Every year at this time, Phil Bender presents a solo show at Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058). He’s been doing this for more than twenty years, ever since he helped found the co-op in 1980 and became its driving force. This year’s show, Paris, Paris Architecture,…
Simon Zalkind, the director of the Singer Gallery at the Mizel Arts Center, has some obvious strengths as an exhibit organizer — he has a good eye, he’s an expert when it comes to hanging a show and, most of all, he’s relentlessly creative. Zalkind shows off all three talents…
There’s a great show, Dave Yust: Selected Monotypes 1997-2001, now on display in the gallery at Open Press (40 West Bayaud Avenue, 303-778-1116). It highlights Yust’s work with master printer Mark Lunning from a series of sessions held over the last four years in Lunning’s printmaking shop, also at Open…
This week marks Historic Denver Week, which annually celebrates the substantial accomplishments of Historic Denver, the respected local preservation group. Founded in 1970 in response to the threatened demolition of the Molly Brown House, at 1340 Pennsylvania Street, the organization bought, saved and restored the house, an eclectic Romanesque confection…
Patti Cramer’s Spring Fever opened about two weeks ago at the Saks Galleries (3019 East 2nd Avenue, 303-333-4144), and though it still has two weeks to run, there are only a handful of pieces left in the gallery. Unfortunately, the practice at Saks is to allow patrons to remove purchases…
There’s no question about it: Roland Bernier is one of Denver’s greatest contemporary artists. His vision is remarkable in its variation and monumentality. His output is astounding. His relentless quest for innovation is breathtaking. And his solo, Between the Lines: Word Works by Roland Bernier, on display in the Denver…
Artyard (1251 South Pearl Street, 303-777-3219) is currently hosting 1500 degrees, an unusual exhibit that showcases a body of recent work by Susan Meyer (formerly Susan Meyer Fenton). The pieces were all made while Meyer was an emerging artist in residence at the famous Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State…
Last spring, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, there was an unprecedented effort by local galleries, art centers and museums to present shows on the broad topic of ceramics. The result was nearly a hundred exhibits all at the same…
It was probably a year or so ago that Molly Dubin, the curator of the Mizel Museum of Judaica, asked me if I knew anything about an artist named Akiba Emanuel. I didn’t, so Dubin explained that Emanuel was a modernist painter and sculptor who had lived in Denver off…
Error & Ingenuity: A Kinetic Sculpture and Robot Exhibit is an ambitious show being presented at the Andenken Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-291-4567). Andenken, the joint effort of Hyland Mather and Malia Tata, originally opened in the Raven’s Nest studio complex but relocated last winter to the GOOG, Patrick…
The Denver Art Museum has long been on the cutting edge of exhibition design. Unfortunately, that’s not always a good thing, as is evident right now at the DAM and other major museums around the world, where marketing and demographics are displacing connoisseurship and art history as key components in…
Emotional Distance, the superb photo show at Gallery Sink (2301 West 30th Street, 303-455-0185) combines the work of some of Colorado’s best-known artists with examples by well-known photographers from around the country. In the front space, exhibit organizer Mark Sink has installed a group of wonderful landscape photos by Boulder…
Edgar Britton was Colorado’s most significant and successful sculptor of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. He was to modernist sculpture what the late Vance Kirkland was to modernist painting. But unlike Kirkland, whose fame has grown since his death, Britton, who died in 1982, is known only to a smallish…
The idiosyncratic sculptures in Tom Nussbaum, which has been installed in the pair of spaces just inside the front door of the Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788), are downright strange.Take, for example, “Head I Man” (left), an acrylic on resin of a bland-looking man holding up a giant, equally…
Since the first of the year, Denver has seen a number of heavy-duty exhibits devoted to abstraction: There was the gorgeous Jeff Wenzel show at Ron Judish, the sublime Jeffrey Keith solo at Rule and the historic Robert Motherwell and Richard Serra exhibits seen together at Robischon. Now it’s time…
The William Havu Gallery (1040 Cherokee Street, 303-893-2360) is so jam-packed with art right now that you can’t help but experience sensory overload. On the first floor are exhibits devoted to Emilio Lobato (see art column), Gregory Gioiosa, Mark Lunning and Jerry Wingren. Upstairs is the small and kooky Lauri…
Last week I described some of the hideous proposals being put forward at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center as part of its five-year expansion plan. The plans were suggested by the Minneapolis-based architectural firm of Hammel, Green and Abramson (is there such a thing as architectural malpractice?) and approved…
The poetically named Raven’s Nest studio (1425 West 13th Avenue, 303-623-1425), whose director has the even more poetic name of Glissen Rhode, is one of Denver’s hidden treasures. The trouble is that this rehabbed, turn-of-the-century train depot with its cute little tower is rarely open to the public. However, on…
The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is one of the finest early-modern buildings in the country, which means it’s the rarest kind of treasure in Colorado’s bleak architectural environment. Only such monuments as the prehistoric ruins at Mesa Verde and the 1960s Air Force Academy Chapel, by Walter Netsch of…
The small but smart-looking Fresh Art Gallery (208 South Broadway, 720-570-2255) is currently presenting encaustic evolution, which officially includes four artists and unofficially includes another five, all of whom use encaustic to create their paintings and sculptures. The gang of four is made up of Andrew Speer, Rachel Urioste, John…
Lewis Sharp, director of the Denver Art Museum, was in his typical ebullient mood when he addressed an assembled group of the media recently. The occasion was the unveiling of the model for the new wing being designed by Daniel Libeskind, the Berlin-based American architect who’s one of the hottest…
For some reason, the little room off the entry at Pirate (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) always seems to be hosting an exhibit worth seeing. The space, dubbed ILK @ Pirate to distinguish it as a separate, alternative space, is currently showing higgled ripples, featuring the mostly three-dimensional work of young…
