Former Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp, who retired at the end of 2009, really made his mark on the place. The most obvious example of this is the Hamilton Building, which nearly doubled the museum’s exhibition space. Less obvious is the way he reorganized the DAM’s internal structure, recasting…
Maruca Salazar became the director of the Museo de las Américas (861 Santa Fe Drive, 303-571-4401, www.museo.org) in the fall of 2009 and unveiled her first show, La Malagua, a couple of months ago. The exhibit highlights the work of a collaborative group of artists based in Puerto Vallarta and…
There’s no argument that Herbert Bayer, who lived in Aspen from 1946 to 1974, is the most important artist in Colorado history. He was internationally famous when he moved here, having been associated with the Bauhaus in Germany before World War II. And he embraced a wide range of artistic…
Leo Seltzer never lived to see the realization of his dreams for the sport he invented, which most modern roller derby scholars trace back to his 1935 Transcontinental Roller Derby at the Chicago Coliseum. Seltzer had Olympic ambitions for his roller guys and dolls, and he dared to dream of…
After much back and forth over the last few months, including a showdown in the middle of the Winter Olympics, Intrawest has repaid its lenders and completed a new loan. Locally, that means Winter Park and Steamboat may be staying the course until at least 2014, though the $107 million…
Works on paper are a standard feature of the art world, even if works made out of paper are not. Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, however, a generation of artists began using paper as their medium — and Colorado artist Ray Tomasso was at the forefront. It’s…
Colorado artists have been making ceramics since the turn of the last century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s and ’80s that the scene here really hit its stride. This was a time when a group of artists whom I call the “greatest generation” were routinely producing world-class work. Luminaries…
Here’s some inspiring news snowboarders around the world have been waiting for: Kevin Pearce officially checked out of Craig Hospital this week, four months after suffering a traumatic brain injury in the halfpipe on December 31. He’ll remain in Colorado for a few weeks of outpatient treatment, but is expected…
Among the city’s cooperative venues, Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173, www.edgeart.org) is almost always interesting. Because the membership is diverse and quite accomplished, shows here are often surprising and always worth viewing. A friend had contacted me about In the Manner of Pollock, a solo made up of recent…
On June 2, 2006 Ben Bradley set out from his home in Tabernash, CO with a rare Never Summer split snowboard, some winter gear, his thumb, and not much else, hitchhiking his way to Jackson, WY to meet friends for some late-season snowboarding. He never made it, and his body…
The trajectory of the exhibition season has two principal arcs. The first gets going in the fall and peters out at the first of the year, while the second begins in late winter and early spring before hitting autopilot for the summer. It’s just like school. And that means we’re…
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,…
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…
