Hal Gould just turned ninety, and not only is he by far the oldest gallery director around, but his photo gallery, Camera Obscura (1309 Bannock Street, 303-623-4059, www.cameraobscuragallery.com), which he runs with Loretta Young-Gautier, is one of the oldest in the country. That said, there’s nothing old-fashioned about the place,…
Although he took the reins of MCA Denver at this time last year, director Adam Lerner didn’t roll out his first full slate of shows until January. Exhibition venues typically plan their events a year in advance in order to make all the arrangements, so until then, Lerner had mostly…
The RiNo district, north of downtown, is now a center for art, but it was originally one of Denver’s prime industrial areas. Among the landmarks in the funky neighborhood is the old Dry Ice Factory, a handsome and substantial brick structure from the 1920s that looks like a misplaced element…
In the early 1990s, with the millennium approaching, scholars, curators, collectors and writers in the art world were in a retrospective mood. Because of this, they began, for the first time, to look seriously at the history of art in Colorado. What has since surfaced from their sleuthing has been…
Since MCA Denver was founded in the late 1990s, its directors have simultaneously served as curators for its exhibits. There have been guest curators — Julie Segraves, John Grant and Petra Sertic come to mind — but no one permanent. For most of the museum’s history, former director Cydney Payton…
A couple of weeks ago, I discussed the persistence of representational imagery in the fine arts by zeroing in on a group of shows in which artists created contemporary versions of realism (“Real Time,” February 4). This week, turnabout being fair play, I’ll look at the equally astonishing longevity of…
Meet the MasterMinds Six years ago, Westword added a very special component to Artopia: the MasterMind awards. Recognizing that the local arts scene needed a little fertilizer to really get going, and growing, we created a program that every year honors five cultural visionaries — artists and organizations alike —…
Although member shows at co-ops are typically presented side by side and often in close quarters, whether they work together isn’t something that is usually considered during the installation. As a result, it’s rare to see a slate of simultaneously scheduled shows that function both individually and in concert. But…
The continuing appeal of various forms of realism is remarkable when you consider that its would-be replacements, abstraction and conceptual art, have been around for a hundred years already. And the depiction of representational imagery shows no sign of becoming passé. Just look at Christoph Heinrich’s Embrace! now at the…
Jim Milmoe is a legend in the local photo scene, with a career more than six decades long — most of it in Colorado. He moved to the state in the 1940s to attend Colorado College, where he graduated in 1949; he later earned an MFA from the University of…
Edge Gallery, one of the city’s most significant artist co-ops, is putting a twist on the typical members’ show by including non-members as well. The idea for the wide-ranging group exhibit, Edge Pairings, was originally proposed by Rian Kerrane at a co-op member meeting, and her thought was to have…
Simon Zalkind, director of the Singer Gallery of the Mizel Arts & Culture Center (350 South Dahlia Street, 303-316-6360, www.maccjcc.org), is an intellectual as much as an aesthete, meaning he’s as interested in ideas as he is in visual matters. So it makes sense that Spittin’ Image: Ten Artists Consider…
During the first half of the twentieth century, Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier artist, but in the succeeding decades, he slowly fell into obscurity — known chiefly by local art historians and, because of his murals, supporters of local historic architecture. But three recent projects dedicated to True have…
Jessica Stockholder and John McEnroe. Jessica Stockholder is an internationally known artist who creates what have been described as three-dimensional paintings. She is widely known for her over-the top installations, so it’s unusual to find Stockholders that are small enough for people to actually buy. This exhibit is dominated by…
The art season for galleries and museums begins every fall, with the winter holidays representing its high point. That means that exhibition venues can be expected to have some of their most important offerings on view at this time. Currently, three top commercial hotspots are featuring very strong offerings involving…
Based on my experience — and my files — I figure there are 300 serious contemporary artists in Colorado. I make note of this because three of them died in November, which strikes me as a pretty high number. On November 8, Elaine Calzolari succumbed to cancer (Artbeat, November 19);…
Denver’s a sports town, but for those of us who occupy the netherworld of the visual arts, our home team is the Denver Art Museum. And since January 1989, the DAM’s head coach has been Lewis Sharp. But Sharp will step down as the Frederick and Jan Mayer Director at…
It’s interesting to notice that some artists basically ignore the fads and trends that sweep over the art scene periodically and instead follow their own vision of what art should be about. A good example is Robert Mangold, the dean of Colorado contemporary sculpture, who, over the past five decades,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
