Visual Arts

Through August 25 at the Museo de las Américas, 861-865 Santa Fe Drive,

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…