Wouldn’t it be great if the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver became one of the great cultural assets of the region in the 21st century? Wouldn’t it be great if the powers that be there could get their act together? Although the museum’s current attraction, Western Vernacular: Colorado Installations, is very…
The current show at the Camera Obscura Gallery, Christopher Burkett: Intimations of Paradise, is a surprise, because all of the photographs are in color. Even more surprising is that unlike most color photos, these are really good. Since a great majority of the serious work in fine-art photography is in…
When Colorado’s Ocean Journey co-founders Bill Fleming and Judy Petersen-Fleming moved to town in 1992 with an idea for an aquarium in the Platte Valley, they appeared to be a couple of pipe-dreaming flakes. The very idea of a facility devoted to marine life seemed absurd in landlocked Denver –…
ILK, at 554 Santa Fe Drive, is a raggedy, upstart co-op that nonetheless frequently displays some of the most original art around. It is currently presenting a pair of intriguing solo shows. In ILK’s south gallery is New Works by Victoria del Carmen Pérez; in the north gallery is Size…
The Center for the Visual Arts is celebrating its first anniversary this summer in an expanded space on Wazee Street. The CVA, which operates under the auspices of Metropolitan State College of Denver, was originally located around the corner on 17th Street, in the building that is now occupied by…
Big-time local ceramics talent Rodger Lang is currently the subject of Lines & Space & Time at Artists on Santa Fe, 747 Santa Fe Drive. Though it’s economical for a solo exhibit, with only a few groupings of pieces, the show does lay out examples of each of the major…
Well, it’s that time of year again–late summer, when the art world, which is centered in New York, essentially shuts down, with many galleries actually closing for the entire month of August. This hiatus is a response to the stifling heat and high humidity that engulfs the East Coast this…
The Singer Gallery’s mid-summer offering, the absolutely fabulous John DeAndrea: Fragments, provides local viewers a rare opportunity to see the work of one of the greatest artists in Colorado, ever. DeAndrea was born in Denver in 1941 and raised in the old Italian neighborhood on the west side. “We lived…
The Spark Gallery has reached a milestone: It has two decades’ worth of history under its belt. To mark this momentous event, the current members of the city’s oldest extant art cooperative invited back its founders, none of whom are still involved with Spark, and many of whom no longer…
The Denver Art Museum has gotten good at attracting crowds. The blockbuster Toulouse-Lautrec, which just closed, brought in more than 100,000 visitors. And last year, the Berger Collection had similar success with a comparable attendance. Thousands of people also visit the various galleries scattered throughout the seven-story museum that feature…
The title of the current exhibit at the Metro State Center for the Visual Arts, Chairs! Chairs! Chairs!, may suggest to some that what we’re in for is a design show–or perhaps a display of artist-made furniture. But it’s neither. Instead, CVA director Sally Perisho has assembled the work of…
Mary Chenoweth, who died on January 14, at the age of eighty, was one of the most important and accomplished artists to ever have worked in Colorado. But that’s not the impression you’ll get from the ineptly arranged and incompetently organized memorial exhibit Mary Chenoweth: Collage of a Life’s Work,…
By a lucky accident of scheduling, the Denver Art Museum is presenting a pair of shows that provide visitors with a striking juxtaposition. On the seventh floor, in sumptuously appointed galleries, is Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: Treasures From the Royal Academy of Arts, a traveling exhibition showcasing…
As we near the end of the 1900s, it’s interesting to notice that the world of the visual arts is wide open, with a staggering profusion of artistic visions. Quite literally, anything goes. There are so many competing styles, ranging from straight traditionalism to the wildest fringes of conceptual art,…
The Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery is currently featuring the compelling show Carl Andre and Melissa Kretschmer, which pairs a handful of Andre’s recent sculptures with Kretschmer’s hard-edged tar-on-glass paintings. Both artists share basic aesthetic concerns. “We’re two modern artists who admire each other’s work,” says Andre, “and we happen…
Since relocating to the Golden Triangle from LoDo last fall, the William Havu Gallery (formerly the 1/1 Gallery) has greatly expanded its stable of artists. Among the recently snagged talents are those of husband-and-wife painting team Tracy and Sushe Felix, whose latest efforts are featured in the captivating exhibit New…
Dave Yust: Diptychs 1968-99, which closes this weekend at the Curfman Gallery on the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins, is a stunning examination of the work of one of the state’s most important contemporary artists. Yust, who teaches at CSU, organized the show himself and has zeroed in…
The normally staid Museo de las Americas, on Santa Fe Drive, is now hosting Los Supersonicos: Two Chicanos Zoom Into the New Millennium, a raucous contemporary exhibit filled with humorous political commentary in the form of irreverent paintings, prints and sculptures. “Los Supersonicos is a grupo,” says Carlos Fresquez, who…
More than any other medium, ceramics has achieved a high level of artistic development in Colorado. The glorious early history of ceramics here was partly determined by the availability of high-quality clay. Beginning in the 1890s, potters from the East and Midwest migrated to Colorado in a kind of clay…
Cydney Payton, the director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, has little trouble filling the place with exciting exhibits. In fact, she’s crammed so much into BMoCA that one of the four current shows, Housed, begins not in the museum, but on the street out front. Housed is a…
Over the past twenty years, blockbuster shows have become a necessary evil at museums. When they succeed–and they usually do, at least financially–they increase attendance, and that’s the bottom line in the exhibition business. But while they may attract big numbers economically, such shows can be aesthetically bankrupt. At the…
Russell Beardsley emerged on the Denver art scene while still a student. The first shows of his conceptual metal sculptures were presented to both critical and popular acclaim in 1993, a year before he earned his BFA from the University of Colorado at Denver. Back then, his pieces most often…
