Historic preservation in Denver is really in trouble right now, despite its many successes. The easy-to-understand community benefits of landmark protection are all over the central part of the city — lower downtown, Country Club, Seventh Avenue Parkway, Potter-Highland, Montclair, Larimer Square and on and on — and they make…
Western art and contemporary art would seem to be mutually exclusive, but they’re not. There are many artists in the area who combine the two sensibilities to create what’s called — you guessed it — contemporary Western art. This type of work has gotten a big boost from the Denver…
I’ve sometimes been criticized for promoting our own art scene too much, though my detractors often misunderstand my position. It’s not that I want our local institutions to feature only artists from around here, but rather to better integrate them into their exhibition schedules. In championing this cause over the…
Some time ago, Bobbi Walker, owner of Walker Fine Art, accused me of always making fun of her titles. I strongly made the claim that she was wrong. Honestly, I don’t always do it, just most of the time. But, come on, she makes it so easy. This time the…
The University of Colorado is the state’s premier learning institution, and Boulder is the region’s only true college town, on par with Madison, Wisconsin, or Ann Arbor, Michigan. Changes initiated by Hank Brown, the school’s president, have put a damper on the famous party atmosphere there, but there’s still a…
The University of Colorado’s Department of Art and Art History, as good as it is and as talented as some of the faculty are (see review, page 46), has long been the campus stepchild, as indicated by the rundown building in which it’s been housed for decades. While other academic…
Just last year, Japanese-American artist Yoshitomo Saito moved to Colorado, and he’s already the subject of a major solo: 108 Blue Cranes, at Rule Gallery, one of Denver’s top venues. I don’t need to tell you that this is no mean feat. Born in Tokyo in 1958, Saito attended Jiyugakuen…
Michael Chavez has been the curator at Foothills Art Center (809 15th Street, Golden, 303-279-3922) for a little over a year, but the current exhibit, REALationships: Works of Surreal Inspiration is the first show he’s had the opportunity to put together. The idea for the show is twofold, with Chavez…
A specialty of the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture is presenting multi-disciplinary projects that combine art shows, films, lectures and panel discussions. The Mizel’s current creative and intellectual enterprise focuses on war — quite timely in the context of what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. The art exhibition,…
Penelope Caldwell is a great-looking solo in the front room of Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-904-1088). On the south wall are a couple of large paintings Caldwell did in 2005 when she lived in San Francisco; opposite them are a series of more recent oil-on-paper paintings that she…
An art exhibition — even those devoted to the work of a single artist — is typically made up of anywhere from a dozen to three dozen pieces. Some exhibits include more than that, with a blockbuster generally having between seventy to a hundred different things on view. It’s unusual…
When I was at the Lab the other day checking out that impressive Liam Gillick piece, for obvious reasons the installation at the staggeringly ugly University of Denver Station on RTD’s light-rail line came to mind. Like the Gillick, John Goe’s “Reflective Discourse” uses words as a key component. Considering…
In all the years I’ve been going to galleries in Denver, there have only been five or six venues that I would consider first-rate. These places are completely reliable, and I can count on finding something worthwhile on display whenever I arrive. Robischon Gallery, which just celebrated thirty years in…
It’s hard to believe that Walker Fine Art (300 West 11th Avenue, 303-355-8955) has been around for five years already, but the gallery is enjoying its 5 Year Anniversary Celebration. According to owner Bobbi Walker, she didn’t have a clue as to what she was doing when she started. In…
Ironton Studios & Gallery is the flagship facility of the one-year-old RiNo Art District. “RiNo” is a contraction of the words “river” and “north” and refers to the relatively vast area along the South Platte River, northwest of downtown, where some art-related operations — notably a lot of studios –…
Denver collecting couple Jill Wiltse and Kirk Brown have really raised their art profile this season. At the same time the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building was being unveiled last October, Wiltse and Brown put on an important historical show at the Emmanuel Gallery called Treasures Revealed: The Art of…
To celebrate the Denver Art Museum’s new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, three special exhibitions are being presented simultaneously in the three galleries dedicated to changing displays. I’ve already looked at Virginia Vogel Mattern’s collection of contemporary American Indian pottery (“Breaking the Mold,” November 23, 2006) and the cutting-edge work of…
For the past 28 years, Dianne Vanderlip has reigned supreme at the Denver Art Museum as the head of contemporary art, one of the museum’s biggest and best departments. Over the nearly three decades she was there, Vanderlip built a widely renowned collection with real depth in the art of…
Like the art world in general, Denver is focusing in on photo-based pieces (pun intended). More likely than not, you haven’t seen the many excellent offerings currently on display because of the difficulty in getting around on deeply rutted streets. Last week I braved the elements to check out some…
I don’t put much stock in shows installed in non-art businesses, because they’re typically thrown together and feature the work of hobbyist-artists. So it wasn’t until I’d heard a lot of positive buzz about OBJECT + THOUGHT (3559 Larimer Street, 720-226-9196), the graphic-design firm that presents exhibitions in its lobby,…
There’s been a lot of talk about the burgeoning art scene in Denver, with dozens of venues featuring the work of hundreds of artists. The current culture boom is best exemplified by the strip of galleries that line Santa Fe Drive, an area that has been almost universally hailed as…
In the last twenty years, the “Built Green” movement has gone mainstream, with big developers such as ForestCity at Stapleton promoting the environmentally friendly features being incorporated into their buildings. But a generation or two ago, only kooks or visionaries thought about such an issue. Here in Denver, we had…
