Spring is the traditional season opener for yardwork, since it’s the best time for planting trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetables and, of course, grass. But not this year, at least not in Denver. The drought and that unbelievable March blizzard has left most landscape enthusiasts not planting — not yet –…
The Orwellian times that we live in have piqued the interest of the Colorado art collective iMiNiMi, which is made up of Roger Rapp, Kent Smith, Rick Visser and the artist known as Bug. For the exhibit Panopticon 21: You Are Being Watched, now at the Cordell Taylor gallery (2350…
The morning of April 9 was absolutely flawless here in Denver, with the temperature hovering in the mid-sixties under a stunningly clear blue Colorado-brand sky. On that perfect day, several hundred people had gathered in the former parking lot at 13th Avenue and Acoma Street to witness a celebration of…
Further evidence of the widespread representational painting craze that is all the rage right now is The Price of Illusion, a duet that features works by Denver painter Wes Magyar and those of nationally known Arizona painter Beverly McIver. The exhibit is the main attraction at the enormous Judish Fine…
Surely the most persistent current in painting is the representation of recognizable things, particularly the figure. In one form or another, representational painting has been around for about 15,000 years, ever since the cave paintings in France and Spain were created. Things went along fine after that, with countless landscapes,…
Artists often encounter difficulties when they address politics in their work. Remember those severed ceramic penises that were stolen from a show at the Boulder Public Library last year? Their ostensible theme was violence against women, but those dismembered members didn’t actually say anything about that; they just illustrated the…
Contemporary art seems to be relentlessly rocked by fads. A craze for some novel thing usually starts in the art magazines, and then suddenly it seems like everyone is doing it. Remember when renditions of little archetypal houses were everywhere eight to ten years ago? Where are they now? Even…
The current exhibit in the main space at Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) has the somewhat poetic and thoroughly pretentious title of Precious Beyond. The show pairs well-known Denver painters Irene Delka McCray and Paul Gillis. McCray’s subjects — aging, sacrifice, suffering, angst and death –…
Periodically in fancy women’s clothing stores, like those in the Cherry Creek area, there are special events called “trunk shows.” They are advertised in the papers, and attendees often appear later in the society pages. In these shows, a representative of some haute designer or maker brings in trunks full…
Last year, the Andenken Gallery (2110 Market Street, 303-332-5582) had a short-lived branch called the Andenken Annex. Situated in the swanky SteelBridge Lofts, the little spot specialized in the work of young artists. Despite its brief run, it cast a long shadow, and though gone, it lives on in Annex…
Daniel Libeskind, an architect with a Denver connection, made a worldwide stir a couple of weeks ago when he was chosen to design the replacement for New York’s World Trade Center. And you saw it predicted here first, weeks before the decision was made — and without the use of…
Robin Schaefer, at Ironton Studios & Gallery (3636 Chestnut Place, 303-297-8626), is an intriguing show spotlighting a group of crisply rendered portraits. Schaefer, who maintains a studio at Ironton, has taken grade-school photos and translated them into oils on canvas. The resulting paintings, which are done in muted colors verging…
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, French culture was really something — and there are all those pictures to prove it. There are the Manets, the Monets, the Van Goghs, the Gauguins, the Toulouse-Lautrecs, the Cézannes, the Matisses and the Picassos, as well as others by the all-time…
If you’re crazy about mid-century modernism — and let’s be honest, who isn’t? — then you’ll want to catch Werner Drewes: A Bauhaus Artist at the Lakewood Cultural Center (470 South Allison Parkway, 303-987-7876). Oh, true, it’s installed with no apparent rhyme or reason — I had to restrain myself…
Photography’s fortunes are soaring right now — not only in Colorado, where photography shows are cropping up left and right — but in the New York-based art magazines, too. The shutter craze has been coming on for a couple of decades, but in the current season, photography is taking an…
Chance Operations Gallery (232 East 20th Avenue, 303-894-0377) is a pretty funky place. In fact, I nominate it as the funkiest art venue around. There’s the requisite bohemian location, of course — a shabby storefront in a row of shabby storefronts at the very shabby northeast end of downtown (you…
Foothills Art Center, which was founded in 1968, is located in the charming old part of Golden, next to the Colorado School of Mines campus. The center is so quaint, it looks like it came right off a postcard. Ensconced in a nineteenth-century church and a pair of red-brick Victorian…
Terry Maker is one of Colorado’s most relentlessly innovative artists, constantly changing approaches. Over the years, she’s exhibited hard-edged paintings, sculptures made of old books, and beach balls covered in latex and wax. For heaven’s sake, she even did an installation inside a travel trailer. Her latest wild creations are…
New York City is not just the center of the art world; it’s the center of American culture. That was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt almost a year and a half ago by the tragic events that occurred on 9/11. With that event, the city’s place in the…
The Museo de las Américas (861 Santa Fe Drive, 303-571-4401) is hosting Frida Kahlo, a photography show documenting the life of the iconic Mexican painter, who died almost fifty years ago. During her short life, Kahlo was hugely famous, but she is even more famous now. Celebrities such as Madonna…
It’s all but official: Young Denver artist Emmett Culligan can now be considered one of the top contemporary sculptors in Colorado. And the proof is in the spectacular Emmett Culligan: Sculpture, currently on display at Judish Fine Arts. The show, which opened a couple of weeks ago, has generated a…
It’s hard to believe today — what with underwear-clad models dancing in Kmart commercials and Joe Millionaire running around in a skimpy Speedo — that twenty years ago, the idea of a man as a sex object was considered outrageous and clearly in bad taste. Then, in the 1980s, along…
