC), is one of the only solos he’s had during his thirty-year career and the largest presentation…

Artbeat

There are only a few days left to catch Richard Hull at the Rule Gallery (111 Broadway, 303-777-9473), as it is set to close on Saturday. The exhibit is an impressive painting solo featuring recent pieces by Hull, a nationally known Chicago artist whose work was first shown at Rule…

Master Class

Even before Cydney Payton formally joined the Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art at the beginning of this year, she’d told me about her plan to initiate a series of ongoing exhibits dedicated to Colorado artists. Now that she’s been ensconced at the institution for several months, she’s putting that plan…