It sounds like a preposterous moment in a cheesy and sentimental Western: A couple of artists out of New York City head from Denver to Mexico by wagon, break down and start an art colony that goes on strong for the next sixty years. It really does seem made up,…
There have been some big changes recently at the Denver Art Museum’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art. Last month, longtime associate curator Ann Daley stepped down after more than twenty years (Artbeat, October 9). And now, Petrie director Peter Hassrick (pictured) has announced his retirement effective next April. Hassrick…
The art tidal wave that’s hit Denver in the past few years hasn’t just led to a museum-building boom. It has also led to an explosion of galleries. I haven’t sat down to count all the commercial art venues in town, but I know it numbers more than a hundred…
Performance art, which has been around since the early twentieth century, is pointedly non-commercial because it’s so ephemeral. It literally comes and goes with little remaining but memories — and a few photos and props. It’s the opposite of object-based art and has as much or more to do with…
Laura Merage is an accomplished photo-based artist whose work I’ve reviewed a few times during the past decade. Her photos and photo-based pieces are supremely elegant and extremely sophisticated, as is she. More relevant to my story this week, however, is her other career, as a generous philanthropist with a…
When Sandy Carson, a fixture in Denver’s contemporary art world, announced earlier this year that she had sold her namesake gallery, even insiders were shocked. Carson has been on the scene since the beginning of time, which in Denver means the 1970s. The buyers were Bill and Jan van Straaten,…
There has never been an election cycle during which Colorado has been as much in the spotlight as it has this time around. It’s been so exciting. Not only was Denver the site of the Democratic National Convention — when Barack Obama addressed the world from a photogenic neo-mod ern…
There are basically two parallel art worlds out there: the contemporary scene and the traditional one. Some artists, however, are able to work in both realms at once, like the painter being feted in the impressive Daniel Sprick: The Living and the Dead at Gallery 1261 (1261 Delaware Street, 303-571-1261,…
Hugh Grant, director of the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, has relentlessly carried the torch for Colorado’s art history, doing more to promote awareness of this important legacy than anyone ever has. He began his promotion with the work of Vance Kirkland, for whom the museum has been…
In the front gallery at Walker Fine Art (300 West 11th Avenue, 303-355-8955, www.walkerfineart.com), owner Bobbi Walker has paired up painter Don Quade and sculptor James Dixon, both from Denver, for the exhibit Natural Abstractions. The show’s title is somewhat general in its implications, if not quite a catch-all, because…
You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar. For more than a decade he’s been one of the top artists in the world, and just about everything he makes is worth…
When I went to the MCA/Denver (1485 Delgany Street, 303-298-7554, www.mcadenver.org) last week to preview Damien Hirst, the place was a beehive of activity. In addition to the Hirst display going up in the Large Works Gallery, another exhibit was being installed around the corner, in the Promenade Space. Called…
Christoph Heinrich, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, must be a workaholic. In recent months, he’s unveiled two new dedicated spaces: a paper-works gallery in the museum’s Hamilton Building and a new-media space called the Fuse Box. Then he took on the ambitious reinstallation of the…
I was really disappointed to learn that Ann Daley (pictured), associate curator of Western art at the Denver Art Museum, had decided to step down after more than a decade in her present post and after having worked for the museum for a lot longer than that. Over the years,…
With no exhibition director on staff at present, the art program at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities is essentially rudderless. Executive director Gene Sobczak is running the program in his spare time, but he is no art expert, and he’s busy with other duties. In addition, Sobczak…
Adam Helms. This MCA solo is the New York artist’s first museum show anywhere. In his works on paper and in a monumental sculpture that conjures up a shooting blind, Helms explores political themes, especially armed struggle. He takes images of different radical and extremist movements from different places and…
It’s amazing how inexhaustible abstract expressionism is as an aesthetic ideology, both in its attenuated original form — going strong for sixty years now – and in its heir, neo-abstract expressionism. Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) is currently hosting a pair of exhibits that highlight this long-lasting appeal. In…
Making the most with the least is a specialty of Sandra Phillips, owner of her namesake gallery on Santa Fe, which opened five years ago. A tiny and cramped storefront with an almost invisible street presence, the facility has little to recommend it from the outside. Inside, there’s only a…
In many ways, magic realism anticipates conceptual realism, even though it’s not actually an early form of the cutting-edge style. Boulder has been a center for magic realism for decades (I guess art really does imitate life), in no small part because of Frank Sampson and Luis Eades, artists who…
Over the last quarter-century, old-fashioned representational imagery has supplanted abstraction, which had dominated most of the cutting-edge art of the twentieth century and become the preeminent expression in the fine arts internationally. It’s not that abstraction is passé; it’s just that more and more artists have embraced the figure to…
Last week, the Colorado Historical Society announced that Steven Turner will become the director of the State Historical Fund. That means that Turner is resigning as the director of Historic Denver. The promotion is good news for those of us who appreciate the old buildings of Denver. Not because Turner…
On September 3, I made my way to the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver as I’ve done so many times since the new building opened last year. But this time I wasn’t in pursuit of an art show. Instead, I was headed, along with a few hundred others, to the memorial…
