Several current local shows zero in on the renewed vitality of abstract art in the Nineties. Chief among these are the group exhibit Reinventing the Abstract, at the Mackey Gallery, and a single-artist display, Gary Passanise, at the CSK Gallery. In the Mackey show, gallery director Mary Mackey includes her…
It truly is fall in Denver, and the trees themselves are coming down along with the leaves. Given this loss to our visual environment, it’s some solace that another, more expected feature of autumn also has arrived: the start of high season for the art world. This year in Denver,…
Museum-quality art can often be found at LoDo’s Robischon Gallery. Rarely, though, are the gallery’s three display spaces all devoted to the work of a single artist, as they are in the current exhibit John Buck–New Work. The special treatment is warranted, given Buck’s formidable artistic output of the last…
Lately, and increasingly, museums across the country and around the world have begun “deaccessioning”–selling off parts of their existing collections as a ready source of “free money” to pay for new acquisitions. It’s money, more than art, that’s hard for many of these institutions to come by, especially in recent…
Words, just like art objects, are subject to fashion. Suddenly everyone is using the word “venerable” or mouthing a phrase like “narrative content.” Everywhere I go these days, artists, especially those associated with the alternative scene, are talking about a “critical mass”–or, more properly, the lack of one in Denver’s…
People often talk about art when they’re actually referring to something else. We hear about the art of the deal, the art of medicine. There’s the art of cooking. And the art of politics. Even the art of baseball. Aren’t comedians and rock stars called artists? In fact, it seems…
To many in the art world, painting is the center stage, the place where the aesthetic stakes are the highest. The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s thought-provoking exhibition Pure Painting provides snapshot views of current events in the venerable medium. Organizing such a show (this one was put together by…
The depiction of the nude figure in the fine arts isn’t just ancient–it’s genuinely age-old. In the Paleolithic cave paintings of France and Spain, usually seen as the oldest works of art on Earth, those famous bison and deer are being pursued by nude men with spears. In the tens…
A principal benefit of following the Denver art scene is the wealth of local artists who pursue their work oblivious to the shifting sands of contemporary trends. Sometimes, though, a solitary approach can lead an artist right into the middle of those trends. That’s apparently what’s happened with Roland Bernier’s…
For nearly twenty years, the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute has chosen a handful of writers, dancers, visual artists and others to receive “associateships”–essentially $1,000 stipends. Since the institute’s founding in 1976, more than 100 individuals–not all of them women–have been selected. And from these awards has emerged an annual art…
Buildings are among the most public of artifacts–they’re really out there, literally. So it’s a shame that most of Denver’s built environment is so bad, more “narcotecture” than architecture. On the bright side, this sorry situation makes the good structures all the easier to recognize, even for neophytes. And surely…
Between the First World War and the 1930s, the United States experienced an internal population shift unprecedented in its history. More than 1 million rural blacks left their sharecropper farms in the South and came north in search of factory jobs and better living conditions in the industrialized urban centers…
Abstract expressionism is the bane of the uninitiated. Paintings of this type have no discernable subject and typically look sloppy, covered with scribbles, drips and scratches. They’re the kind of thing people are talking about when they say “My kid could do that.” But to artists, the problem of creating…
A major event in the local art world of the 1980s was the “21 Year Show,” presented eleven years ago at the now-defunct Progresso Gallery. It displayed the works of a group of local artists 21 years after they came together at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Now comes…
In recent years, Loveland has acquired a national reputation as the place where romantics and cornballs send their Valentine’s Day cards to be canceled with a “Love-Land” postmark at the local post office (which, by the way, features some charming WPA murals by Russell Sherman). Perhaps it’s this saccharine sentimentality…
Few artists in this country have achieved the kind of fame that Georgia O’Keeffe has. Her life and work are, without exaggeration, the stuff of legend. But there’s been a downside to O’Keeffe’s celebrity. Some of her most famous paintings have become trivialized through excessive reproduction, especially in the form…
The black-and-white photos of Don Donaghy are often out of focus, overexposed and underlighted, so it’s no surprise to learn that Donaghy has never used a light meter. But as Photographs From the Street, a retrospective of Donaghy’s 1960s work now at the Grant Gallery, makes clear, a disregard for…
Kathy Andrews was named curator for the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities only about a year ago. But she’s already come through with a must-see show. A Gathering of Galleries/A Gathering of Artists is an exciting look at the art market in Denver. Andrews, who says she wanted…
Odd as it may seem, Denver hasn’t always been the art-making hub of Colorado. From the nineteenth century up to the 1970s, Colorado Springs was the home of our most important contemporary art scene. And it was there that a loosely affiliated group formed the state’s first true artist cooperatives–years…
In Denver, like everywhere else, there are two highly distinct and opposing camps when it comes to the fine arts. There are the artists associated with a number of contemporary movements, and there are those who embrace more traditional styles. The rivalry between the two is anything but friendly: Traditionalists…
The husband-and-wife team of Tracy and Sushe Felix emerged from the free-for-all that was 1980s art in Colorado. The Manitou Springs couple was associated with a hip, cartoonlike approach that was part and parcel of the neo-expressionism that dominated the period. But in the meantime, they’ve changed significantly, taking their…
The Mackey Gallery is as filled with color as a spring garden. But bright hues are about the only common ground shared by the two very different artists on display. Lynn Heitler’s work falls readily within the tradition of abstract expressionism. Her more or less instinctive formal relationships provide a…
