The Sandra Phillips Gallery, situated about halfway between El Noa Noa and the Sandy Carson Gallery on the 700 block of Santa Fe Drive, is a little hard to see as you drive by. Even on foot, the quaint little storefront is easy to miss from the sidewalk. Once inside,…
Denver printmaker Diana Vavra Strong died on July 24 after a nearly twenty-year battle with cancer. Vavra Strong was most active as an artist in the 1960s and ’70s, so until recently, her work was known mostly to a handful of old-timers. Last year, Kirkland Museum director Hugh Grant mounted…
Even though Shannon Corrigan has been at the helm of the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria campus for a couple of years now, there’s still something of a breath of fresh air to the place — and she’s apparently the one who’s brought it. Why Emmanuel needed air in the…
Summer — especially as hot as this one’s been — strikes me as an odd time to be thinking about quilts, but that’s what’s on the mind of Judy Hagler, owner of Translations Gallery (773 Santa Fe Drive, 303-629-0713), in her new exhibit, Flow. Then again, the cloth pieces in…
What constitutes Western art has been a hot topic among curators over the past twenty years. The answer is obvious when applied to material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it gets murkier and murkier after the 1930s. What caused the confusion, of course, was the rise of…
Denver artist Jason Appleton takes the role of the outré bohemian, the perfect pose for a longtime member of Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis (3656 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058, www.pirateart.org). Over the years, I’ve come to learn that although he’s always ambitious, he’s also always uneven; a typical Appleton show has…
If you’re from somewhere else — or if you aren’t paying attention — you may have a misperception about the art scene in metro Denver. I was led to this observation by a conversation I had recently with San Francisco-based art-and-culture critic Glenn Helfand, who was in the area to…
Oh, it has been a scorcher lately, hasn’t it? That’s why it strikes me as being extremely counterintuitive for Ironton Gallery (3636 Chestnut Place, 303-297-8626) to be doing Glacial right now, an exhibit organized around a wintry theme. Then again, Glacial may be about the cold, but it’s definitely hot…
The culture boom that’s been hitting the Front Range has reached another milestone: On Saturday, August 4, at 10 a.m., a ribbon-cutting ceremony will open the new two-story, 48,000-square-foot wing that has been subtly added to the magnificent and iconic Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, a 1930s modernist masterpiece that…
The thoughtful new addition to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center done by David Owen Tryba (see review) is surely the biggest cultural event of the summer. But another important happening is the new piece of public art that was recently erected in America the Beautiful Park, just west of…
Clyfford Still, master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. This characteristic is best illustrated by the fact that at the height of his acceptance, he pulled out of the New York art world and isolated himself in a rural part of…
For nearly three-quarters of the twentieth century, the heart of the art world in Colorado was in Colorado Springs. Artists were attracted to the then-charming town by its art-colony character, which was anchored by the Broadmoor Academy and its successor institution, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center School. Beginning in…
When I came to Denver in the 1980s, the Mile High City was a great place to be if you were a fan of architecture, as I am. At the time, the oil boom was transforming downtown into what it is today, with new high-rises popping up like mushrooms. The…
I’m sure that anyone who travels down the South Monaco Parkway as it skirts the fashionable Crestmoor neighborhood has noticed the dramatic — if a bit tumbledown — expressionist-style church (pictured) that occupies a two-acre site just north of the Ellsworth Avenue intersection. As long as I can remember, the…
Installation art, an aesthetic approach that uses space as one of its materials, dates back to the early twentieth century, but then it was a mere sidelight rather than the major art form it is today. Installation began to take off in the 1960s and 1970s, along with the rise…
Lawrence Argent, one of the four featured artists in Looking Up at Metro’s CVA (see review), has emerged over the last decade or so as the region’s premier conceptual artist. But unlike most of his fellow travelers in this brainiac pursuit, Argent has been successful in getting public commissions. Selection…
Curator Gwen Chanzit is the world’s foremost authority on the late artist Herbert Bayer, and she has put this knowledge to good use over the past couple of decades as the keeper of the Herbert Bayer Archive and Collection held by the Denver Art Museum. It was started while Bayer…
The contemporary art scene in Denver is made up of scores of galleries, but until thirty years ago, there were only a handful of exhibition spaces in town. It was in the 1970s that the foundations for what we have now were first laid. This was the time of the…
It’s hard not to notice all the public sculpture that’s come on line in the past few years. As I drive around, it seems like I’m always spotting something new. That’s what happened when I found myself out in Lakewood the other day. I was looking for an important mid-century…
Some very sad and shocking news came out of Boulder last week: Noted Colorado artist Jim Colbert was found dead in his Boulder home, an apparent suicide. Colbert, a contemporary realist painter with a political bent, had exhibited widely throughout the state since first coming to Colorado thirty years ago…
The new Frederic C. Hamilton Building may have created a lot of unanticipated problems for the Denver Art Museum, but its opening also kicked up much of the commercial art world a notch or two. I’ve said it several times before, but it’s still worth noting again: There’s never been…
For a while now, Bobbi Walker, owner of Walker Fine Art, has been pairing her main exhibits with selections by artists in her stable. With legendary Denver artist Roland Bernier being the featured attraction (see review), it was delightful to notice that Walker had also chosen to showcase another significant…
