Cydney Payton, the director of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, must be a workaholic. Not only was the groundbreaking for the new David Adjaye-designed building just a month or so ago, but she is now undertaking the most ambitious show of her curatorial career, Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 -…
Sitting on the lawn of the Colorado Convention Center adjacent to Speer Boulevard is “Indeterminate Line,” that enormous rusted-steel spiral doodle. The piece, created by Bernar Venet, is one of the most important works of art in the city. The French-born but New York-based artist has an international reputation, but…
Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173), one of the top alternative art spaces in town, is currently given over to a group of shows that highlight the use of photography in various ways. This kind of aesthetic unity at Edge is very rare considering that there are usually three completely…
You’d think that by now artists would have tired of recording the sights of the world in the tried-and-true mediums of painting and drawing. For heaven’s sake, representational art has been done for the past 15,000 years. Just thinking about it makes me drowsy. But, no. Despite the rise of…
It may seem like there’s a new gallery opening in town every day, but it’s actually only about one ribbon-cutting per week. One of the latest to open its doors is Translations Gallery (773 Santa Fe Drive, 303-629-0713), which specializes in contemporary textiles. This makes Translations unusual in Denver –…
Believe it or not, in the 1950s, Colorado’s main art scene was seated not in Denver, but in Colorado Springs, of all places. The most sophisticated art in the region was being created by a loosely affiliated group of artists who were based down there and who represented a veritable…
Like the pop charts, boutiques and Hollywood, the art world is always looking for the latest thing. And because the newest ideas are usually found in the ranks of unknown and emerging artists, juried shows are worth looking at, because that’s who they feature. Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive,…
The swank David Cook Fine Art has been riding the recent wave of interest in the art of the American West, a formerly untapped treasure trove. One way the gallery has done this is by presenting consistently great shows on the subject, filling them to the brim with first-rate pieces…
Surely one of the city’s funkiest, grungiest, edgiest and strangest art galleries is Capsule (554 Santa Fe Drive, 303-623-3460), the brainchild of artist Lauri Lynnxe Murphy. I don’t see every show presented here, but I’ve seen enough to know that whatever’s on view will at least be interesting, if not…
At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, artists were attracted to the West by its majestic scenery. Then, in the late twentieth and early 21st centuries, artists began to notice how people were wrecking those formerly perfect views. A typical approach for many of…
During the past ten years, the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (1600 Pierce Street, 303-753-6046) has emerged as a local powerhouse. Although there are fewer students enrolled in the entire school than there are fine-art majors at Metropolitan State College of Denver, there have been more significant emerging…
On the morning of Monday, May 1, throngs of Mexican-Americans, most of them young, marched through downtown Denver — and cities across the country — in support of the rights of undocumented immigrants. The story of these Mexican exiles is well known, with many of them toiling in the unforgiving…
During the groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Denver Museum of Contemporary Art last week, executive director Cydney Payton addressed the crowd (see “Next Up”). In her remarks, she pointed out that the MCA was “not a hundred-million-dollar project,” since it’s projected to cost only $15 million. Though she didn’t say…
Among the standard features of the visual arts, two attributes rise above the others: what something looks like, and what it means. The rise of modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, to a great extent, all about appearances, with formalism providing a kind of conceptual justification…
Ivar Zeile, director of + Gallery (2350 Lawrence Street, 303-296-0927), went to college in Utah and during his student days became friends with painter Jean Arnold. As so often happens, the two friends drifted apart after school. When Zeile recently came upon Arnold’s work on the Internet, it had been…
Having people from both inside and outside the art world come to me and plug a show is a standard feature of my life as an art critic. What’s funny about it, though, is how many of them think they’re doing me a favor. You see, in their fantasies about…
The Sandra Phillips Gallery (744 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-5969) has stumbled on a niche in the art market: featuring the work of well-known Colorado artists from yesteryear. Last month it was Ruth Todd, who is in her nineties, and now it’s Mel Strawn, who’s quite a bit younger. He’s in…
Up until the 1960s, people argued in all seriousness that photography was not a fine art because a machine was used to produce it. Today this seems not just naive, but incredibly wrong, as photography is now the predominant form in all types of contemporary art. Photos themselves are a…
Five to ten years ago, there seemed to always be some kind of over-the-top installation at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173), but lately such displays have been few and far between. They do take a lot of effort, after all, and are completely un-sellable. Being outrageously ambitious and a…
Though my workaday life is filled with the high-minded pursuit of looking at exhibitions, I do have more than a few guilty pleasures. I love Peeps, for example, those marshmallow chicks rolled in yellow sugar available this time of year. I also love muscle cars from the ’60s and ’70s…
Skyline Park, which runs along Arapahoe Street between 15th and 18th streets, was once a world-class example of modernist landscape design. It was created in 1970 by Lawrence Halprin and featured a multi-level topography created with cast-in-place concrete planters, berms and fountains. Now it’s a ho-hum kind of place, as…
Some thirty years ago, Foothills Art Center in Golden established Colorado Clay as an annual juried exhibit to highlight ceramics being done in the state. But Jenny Cook, the center’s director, has decided to make the exhibit a biennial so she can open up the schedule for new programming. Colorado…
