The current blockbuster at the Denver Art Museum is an enormous show with the exhaustively informative title of European Masterpieces: Six Centuries of Paintings From the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. Filled with compelling pieces, it occupies both the Hamilton and Stanton galleries, which comprise some 18,000 square feet at…
Working Drawings, at the Philip J. Steele Gallery in the design building at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design (6875 East Evans Avenue, 303-753-6046), is a charming little show. Steele director Lisa Spivak, who organized the show, invited the faculty and staff of RMCAD to participate, as well…
Ron Judish Fine Arts, which will close for several months on Saturday, is set to decamp from its tony Wazee Street location within weeks and move into new and greatly expanded accommodations on the ground floor of a historic church in northwest Denver. And, while gallery director Ron Judish has…
In the last couple of months, the Denver Art Museum (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, 720-865-5000) has acquired some important new pieces. The department of painting and sculpture has received “Bords de l’Oise a Pontoise,” a painting by French impressionist Camille Pissarro, which has been hung on the sixth floor…
It is the happiest news imaginable. The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center has finally, if reluctantly, abandoned its plans to build an addition on the facade at the southwest corner of the building next to the main entrance. Any addition placed in this spot, no matter how inspired, would have…
Spark (1535 Platte Street, 303-320-4547) is currently presenting Wasteland, a show featuring two of the co-op’s members, Annalee Schorr and John Davenport. The Schorr portion readdresses television as a topic. Schorr had produced photo-based works on this subject for about a decade before abandoning it in recent years in favor…
Photographer R. Skip Kohloff is well known in Denver, but he only rarely exhibits his work. In fact, déjà-view: A Retrospective Exhibition: R. Skip Kohloff, on display at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC), is one of the only solos he’s had during his thirty-year career and the largest presentation…
There are only a few days left to catch Richard Hull at the Rule Gallery (111 Broadway, 303-777-9473), as it is set to close on Saturday. The exhibit is an impressive painting solo featuring recent pieces by Hull, a nationally known Chicago artist whose work was first shown at Rule…
Even before Cydney Payton formally joined the Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art at the beginning of this year, she’d told me about her plan to initiate a series of ongoing exhibits dedicated to Colorado artists. Now that she’s been ensconced at the institution for several months, she’s putting that plan…
Every year at this time, Phil Bender presents a solo show at Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058). He’s been doing this for more than twenty years, ever since he helped found the co-op in 1980 and became its driving force. This year’s show, Paris, Paris Architecture,…
Simon Zalkind, the director of the Singer Gallery at the Mizel Arts Center, has some obvious strengths as an exhibit organizer — he has a good eye, he’s an expert when it comes to hanging a show and, most of all, he’s relentlessly creative. Zalkind shows off all three talents…
There’s a great show, Dave Yust: Selected Monotypes 1997-2001, now on display in the gallery at Open Press (40 West Bayaud Avenue, 303-778-1116). It highlights Yust’s work with master printer Mark Lunning from a series of sessions held over the last four years in Lunning’s printmaking shop, also at Open…
This week marks Historic Denver Week, which annually celebrates the substantial accomplishments of Historic Denver, the respected local preservation group. Founded in 1970 in response to the threatened demolition of the Molly Brown House, at 1340 Pennsylvania Street, the organization bought, saved and restored the house, an eclectic Romanesque confection…
Patti Cramer’s Spring Fever opened about two weeks ago at the Saks Galleries (3019 East 2nd Avenue, 303-333-4144), and though it still has two weeks to run, there are only a handful of pieces left in the gallery. Unfortunately, the practice at Saks is to allow patrons to remove purchases…
There’s no question about it: Roland Bernier is one of Denver’s greatest contemporary artists. His vision is remarkable in its variation and monumentality. His output is astounding. His relentless quest for innovation is breathtaking. And his solo, Between the Lines: Word Works by Roland Bernier, on display in the Denver…
Artyard (1251 South Pearl Street, 303-777-3219) is currently hosting 1500 degrees, an unusual exhibit that showcases a body of recent work by Susan Meyer (formerly Susan Meyer Fenton). The pieces were all made while Meyer was an emerging artist in residence at the famous Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State…
Last spring, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, there was an unprecedented effort by local galleries, art centers and museums to present shows on the broad topic of ceramics. The result was nearly a hundred exhibits all at the same…
It was probably a year or so ago that Molly Dubin, the curator of the Mizel Museum of Judaica, asked me if I knew anything about an artist named Akiba Emanuel. I didn’t, so Dubin explained that Emanuel was a modernist painter and sculptor who had lived in Denver off…
Error & Ingenuity: A Kinetic Sculpture and Robot Exhibit is an ambitious show being presented at the Andenken Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-291-4567). Andenken, the joint effort of Hyland Mather and Malia Tata, originally opened in the Raven’s Nest studio complex but relocated last winter to the GOOG, Patrick…
The Denver Art Museum has long been on the cutting edge of exhibition design. Unfortunately, that’s not always a good thing, as is evident right now at the DAM and other major museums around the world, where marketing and demographics are displacing connoisseurship and art history as key components in…
Emotional Distance, the superb photo show at Gallery Sink (2301 West 30th Street, 303-455-0185) combines the work of some of Colorado’s best-known artists with examples by well-known photographers from around the country. In the front space, exhibit organizer Mark Sink has installed a group of wonderful landscape photos by Boulder…
Edgar Britton was Colorado’s most significant and successful sculptor of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. He was to modernist sculpture what the late Vance Kirkland was to modernist painting. But unlike Kirkland, whose fame has grown since his death, Britton, who died in 1982, is known only to a smallish…
