Periodically in fancy women’s clothing stores, like those in the Cherry Creek area, there are special events called “trunk shows.” They are advertised in the papers, and attendees often appear later in the society pages. In these shows, a representative of some haute designer or maker brings in trunks full…

Robin Schaefer, at Ironton Studios & Gallery (3636 Chestnut Place, 303-297-8626), is an intriguing show spotlighting a group of crisply rendered portraits. Schaefer, who maintains a studio at Ironton, has taken grade-school photos and translated them into oils on canvas. The resulting paintings, which are done in muted colors verging…

Daniel Libeskind, an architect with a Denver connection, made a worldwide stir a couple of weeks ago when he was chosen to design the replacement for New York’s World Trade Center. And you saw it predicted here first, weeks before the decision was made — and without the use of…

If you’re crazy about mid-century modernism — and let’s be honest, who isn’t? — then you’ll want to catch Werner Drewes: A Bauhaus Artist at the Lakewood Cultural Center (470 South Allison Parkway, 303-987-7876). Oh, true, it’s installed with no apparent rhyme or reason — I had to restrain myself…

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French culture was really something — and there are all those pictures to prove it. There are the Manets, the Monets, the Van Goghs, the Gauguins, the Toulouse-Lautrecs, the Cézannes, the Matisses and the Picassos, as well as others by the all-time…

Chance Operations Gallery (232 East 20th Avenue, 303-894-0377) is a pretty funky place. In fact, I nominate it as the funkiest art venue around. There’s the requisite bohemian location, of course — a shabby storefront in a row of shabby storefronts at the very shabby northeast end of downtown (you…

Photography’s fortunes are soaring right now — not only in Colorado, where photography shows are cropping up left and right — but in the New York-based art magazines, too. The shutter craze has been coming on for a couple of decades, but in the current season, photography is taking an…

Terry Maker is one of Colorado’s most relentlessly innovative artists, constantly changing approaches. Over the years, she’s exhibited hard-edged paintings, sculptures made of old books, and beach balls covered in latex and wax. For heaven’s sake, she even did an installation inside a travel trailer. Her latest wild creations are…

Foothills Art Center, which was founded in 1968, is located in the charming old part of Golden, next to the Colorado School of Mines campus. The center is so quaint, it looks like it came right off a postcard. Ensconced in a nineteenth-century church and a pair of red-brick Victorian…

The Museo de las Américas (861 Santa Fe Drive, 303-571-4401) is hosting Frida Kahlo, a photography show documenting the life of the iconic Mexican painter, who died almost fifty years ago. During her short life, Kahlo was hugely famous, but she is even more famous now. Celebrities such as Madonna…

New York City is not just the center of the art world; it’s the center of American culture. That was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt almost a year and a half ago by the tragic events that occurred on 9/11. With that event, the city’s place in the…

It’s hard to believe today — what with underwear-clad models dancing in Kmart commercials and Joe Millionaire running around in a skimpy Speedo — that twenty years ago, the idea of a man as a sex object was considered outrageous and clearly in bad taste. Then, in the 1980s, along…

It’s all but official: Young Denver artist Emmett Culligan can now be considered one of the top contemporary sculptors in Colorado. And the proof is in the spectacular Emmett Culligan: Sculpture, currently on display at Judish Fine Arts. The show, which opened a couple of weeks ago, has generated a…

Roach Photos has been in its distinctive old building on Broadway and Ninth Avenue, just south of downtown, since the mid-1970s, but its long and proud history goes back way before that. The business, which specializes in the production of photomurals, was launched in 1936 by the late commercial photographer…

I think it was triggered back in the 1990s, as people looked ahead to the new millennium. When the 21st century dawned, everyone everywhere and in every field of human endeavor seemed to look to the past to chart the course of the future. This retrospective mood constituted a major…

The typical show at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) highlights the work of the co-op’s members. But around this time every year, Edge presents a show devoted to non-members. The current version, which is on display now, is titled Emerging Artists: 2003 Edge Invitational. In the past, this annual…

Last week, Jeanie Nuanes King unveiled her long-awaited Fresh Art with the inaugural exhibit Momentum, a contemporary group show of painters and sculptors. It’s hard to believe that just over two years ago, King opened her first gallery in a tiny storefront on South Broadway — especially considering how far…

Last year, Kathy Andrews, gallery director at the Arvada Center (6901 Wadsworth Boulevard, Arvada, 720-898-7200) jumped ship to take on a similar gig at Metro’s Center for the Visual Arts in LoDo. Although the current Arvada shows were set in the schedule by Andrews, they were put together without her…

Photography is a complicated topic from the perspective of the fine arts. There are so many different types of photography — scientific, documentary, fashion, advertising, experimental — all of which may or may not qualify as fine art. Not only that, but the very nature of the medium is difficult…

Each year, the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (1513 Boulder Street, 303-455-8999) selects three members as prizewinners and presents their works in an annual exhibit. The latest version of the show has the already-outdated-sounding title of 2002 CPAC Member Awards. (In fairness to the organizers, the exhibit opened in December, so…

Studio Aiello, under the direction of Tyler and Monica Petty Aiello, is set to grow into a full-scale art center over the next few years. In an old commercial building and on an adjacent lot in the far north reaches of the downtown railroad yards, the Aiellos plan to hold…

It all started in November, when Art Students League artist Cong Lu won a prize for his painting “Self-Portrait of a Martyr.” Conservative in style, it shows a very buff Lu raising his T-shirt, revealing that his abs are strapped with explosives. Some students and viewers objected, and this thin…