The blockbuster Inspiring Impressionism (see review), at the Denver Art Museum (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, 720-865-5000, www.denverartmuseum.org), posits the idea that the widely admired style both signaled a clear break with the past and, strangely enough, represented a straightforward continuation of Old Master traditions. Another show at the DAM,…
Four 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, that are working…
Colorado has an important ceramics tradition that stretches back a century. But the ranks of the top artists in the field have taken some big hits over the past decade: Betty Woodman retired from teaching in Boulder and moved to New York; Rodger Lang and Jim McKinnell died; and Nan…
Last fall, the Sandra Phillips Gallery (744 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-5969, www.thesandraphillipsgallery.com) presented a museum-quality show featuring some of Colorado’s most important ceramic artists, including Martha Daniels and Paul Soldner. Before the show opened, Daniels had lunch with Denver Art Museum curator Gwen Chanzit. Daniels — whose own work is…
A couple of years ago, while I was serving on a panel, one of my fellow panelists — I won’t say who — commented that it was no longer relevant where something was made because art had become truly international. I had two words for this would-be theorist: Chinese art…
In 1990, Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp hired his old friend Craig Miller to start the Architecture, Design and Graphics department. A gifted and visionary curator, Miller took the ball and ran with it, collecting pieces with abandon. He became especially deft at absorbing entire collections of graphics, and…
The current exhibit at Metropolitan State College’s Center for Visual Art is interesting, though decidedly odd. It’s simply called Story, with no subtitle to help explain the idea behind it. This allowed its organizers, CVA director Jennifer Garner and assistant director Cicely Cullen, to build a group show connected only…
When Mark Travis died at the end of 2007, he had begun working on a series of politically themed pieces that were going to be presented at Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-904-1086, www.spacegallery.org) this August to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. That plan was scrapped after his…
Before I recommend that you take the time and trouble to check out the impressive if misleadingly titled Impressionist and Modern Masters From the New Orleans Museum of Art at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, I want to say a word or two about Blake Milteer, a newish curator…
More than any other artist cooperative around town, Spark Gallery (900 Santa Fe Drive, 720-889-2200, www.sparkgallery.com) has a membership mostly comprising artists with long and established careers. And that’s how I’d describe both Judith Cohn and Sue Simon, who are starring in side-by-side solo shows there. Dust to Dust is…
Last summer, I was part of a panel discussion about the role that our local scenery plays in both contemporary and traditional art, especially — though not exclusively — in the art that’s done in the region. At one point, artist Don Stinson, who was in the audience, made a…
The walls of the William Havu Gallery (1040 Cherokee Street, 303-893-2360, (www.williamhavugallery.com) are covered by The Nature of Things, combining the work of Tracy and Sushe Felix (see review). A second exhibit, Erick C. Johnson, has been installed around the edges, in the corners and outside, with one of the…
On December 14, I got a call from a good friend. Her tone was uncharacteristically formal, so I knew something was wrong. “Mark Travis was found dead in his studio,” she stoically told me. This news was shocking despite the fact that Travis had been in declining health for years,…
Ivar Zeile, the owner of Plus Gallery (2350 Lawrence Street, 303-296-0927) has often described his approach to showing contemporary art as “eclectic,” and in his case, that means embracing competing ideologies at the same time and in the same shows. The problem with this approach is that offerings of this…
The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver opened its brand-new David Adjaye-designed building at the corner of 15th and Delgany streets less than two months ago. I love the building and the fact that the upstart institution managed to construct a high-style facility by an internationally famous architect, and I focused on…
The idea for a quartet of solo shows at Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585, www.sandycarsongallery.com) began when owner Sandy Carson decided she wanted to mount an exhibit devoted to Toronto hotshot Tony Scherman, one of the foremost encaustic painters anywhere. Encaustic, by the way, is a wax-based…
As you might imagine, I see a lot of art shows in the course of doing my job. I figure that since this time last year, I’ve seen something like 250 exhibits — not counting the informal efforts in restaurants and coffee shops that I encounter in everyday life. It…
In 1890, Benjamin F. Woodward, a tycoon who helped bring the telegraph to Colorado, commissioned Denver’s premier architect, Frank Edbrooke, to design a mansion. Edbrooke, who had just completed his masterpiece, the Brown Palace Hotel, worked in the Richardsonian-Romanesque manner, the most important architectural style of the day. Constructed of…
It’s hardly a new observation to say that the invention of photography revolutionized the visual arts; it’s trite, but true. Before photography, the best way to capture the appearance of exterior reality was to paint it. Once people could take photos, however, the idea of painting as a window on…
In Sporting and Recreation: Furniture, the current exhibit at Ironton Studios and Gallery (3636 Chestnut Place, www.irontonstudios.com), Chase DeForest has a lot of fun adding narrative content to things like sideboards and chairs. The items all reference some kind of leisure activity like a game. But DeForest is also interested…
I’m wary of art with political subtexts, because it’s usually pretty bad, and the shows that feature it are often long on explanatory text and documentary videos and short on artistic content. So when I walked into the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art to view the enormous eco-themed Weather Report:…
The Dairy Center for the Arts (2590 Walnut Street, Boulder, 303-440-7826, www.thedairy.org) is an impressive facility, but the building definitely needs some work to make it more appealing and less gloomy. Maybe now that Judy Hussie-Taylor, the former deputy director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, has taken over as…
