Dan Jacobs, the director at the University of Denver’s Vicki Myhren Gallery, used to be a high-ranking staffer at the Denver Art Museum. As a result, he has brought museum-like programming, like the current exhibit, Learning to See Color, to the Myhren. Jacobs and co-curator, Jeffrey Keith, a well-known Denver artist and…

The wonderful solo Joel Swanson: Polysemic is approaching its final weeks at the Museum of Outdoor Arts. Despite the institution’s name, most of the works are actually indoors, but one, a billboard titled “Respectfully,” is sited outside. The billboard is a digital print on which the word “Respectfully” has been…

Last week, I suggested a Venn diagram for contemporary painting, sculpture and installation in which there were three circles: representation, abstraction and conceptualism. At that time, I talked about the overlap between representation and abstraction. This time, though, I’d like to address not only the point at which abstraction and…

Broadly speaking, the Venn diagram of contemporary art as it applies to painting, sculpture and installation has three circles: representational, abstract and conceptual. This week, I’m looking at multiple shows at two venues that feature work that exists where the representational circle overlaps the abstract one. Next week, I’ll discuss…

In the large front space at Michael Warren Contemporary, director Mike McClung is presenting a sweet little solo called Equations: New Paintings by Teresa Booth Brown. The show follows Brown’s sensational drawing exhibit last fall at Ironton Gallery; that venue has since closed, to be replaced by the Colorado Photographic…

Jerry De La Cruz was born and raised in Denver and first expressed his artistic talents by winning a coloring contest at the age of seven. Although his solo at the Museo de las Americas, A Road Well Traveled: An Art Life Retrospective: Jerry De La Cruz, doesn’t go back…

As I look back at what has changed in Denver’s art scene over the past year, I feel that first I need to pause and fondly recall two key players who are no longer with us, each of whom led long and illustrious lives that enriched the Mile High City…

Considering the cornucopia of art venues in the Denver area — galleries, art centers, museums, artist-cooperatives, pop-ups, and even wide hallways — and the hundreds of exhibits presented inside them over the last year, it comes as no surprise that the Mile High City is starting to get some real traction as…

Part of a generation of modernists who emerged in northern New Mexico in the 1970s, Zachariah Rieke has been influenced by both abstract expressionism and Japanese calligraphy. A selection of his abstracts can be seen in Surface Tension, a group show at William Havu Gallery that combines paintings and sculpture…

Given the alternating pattern of drought and floods brought on by global climate change, water has become an ever more urgent topic — not just for scientists and farmers, but for artists as well. These environmental issues provide the context for a discussion of six solos at two of the…

It was a generation ago, in the ’70s and ’80s, that the art of the Southwest — New Mexico, specifically — got hot. This led to a reassessment of the historic artists of Taos and Santa Fe and bolstered the careers of several contemporary artists working in that part of…

This past summer, RedLine founder Laura Merage launched another Denver art venue, Black Cube, which was conceived as a nomadic museum based out of a black metal container in the shape of a cube. The plan is for the box to be moved around and used for pop-up exhibitions or…

Denver’s vibrant art culture has started to generate national attention, even getting mentioned as one of the town’s key attributes on all of those “best city” lists on the Internet. Although the Mile High City still has a ways to go in comparison to international art centers, it is nonetheless…

Point Gallery focuses on contemporary representational imagery, as with the pair of exhibits on view there now. In the front spaces is Michael J. Dowling: Forgotten Scoundrels, which comprises drawings and paintings of people and animals. Dowling, who grew up in Colorado, studied with Amy Metier and John Hull here…

Mike McClung, the director of Michael Warren Contemporary, has put together two interesting solos that are midway through their runs. The shows are extremely compatible, as both focus on artists who work with geometric compositions, though each does so in a thoroughly individual way. In the large set of spaces…

From the moment it opened, four years ago this month, the Clyfford Still Museum has been one of the city’s greatest cultural treasures. Located inside a lovely little concrete building, the museum is dedicated to the conservation and presentation of the work of the legendary abstract-expressionist pioneer Clyfford Still, who,…

The three solos currently on display at Robischon Gallery share a creepy yet elegant mood — like the feeling of walking through a decrepit mansion — and it strikes me that the atmosphere is a perfect fit for this time of year. Filling the initial set of galleries is Kahn…

For its fall offerings, the Arvada Center is hosting three shows connected not by style or theme, but in how the works included in each were made. The subjects of the three shows — unified under the banner of FIRED — are iron, ceramics and glass, with the iron having…

Everything I’ve seen by Amber Cobb over the past several years has focused on domestic life, with a special interest in references to the bedroom. The artist’s oeuvre incorporates a wide range of material, from stomach-turning objects like stained and torn mattresses at one end to elegant and minimal expressions…

Point Gallery curators Frank Martinez and Michael Vacchiano had planned to do a show featuring recent work by artist Robin Ross, who built her career in Brooklyn but moved to Crestone, Colorado, about four years ago. Sadly, Ross passed away while the show was still in the planning stages. So…

This fall’s blockbuster at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, is an orgy of visual experiences, a spectacle comprising scores of works, many of them monumental and all of which could be described as either pretty or dirty or both — just as the show’s title warns…

Surely the biggest news for contemporary art in the twenty-first century is the ascendancy of Chinese contemporary art and its important place in the international mix. Amazingly, exhibition-goers in Denver have had a front-row seat for this rapid transformation in the art world’s hierarchy, and that’s partly due to the…