About a year ago, Colorado’s Doug Kacena came up with a provocative idea for an exhibit: He would paint over other artists’ paintings employing his own style, while those other artists painted over his works in their own respective styles. It was an unusual move, even if there were art-historical…
Like the movie series that inspired it, Star Wars and the Power of Costume is proving a big hit at the Denver Art Museum, with out-of-this-world attendance figures. But the exhibit is about more than star power; it “basically is looking at form and function,” says Saul Sopoci Drake, exhibitions…
In the beginning — of the last decade, at least — 314 East 13th Avenue was the home of Bender’s, and featured a large mural of Johnny Cash, smoking a cigarette and casting a man side-eye toward oncoming traffic. When the venue changed hands and became Quixote’s True Blue, Cash…
So, this is where we are. Like everyone else on the left, I have been attempting to process the results of the November 8 election and adjust to the idea of the new America we will be living in. But my immediate thoughts in the shock of the post-election haze…
Nathan Carter had a revelation when, as a middle-schooler, he visited the Whitney Museum and saw the creative and whimsical feat of imagination that is Calder’s Circus. “I remember being confused,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Wait, this is how I played with my toys. What was this doing in a…
Move your car, Donald. This isn’t a real parking sign; it is an artistic statement in the form of a wheat paste. “No Trump Anytime” has appeared in two locations in the Mile High City since the election November 9. The satirical version of a no-parking sign is an original piece by Plastic Jesus…
Works on paper — watercolors, drawings and prints — are the neglected stepchildren of paintings and typically considered their inferior. So it’s interesting to see that Clyfford Still, an artist known exclusively for his paintings, also used ink, watercolor, pastels and paint, all of them applied to paper, as an…
Denver may not have seen any snow, but there’s been a flurry of activity around town. In fact, the metro area is buried in great events — large and small, intimate and extravagant, upscale and downhome. Keep reading for the 21 best events in Denver this week. Tuesday, November 15…
The Stanley Film Festival, which attracted horror fans and industry professionals to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, is canceled for 2017 – and perhaps permanently. After a three-year run, from 2013 to 2015, the “Sundance of horror films” was put on hiatus in 2016 after the iconic hotel, which…
Cold-calling exhibition venues isn’t usually part of a curator’s job when creating an art show, but that’s exactly what University of Colorado Boulder art professor George Rivera did when he jumped departments in the ’90s after twenty years of teaching sociology. It started with his idea of shaking things up…
Aspen, along with the nearby towns of Snowmass, Carbondale, Woody Creek and Basalt, is one of Colorado’s centers for contemporary art. Although most of the artists in that community rarely show here, that’s starting to change. The latest example is Basalt’s Richard Carter, who has the lead role in Mandalas:…
The Vance Kirkland Studio has a new home. On Sunday, November 6, the historic studio once used by Denver Art Museum co-founder Henry Read moved a few blocks west, from its longtime home at 1311 Pearl Street to the corner of West 12th Avenue and Bannock Street.
Though it’s 106 years old, the Stanley Hotel continues to fascinate tourists (about 430,000 a year, to be exact) and locals alike. As the inspiration for Stephen King’s best-selling novel The Shining, it lives in pop-culture infamy. It’s also supposedly haunted and has a controversial owner who, for better or for worst, capitalizes on its allure. Brush up on your history and learn more about the hotel’s future in our recent coverage.
It’s time to dive into Denver Arts Week, and First Friday is the perfect introduction. If you don’t get out to the galleries throughout the year, this is the night to change your tune. Here’s a sampler of what you’ll find. Contemporary Fiber 2016 Niza Knoll Gallery Now through November…
In January 2014, Hugh Grant, founder of Denver’s Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, announced that the beloved cultural attraction would be vacating its original Capitol Hill location at 1311 Pearl Street and moving into a new facility to be erected at the corner of West 12th Avenue and…
The best thing about Denver Arts Week? It amplifies what we have here all year along, and especially in mid-fall, when local culture is completely up and running for a bright new season. From November 4 through 12, it’s the best chance you’ll have this year to explore what’s happening…
Spark Gallery on Santa Fe Drive consists of a pair of mid-sized rooms and one very small one, so the space can get cramped when each area is assigned to a separate exhibit. The crowded feel is exacerbated when the styles of the art in the various exhibits don’t jibe…
In the hierarchy of exhibits, the retrospective solo ranks at the top of the heap, as it allows viewers to follow an artist’s aesthetic life through the course of a career. The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is currently hosting just such a show, Kim Dickey: Words Are Leaves, organized…
Aside from when I was a baby in New Jersey and two years in Ohio for grad school, Denver has always been my home. But a home is a different thing from a community: You can have many communities, and in the age of the internet those communities can be…
Ritualcravt, the shiniest, eco-metaphysical mineral and herb store in the Mile High City, has recently expanded with a new location at 2842 West 44th Street. Still in Sunnyside but up the road and off the beaten path, Ritualcravt now boasts a significantly larger storefront with some much needed elbow room. The new space coincides with the shop’s one-year-anniversary, being celebrated this weekend with a seance on Friday October 28 and an all-day anniversary party on Saturday, October 29.
Bobbi Walker, owner and director of Walker Fine Art, has assembled Inherent Intent, a seamless group show that brings together seven contemporary abstract artists from across the country. All of these artists employ subtlety as their principle aesthetic philosophy, yet none of them can be called minimalists — at least…
This summer, as the start of an abstraction extravaganza, Space Gallery presented Expanding the Dialogue: Part One (which I reviewed September 14), and now Expanding the Dialogue: Part Two is on view. While the first show explored the subtlety of certain approaches, the second takes the opposite tack, looking at…
