Oil Wells

There’s no question that oil paints were used to create the paintings in Jeffrey Keith: Recent Work. Invisible plumes of airborne linseed oil immediately engulf anyone who enters the Rule Gallery, where the show is on display. It’s not a light aroma that simply wafts through the room — it’s…

Artbeat

Installed below street level along the greenbelt east of Broadway in Englewood is a hidden attraction: the Dry Creek Sculpture Garden. It may be entered at various points, but the easiest route is to take one of the pedestrian ramps on Hampden Avenue that lead down to a walkway running…

Time Machines

Until last year, Artyard, the grand dame of the local sculpture world, was the place to see rotating exhibits of monumental outdoor pieces by a number of noteworthy sculptors. They were displayed in a large lot on South Pearl Street, just a few doors down from the gallery proper. But…

Artbeat

The Colorado Photographic Arts Center (1513 Boulder St., 303-455-8999) is featuring the recent work of Karen Kirkpatrick, Michael Butts and Glenn Cuerden, last year’s recipients of CPAC awards. Part of the prize for that honor was this exhibit, which has been rather bluntly titled Members Awards 2000. The show begins…

Slights of Hand

There’s only a couple of weeks left to catch the current attractions at the Robischon Gallery: three superlative solos, each devoted to an internationally famous artist. In the pair of spaces bracketing the front doors is Robert Motherwell: Early Drawings, 1963-1976; in the pair of spaces beyond, there’s the smaller…

Artbeat

It could be said that the ILK @ Pirate space (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) is a hole in the wall within a hole in the wall — or to put it more elegantly, an alternative space within an alternative space. Despite the limitations of a small, dingy room, more often…

Three-Way

You can always expect to see some of the best and most interesting contemporary art by local, national and international artists at Ron Judish Fine Arts, because director Ron Judish is relentlessly searching for new material — and he often finds it right in our own backyard. But the three…

Artbeat

There’s a great show being presented right now at the slightly off-the-beaten-path O’Sullivan Arts Center at Regis University (3333 Regis Boulevard, 303-458-3576) — but, then again, there usually is. The current attraction is Dickson: Oils — Monotypes, which presents an in-depth look at well-known Denver artist Mark Dickson’s most recent…

Winter Gardens

By clearly dividing his gallery into three distinct areas and installing the work of a different artist in each one, Bill Havu has finally come up with a successful scheme for laying out shows in his beautiful, custom-built space in the Golden Triangle. True, it’s only slightly different from what…

Artbeat

The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs, 1-719-634-5581) is a quintessential artifact of the 1930s. Designed by John Gaw Meem, it is adorned with gorgeous murals and bejeweled with exquisite metalwork. It is one of the finest early-modern buildings, not just in this time zone,…

Mexican Sojourn

Sally Perisho, the director of the Metro Center for the Visual Arts, describes Mexicanidad: Modotti and Weston as the most important show her institution has ever presented. The traveling exhibit, made up of more than sixty photographs by important twentieth-century American photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, chronicles the few…

Artbeat

The Bayeux Gallery (1133 Bannock Street, 720-359-0990), one of the only galleries in the country specializing in art textiles, is showing the luxurious Spotlight on Tapestry, featuring works by Lucia Grigore and her daughter Celina Grigore. Both are Romanians by birth, but Celina lives in Denver while Lucia remains in…

All Hands Down

Is there a pattern that connects the various media that are collectively called “crafts”? What does jewelry have to do with glass? Ceramics with quilts? How are they linked to one another? One obvious connection is that all craft items are handmade. Then again, so are paintings and cakes baked…

Artbeat

Last year, Denver artist and commercial art director Jeanie Nuanes King was looking for studio space when she found a run-down storefront on funky South Broadway. “At first I was just going to hang my own work,” she says, “but I always wanted to run a gallery and get out…

Northern Lights

Colorado’s own Chuck Parson is surely one of the most prolific artists anywhere, as his activities of the last year illustrate. When he wasn’t putting in long hours as head of the sculpture department at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, he was feverishly working away in his…

Artbeat

Elizabeth Schlosser Fine Art in Cherry Creek is presenting The Estate of Ethel Magafan, an exhibit of fourteen pieces from the late artist. Magafan was born and educated in Colorado, but she spent most of her career in the art colony at Woodstock, New York. In the 1930s, Magafan and…

Looking Up, Downtown

In the waning months of 2000, history — or in Denver’s case, historic preservation — marched down the street. The Denver City Council, with the full support of Mayor Wellington Webb, unanimously authorized the creation of a non-contiguous downtown historic district. It includes more than forty buildings that have played…

Artbeat

A sculpture by Robert Mangold, titled “PTTSAAES Denver” but unofficially redubbed “Particle Moving Through Denver” (above), was recently erected on the fairly new leg of the Sixth Avenue Parkway that runs through the still-under-construction neighborhood being built on the former Lowry Air Force base. The sculpture, done in 1999, is…

Favorite Things

Even on an ordinary day, the Foothills Art Center is uncommonly picturesque. It’s situated in an old red-brick church and a pair of adjacent — and matching — Victorian houses in Golden; this charming assemblage perches on a steep hill, high above the street, with the mountains in the background…

Art Beat

One of Gallery M’s specialties is photography, particularly contemporary prints by the giants of black-and-white photojournalism from the mid-twentieth century. The gallery’s current exhibit, Andreas Feininger, is the latest in a long line of solo shows devoted to this important generation of photographers. Feininger, who died in 1998, was the…

Future Shock

Since 1995, the Denver Art Museum’s handsome and spacious Stanton galleries have mostly been at the disposal of the Modern and Contemporary Art department, and over the years, department curator Dianne Vanderlip and her colleagues have used these rooms, located just off the elevator lobby on the first floor, to…

Art Beat

Most of the time we expect to see historic Colorado art at Elizabeth Schlosser Fine Art (311 Detroit Street, 303-321-4786), but the gallery has also regularly shown contemporary art. Right now, for example, Schlosser is presenting Bernice Strawn, a show of recent sculptures by this well-known Colorado artist. Schlosser has…