The Denver Art Museum has gotten good at attracting crowds. The blockbuster Toulouse-Lautrec, which just closed, brought in more than 100,000 visitors. And last year, the Berger Collection had similar success with a comparable attendance. Thousands of people also visit the various galleries scattered throughout the seven-story museum that feature…
The title of the current exhibit at the Metro State Center for the Visual Arts, Chairs! Chairs! Chairs!, may suggest to some that what we’re in for is a design show–or perhaps a display of artist-made furniture. But it’s neither. Instead, CVA director Sally Perisho has assembled the work of…
Mary Chenoweth, who died on January 14, at the age of eighty, was one of the most important and accomplished artists to ever have worked in Colorado. But that’s not the impression you’ll get from the ineptly arranged and incompetently organized memorial exhibit Mary Chenoweth: Collage of a Life’s Work,…
By a lucky accident of scheduling, the Denver Art Museum is presenting a pair of shows that provide visitors with a striking juxtaposition. On the seventh floor, in sumptuously appointed galleries, is Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: Treasures From the Royal Academy of Arts, a traveling exhibition showcasing…
As we near the end of the 1900s, it’s interesting to notice that the world of the visual arts is wide open, with a staggering profusion of artistic visions. Quite literally, anything goes. There are so many competing styles, ranging from straight traditionalism to the wildest fringes of conceptual art,…
The Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery is currently featuring the compelling show Carl Andre and Melissa Kretschmer, which pairs a handful of Andre’s recent sculptures with Kretschmer’s hard-edged tar-on-glass paintings. Both artists share basic aesthetic concerns. “We’re two modern artists who admire each other’s work,” says Andre, “and we happen…
Since relocating to the Golden Triangle from LoDo last fall, the William Havu Gallery (formerly the 1/1 Gallery) has greatly expanded its stable of artists. Among the recently snagged talents are those of husband-and-wife painting team Tracy and Sushe Felix, whose latest efforts are featured in the captivating exhibit New…
Dave Yust: Diptychs 1968-99, which closes this weekend at the Curfman Gallery on the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins, is a stunning examination of the work of one of the state’s most important contemporary artists. Yust, who teaches at CSU, organized the show himself and has zeroed in…
The normally staid Museo de las Americas, on Santa Fe Drive, is now hosting Los Supersonicos: Two Chicanos Zoom Into the New Millennium, a raucous contemporary exhibit filled with humorous political commentary in the form of irreverent paintings, prints and sculptures. “Los Supersonicos is a grupo,” says Carlos Fresquez, who…
More than any other medium, ceramics has achieved a high level of artistic development in Colorado. The glorious early history of ceramics here was partly determined by the availability of high-quality clay. Beginning in the 1890s, potters from the East and Midwest migrated to Colorado in a kind of clay…
Cydney Payton, the director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, has little trouble filling the place with exciting exhibits. In fact, she’s crammed so much into BMoCA that one of the four current shows, Housed, begins not in the museum, but on the street out front. Housed is a…
Over the past twenty years, blockbuster shows have become a necessary evil at museums. When they succeed–and they usually do, at least financially–they increase attendance, and that’s the bottom line in the exhibition business. But while they may attract big numbers economically, such shows can be aesthetically bankrupt. At the…
Russell Beardsley emerged on the Denver art scene while still a student. The first shows of his conceptual metal sculptures were presented to both critical and popular acclaim in 1993, a year before he earned his BFA from the University of Colorado at Denver. Back then, his pieces most often…
The Colorado History Museum’s major exhibition this season is Spirit of Spider Woman, an intelligent and elegantly presented examination of Navajo weaving that’s been two years in the making. But don’t expect the dry, straightforward approach that is typical of the CHM. Instead, like the exhibit’s catchy title, Spider Woman…
When John Hull moved to Denver last year to become the head of the art department at the University of Colorado’s Denver campus, the city didn’t gain just another academic. It also netted itself an important artist, as shown in John Hull Narrative Paintings, Hull’s regional debut exhibit at the…
The landscape has served as both artistic inspiration and subject matter for thousands of years, dating back to Neolithic cave painting. And today the landscape’s allure is just as strong, even if the pieces it inspires are often far from traditional. Like landscape-driven art, Eight Ounce Fred, a funky little…
The role of photography in contemporary art hasn’t always been black and white. Although today photography is highly prized, as recently as thirty years ago, many in the art world–including the director of the Denver Art Museum–questioned whether it qualified as fine art at all. As the story goes, the…
When British artist Erica Daborn moved to Los Angeles in 1987, she came empty-handed. Leaving her work back in England, she arrived in the United States with little more than her art degrees from the Winchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art and a reputation for her…
By the early twentieth century, artists from the East Coast, as well as emigres from Europe, were making their way to the handful of art colonies springing up out West. They came to places like Santa Fe, Sedona, even Colorado Springs, for a variety of reasons, ranging from magnificent scenery…
The string of rooms on the ground floor of the funky Sibell-Wolle Fine Arts building that are rather grandly known as the CU Art Galleries have just undergone a makeover that makes them more worthy of the name. The formerly plain-Jane spaces have been dressed up with a fresh coat…
The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver finally has a somewhat permanent address: Sakura Square. The ground-floor, two-story MoCA/D space fronts a garden done in a handsome Japanese style, with rocks, gravel and several of those tortured miniature Ponderosa pines that are native to our state. It makes an appropriate entrance for…
Since Virginia Folkestad received her bachelor of fine arts degree from Metropolitan State College in 1991, she’s gained a considerable reputation for her thoroughly thought-out environments. In 1993 she simultaneously joined Spark and Edge, guaranteeing at least two annual opportunities to express her artistic vision through the interrelated installations she…
