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…
More than any of the other co-ops in town, Spark Gallery (900 Santa Fe Drive, 720-889-2000, www.sparkgallery.com) has a membership dominated by established artists. And that makes sense when you remember that it’s the city’s oldest art venue of its type. Among the current offerings is a case in point:…
Denver’s contemporary-art scene is remarkable both in its size and in the diversity of work being done. The city’s venues, particularly the co-ops and commercial galleries, are seemingly always filled to the brim with thought-provoking and accomplished art, and the sheer volume of worthwhile material never ceases to amaze me…
For the past eight years, Denver artist Stephen Batura has been doing works of art based on an archive of historic photos from the collection of what used to be called the Colorado Historical Society and is now known as History Colorado. Batura, who once worked at the Denver Public…
Some art writers, including critics and commentators, have been trying to put abstraction in its grave for a generation. In fact, abstraction has been the butt of sneering invective from those who champion other aesthetic approaches since artists first embraced the style a hundred years ago — and it’s come…
As much as any art museum or venue in town, Plus Gallery (2501 Larimer Street, 303-296-0927, www.plusgallery.com) is committed to showcasing cutting-edge art. The current case in point is Industry, a Jonathan Saiz solo made up of a group of closely related wall sculptures that function as a single, coherent…
It would be easy to argue that all art is partly about the artist who created it. But that doesn’t mean every piece can be classified as art of identity. No, that relies on a person’s sexual, ethnic, racial or religious background as a key element. The current art-of-identity era…
For a few days last month, Denver and the Front Range were shrouded in a smoky haze, courtesy of the forest fires in California. It was more than a little unsettling, lending the town a doomsday quality right out of a disaster movie. But fires are a natural part of…
The sluggish economy has affected the bottom line for art galleries, just as it has other businesses, but you wouldn’t know it from looking. In recent months, exhibits as good as, if not better than, ever have been unveiled one after another. And with the fall season now underway, you’d…
Denver artist Michael Brohman is known for conceptual sculptures and installations with ambiguous narratives. He’s also known for having edgy, if not questionable, tastes that result in the use of stomach-turning materials like human bones and skulls, animal pelts and remains and, believe it or not, horse manure. And then…
Very rarely is it possible to start out on the wrong foot and yet wind up hitting a successful stride. But somehow, in the case of the History Colorado Center, getting it wrong at first hasn’t precluded the possibility of getting it right later. In 2005, a state building committee…
