Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
From the outside, the Denver Art Museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building is among the best pieces of Colorado architecture, and its design has many supporters. But Daniel Libeskind’s masterpiece also has many detractors, especially when it comes to the interior. The ground floor, which sets the tone for the rest…
Barnaby Furnas: Floods. Furnas is a New York artist who’s been exhibiting his work since 2000, and this exhibit, in the MCA’s Large Works Gallery, is made up entirely of his large abstract paintings. A unique feature of Furnas’s personal history is his early embrace of watercolors as his medium…
Elaine Calzolari, an important Denver artist known for her many public commissions in Colorado and nationwide, died November 8 after a long battle with ovarian cancer. Born in 1950 in Albertson, New York, she studied sculpture in France and earned her bachelor’s degree in 1973 from Hofstra University, where she…
Christoph Heinrich, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Denver Art Museum, has been on a remarkable roll since coming here from Hamburg a couple of years ago. For starters, he reconceived the permanent collection and mounted a major solo dedicated to Daniel Richter. Then, a couple of…
Austrian-born photographer Sabin Aell settled in Denver, which she calls “the Wild West,” just a few years ago. But she began making art long before that as a child in the town of Linz. In the ’90s, Aell documented the alternative music scene in Europe — think Rob Zombie in…
Barnaby Furnas: Floods. Furnas is a New York artist who’s been exhibiting his work since 2000, and this exhibit, in the MCA’s Large Works Gallery, is made up entirely of his large abstract paintings. A unique feature of Furnas’s personal history is his early embrace of watercolors as his medium…
The history of modern design is one of the focuses of the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, and the Kirkland’s founder, Hugh Grant, has avidly acquired more than 3,000 interesting examples of furniture and accessories by a who’s-who list of international designers. In the process, Grant has turned…
The Power of Then. Curated by Patty Ortiz, the former director of the Museo de las Américas who now runs the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, this uneven group show explores the shared Latino experience, as in old-fashioned Chicano art — hence the reference to ‘then’ in the…
More than any of the other co-ops in town, Spark Gallery (900 Santa Fe Drive, 720-889-2000, www.sparkgallery.com) has a membership dominated by established artists. And that makes sense when you remember that it’s the city’s oldest art venue of its type. Among the current offerings is a case in point:…
Currents. Traditional American Indian art is a well-established genre, and many Native artists still practice the old forms of weaving, pottery-making, metalwork and basket-making. But there are also contemporary artists among the tribes, and this group is the focus of Currents: Native American Forces in Contemporary Art. The exhibit was…
Denver’s contemporary-art scene is remarkable both in its size and in the diversity of work being done. The city’s venues, particularly the co-ops and commercial galleries, are seemingly always filled to the brim with thought-provoking and accomplished art, and the sheer volume of worthwhile material never ceases to amaze me…
Currents. Traditional American Indian art is a well-established genre, and many Native American artists still practice the old forms of weaving, pottery-making, metalwork and basket-making. But there are also contemporary artists among the tribes, and this latter group is the focus of Currents: Native American Forces in Contemporary Art. The…
For the past eight years, Denver artist Stephen Batura has been doing works of art based on an archive of historic photos from the collection of what used to be called the Colorado Historical Society and is now known as History Colorado. Batura, who once worked at the Denver Public…
Not long ago, husband-and-wife Lakewood artists Haze and Jana Diedrich made a pilgrimage to Santa Fe, where they began to appreciate those small objects of Hispanic-Catholic devotion called retablos. These paintings and works on tin, wood or even paper depict Christ, the saints and other religious figures in an unmistakable…
R. Craig Miller came to the Denver Art Museum in 1990 to establish the Architecture, Design and Graphics Department, and he hit the ground running by putting together a world-class collection of thousands of artifacts, including significant architectural models, important pieces of furniture and notable works on paper. Then in…
Anna Kaye. The conceptual framework that underlies the drawings and watercolors that make up the handsome if small Apparition: works on paper by Anna Kaye is the effect of forest fires. Toward that end, Kaye captures the forest by employing a high level of drafting that make her drawings seem…
Some art writers, including critics and commentators, have been trying to put abstraction in its grave for a generation. In fact, abstraction has been the butt of sneering invective from those who champion other aesthetic approaches since artists first embraced the style a hundred years ago — and it’s come…
Kirk Brown and Jill Wiltse were already art collectors and exhibition sponsors when they recently added another label, that of film supporters, with their founding of Design Onscreen — the Initiative for Architecture and Design on Film. The group is headed up by Heather Purcell, and its latest effort is…
Al Wynne. Al Wynne is one of the greatest artists to have ever worked in Colorado, and his accomplishments rank right up there with those of acknowledged masters such as Vance Kirkland and Herbert Bayer. And Black Forest Magic: Paintings & Sculpture by Al Wynne proves it. The Colorado native’s…
As much as any art museum or venue in town, Plus Gallery (2501 Larimer Street, 303-296-0927, www.plusgallery.com) is committed to showcasing cutting-edge art. The current case in point is Industry, a Jonathan Saiz solo made up of a group of closely related wall sculptures that function as a single, coherent…
Robert Mangold (Bob to everyone in the Colorado art scene) is surely the dean of Denver’s contemporary sculptors, with a fifty-year career under his belt. His best-known pieces are those colorful and familiar whirligigs called “Anemotive Kinetics,” a number of which can be seen around town. Still, it’s been years…
