Eight years ago Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp hired his old friend Craig Miller, with whom he had worked at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, to put together a design collection at the DAM. The museum had accumulated a hundred years’ worth of chairs, vases and candlesticks, but…
Words may be the currency of the 1990s in the same way money was the lingua franca of the 1980s. Never has this been more clear than in the political crisis that has reached a dramatic pitch in recent weeks. We’ve all heard President Clinton “parse” his words, while his…
It’s hardly unexpected to find art shows at museums–unless the museum is that funky Platte Valley landmark the Forney Transportation Museum. It is this unlikely venue that well-known contemporary artist Stephen Batura chose for his most recent, untitled show. In a sense, the Forney was a natural for this Denver…
Denver’s Mizel Museum of Judaica occupies only a small gallery and a couple of offices in the recesses of the large BMH-BJ synagogue. Despite these modest facilities, however, the institution often presents highly provocative art shows that easily rise above the Mizel’s sectarian character. Ben-Zion: In Search of Oneself, which…
Objects of Personal Significance is a loosely organized theme show that handsomely fills the recently relocated and expanded Center for the Visual Arts on Wazee Street, the LoDo gallery of Metropolitan State College of Denver. The exhibit, which has a too-short five-week run, comprises a traveling section organized by Exhibits…
Denver’s collection of art cooperatives–notably, Spark, Pirate, Edge, Core and ILK–are a boon to contemporary art here. Most major cities don’t have anything close. The co-ops’ great cultural value is that they provide opportunities for emerging artists and established talents alike to display their latest work free of commercial constraints;…
The art scene in Denver does not shut down during the summer as it does in the big cities on the east and west coasts. Even here, though, there is a point when everyone seems to be taking a break–and that hiatus is currently on. The last of the summer…
In visual art, representations of the outside world have a formidable history–some 14,000 years’ worth. Which, of course, creates a problem for contemporary artists: How can they record external reality and still do something new? To meet this challenge, painters in recent years have advanced a variety of artistic strategies,…
People in the art world–artists, dealers and collectors alike–generally eschew dressing up. As renowned writer and art collector Gertrude Stein observed in the 1930s, if you don’t have much money, you either buy clothes, or you buy art. Stein kept her own counsel in this regard, collecting a world-class assortment…
Oh, the America of the 1950s. In the nostalgic mind’s eye, the era is all poodle-skirts and roller skates, malt shops furnished with chrome dinettes and jukeboxes filled with Elvis. It was a time when, according to the late career civil servant W. Averill Harriman, the whole country “drank Coca-Cola…
Sean Scully occupies a peculiar niche in the history of recent art. An unabashed modernist, he came of artistic age in the 1980s, an era dominated by an anti-modernist zeitgeist. The assault on modernism generally, and on abstract painting in particular, came from both the front and the rear. While…
You may want to wash your hands after taking in the trio of oddball (a polite but accurate term) conceptual exhibits that fill the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art this summer. While none are visually edifying, all three challenge conventional, and even unconventional, ideas about the nature of art and…
A cultural notion emanating from New York–as do so many–is that the art world closes down for the summer. While this may be true in that city, which wealthy collectors, gallery owners and artists alike abandon for the seashore during the dog days, out here in the hinterlands summer is…
Sally Perisho, the highly regarded director of Metropolitan State College’s Center for the Visual Arts, has been at the eye of a whirlwind the past few weeks. Last month her gallery moved from the corner of Wazee and 17th Streets in LoDo to a pair of storefronts next to the…
A new piece of public sculpture planned for the Denver Performing Arts Complex may yet displace the goofy entrance canopy at the Denver Art Museum as the most reviled object in the local art world. If the winning entry in a recent competition–Jonathan Borofsky’s as-yet-untitled monumental six-story-tall sculpture of conventionalized…
Contemporary art has fractured into innumerable directions and styles since the 1970s, but the situation has never been as wildly pluralistic as it is today. For proof of this diversity, see three current shows at two very different local venues. But catch them while you can–they’re all set to close…
On a recent sunny afternoon, Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp was standing under the museum’s still-controversial entrance canopy on Acoma Plaza. Not that the canopy provides any shade: Though workers began erecting it last fall, it’s still not finished. The stainless-steel panels intended to provide it with a roof…
As lower downtown’s sidewalks have become crowded with shoppers, tourists and sports fans, the trend among art galleries has been to move out or close up. That’s not just the story in LoDo, but on Broadway and throughout the central business district. The problem? Spiraling rents combined with sluggish art…
The new exhibit at Denver’s Museo de las Americas has an impenetrable title and an equally confusing outlook. 1598, 1848, 1898: Conquest and Consequences is billed as an exploration of the myriad relationships between the United States, Mexico and Spain. Its title suggests a provocative discussion and explanation of the…
Robin Rule, director of the Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery, is on cloud nine, thanks to the nine abstract paintings that make up the gorgeous Dale Chisman: New Paintings exhibit that just opened at Rule. Not only is this show an aesthetic triumph for Chisman, the well-known contemporary master, but…
There’s good news and bad news these days at the Denver Art Museum. We’ll start with the good: After years of being on the road or in storage, the DAM’s own stash of modern and contemporary art is back on display with the opening of Welcome Back! Selections From the…
Anyone even remotely interested in tracing the course of contemporary art in Colorado over the past few decades will want to take in a pair of marvelous shows that focus on major, established local artists. But move fast–they’re closing soon. The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is feting venerable painter…
