Dutch Walla has been taking photos for over fifty years, beginning as a protegé of the late Denver photographer Otto Roach and eventually taking over the older man’s processing business, Roach Photography. Now, at the age of 75, Walla has turned the day-to-day operations of Roach Photography over to his…

It’s hard to live in Colorado and, at the same time, to love architecture. The problem is twofold: There’s very little of the built environment that’s any good, and the few buildings that are good are constantly being threatened with demolition or insensitive remodeling. I was contemplating these ideas while…

Variations on the theme of contemporary portraiture are brought together in Heads, now at Studio Aiello (3563 Walnut Street, 303-297-8166). The show highlights six artists, four of whom have their work shown in depth. Gallery co-directors Tyler Aiello and Monica Petty Aiello organized the exhibit in cooperation with private dealer…

There’s a handsome show called Winter Exhibit: Murphy, Garcia, Jackson, Lee playing at the glitzy Fresh Art Gallery, and it’s a signature outing in a number of ways. As usual, everything was hand-selected by director and gallery owner Jeanie King. Also as usual, all of the artists on display explore…

Right now, in the South Gallery of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs, 1-719-634-5583), there is a very good show called Gene Kloss: Southwestern Printmaker. The large exhibit, which has been handsomely installed, showcases the artist’s famous etchings and drypoints. Kloss was born in…

It was at the end of the nineteenth century that the worldwide romance with the American West first got off the ground. This happened because, even as the earliest settlers were making their way here, the dramatic scenery of the region was attracting artists, particularly photographers and painters. These artists…

In the past couple of months, Bryan Andrews created dozens of large sculptures for his solo show, which is now playing at Cordell Taylor Gallery (see page 55). That would seem like a lot of work, but somehow Andrews had some spare time on his hands. How else to explain…

In the 1970s, contemporary art fractured into a riot of diverse styles. The anything-goes situation in which we find ourselves today is the inevitable product of this explosion. Now that artists have had decades to work out the various logical extensions of this cornucopia of ideas, contemporary art encompasses a…

This past spring, emerging artist Jared David Paul founded an exhibition space that he originally called the Santa Fe Arts Assembly. He has since shortened the name to the Assembly (766 Santa Fe Drive, 303-257-0145), because the original name, it turns out, misled people into thinking that the space was…

It would be accurate to call BLOOD: Lines & Connections, the fall-winter exhibit at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a bold effort. It would also not be too far wrong to call the show — or at least parts of it — outrageous, confrontational and over the top. MCA director…

The Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) is just coming off a recent bout with censorship. As reported in Westword (Off Limits, October 9), the Denver Civic Theatre requested that Edge remove a photo from its show hanging in the theater’s lobby. The photo depicts two men kissing, with the…

The season began only a scant six weeks ago, but already many of the first shows have closed — or soon will. It’s been a crowded calendar, with more than a hundred exhibits being presented simultaneously, a couple dozen of which are definitely worth seeing — pretty good odds when…

The front spaces at Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585) are fitted out with Frank Sampson paintings (see page 57), but in the back gallery and extending into the conference room is a separate solo, Virginia Folkestad: Isthmus/go-between. Since the early 1990s, Folkestad has used traditional home life…

There’s something edifying about retrospectives. I guess it’s their epic scope. Collected in a single place is a representative sample of an artist’s entire professional lifetime. Stylistic phases are marked, as are the topics of interest that the artist embraced over the years. Yet despite these obvious virtues, retrospectives are…

A couple of times a year, Cherry Creek’s Gallery M (2830 East Third Avenue, 303-331-8400) puts on a photography show that focuses on a single photographer using traditional methods. The big fall exhibit, Bob Kolbrener: Celebrations of Nature, is the latest example of this worthy program. The show features sumptuous,…

Let me say this right off the bat: The fall-winter blockbuster at the Denver Art Museum, El Greco to Picasso from the Phillips Collection, is one of the best shows ever presented in our region. Not since the DAM’s Matisse show a few years ago has the city been graced…

Lauri Lynnxe Murphy only recently took over as director of the Andenken Gallery (2110 Market Street, 303-292-3281), but she’s already making a splash with her first effort, the tasty group show Luscious that’s now on display. There’s a back story to Luscious: A good deal of the exhibit — the…

It occurs to me that the art world is akin to a light switch. Not the on-and-off type (the art world is always on) but one of those dimmer switches. Metaphorically speaking, at times the lights in the galleries have been turned down to a flicker; at other times, they’ve…

Bobbi Walker forces visitors to her gallery, Walker Fine Art (300 West 11th Avenue, 303-355-8955), to suspend their aesthetic sensibilities. At issue is the hideous high-rise — the Prado — in which the gallery is located. Loving buildings as I do, it took me a long time to build up…

When the Cordell Taylor Gallery opened its doors in Denver in the fall of 2001, its specialty was contemporary art from Utah, and all of the represented artists were holdovers from the days when the business was located in Salt Lake City. These out-of-state artists were unknown around here and…

For its fall opener, the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (1513 Boulder Street, 303-455-8999) is presenting the theme show Recreated Realities. Though a wide variety of mediums are on display, from primitive pinhole to up-to-the-minute digital, all of the photos were created by assembling multiple images. The photographers included are an…

A principal leitmotif of Colorado’s history is the influence of Mexican culture. Though not equal in legend and lore to the cowboys and Indians, it has been more enduring. Mexican explorers coined the state’s name, and the southern half was actually once a part of Mexico. Thus Mexican-Americans have been…