Here in Colorado, we get more than our share of “pretty” photographs of the West. These brilliantly colored fantasies portray a land full of unspoiled scenery, snow-capped peaks, green forests and crystalline lakes. But longtime residents know another West that seldom makes it into coffee-table books or postcards: a vast,…
Hard as it is to admit, Denver’s alternative scene is aging. Well-established cooperative galleries such as Pirate and Spark are celebrating anniversaries well into the double digits, and many of their members now enjoy elder-statesman status. Housed mostly in shabby storefronts in cheap neighborhoods, these hardy urban survivors can seem…
When I was around six years old, my mother took a class in oil painting at Emily Griffith Opportunity School. I have vivid memories of her bringing home boxes of smelly paint and handfuls of those tiny books filled with child-sized reproductions of the paintings of Renoir and Van Gogh…
Any curator looking to find the best women artists from the Front Range over the last twenty years would do well to read the roster of the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute. Begun in 1976, RMWI’s annual search for female (and, since 1993, male) artists, writers and performers boasts an impressive…
The phrase “read you like a book” has some basis in fact: Most observers will agree that the human body can be read for meaning, much like a text. Some artists have taken the metaphor literally, concentrating on the direct representation of body parts or inventing ways for live bodies…
Years before LoDo was a dull gleam in a developer’s eye, northwest Denver’s Highlands neighborhood shone as the city’s unofficial arts district. Artists flocked to the area, drawn by cheap rent, urban convenience and choice hangouts like My Brother’s Bar and the old Muddy’s on 29th Avenue. There artists gathered…
Rivers have always presented a challenge for landscape artists. Their majesty, their mystery and, especially, their movement all resist a flat, two-dimensional rendering. Enter German artist Mario Reis, whose recently completed North American Nature Water Color Project used an ingenious method to literally capture a river’s essence. Since 1977 Reis…
The fad of pigeonholing art into politically correct categories has created a multitude of interesting genres. Some are lively and welcome inventions, such as Outsider Art, Latino Art or the recent Reclamation Art, where environmentally contaminated areas are resurrected with the aid of public art projects. But few of the…
Denver artist Louis Recchia’s raucous, jam-packed style has changed only slightly since he burst onto the Denver art scene in the early Eighties. And in Recchia’s case, that’s a positive: His trademark mirror-filled backgrounds, found-object tableaux and flat cartoony representations of lovers, dogs, ballerinas and everything else under the sun…
When Marcel Duchamp found an industrial bottle rack and proclaimed it art, he transformed fine art from an activity for a privileged few to one that everyone–and almost everything–can play. Almost eighty years later, people still delight in “found” objects, abandoning the formal grind of academic art to celebrate the…
After a decade spent isolated in a Highlands barrio, Spark Gallery, the oldest of Denver’s cooperative art spaces, gained a new lease on life two years ago with its move to the industrial-grunge neighborhood near the Paris on the Platte coffeehouse. The once-sleepy Spark now buzzes with activity: A recent…
To be an innovator in today’s art world takes more than skill, knowledge and talent–it also helps to know how to focus an electron microscope or calculate the frequency of a microwave transmitter. These seemingly nonartistic techniques are only two elements involved in the extraordinary creations at the Arts Innovation…
She stares out of the canvas at the viewer–at nothing. She seems frozen in a moment of deep anxiety, preoccupied with her thoughts. Who is she? In a sense, she is the artist, for this is an intensely realistic self-portrait. But at the same time, this woman and the other…
Among the Denver area’s many opportunities for artists, the annual associateships at the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute are unique, offering studio space, a stipend and a supportive atmosphere to a select group of visual and performing artists and writers. Originally designed to give women artists a place to work on…
Rejecting journalistic photography while investigating the uncharted neighborhood of the unconscious, three artists turn reality-based images into weird worlds full of symbols and suggestion at Mackey Gallery this month. Although the exhibit’s photographs are in black-and-white, they all display dark-hued psychological effects. Phoenix artist Linda Ingraham starts with grainy photographs…
The medium of printmaking still carries an Old World cachet–as well as equally exclusionary costs. The expenses involved in making a hand-pulled print on heavy paper puts the reproductive technique out of reach for many artists. To overcome this obstacle, some arts communities have worked to make printmaking facilities more…
After fifty years of disrupting the art world, the formerly disreputable style called abstract expressionism has achieved a kind of elder-statesman eminence. Paintings that once were the butt of endless I-don’t-know-much-about-art jokes now enrich museums and decorate corporate offices, hotels and movie sets. Unfortunately, all of this visibility hasn’t made…
Given the current art-world trend to deconstruct every available style and medium, it was only a matter of time before the same turn-it-upside-down mania hit the furniture market. To fit postmodern strategy, the “new” furniture must look like it’s coming apart at the seams or defying gravity–as well as tradition–all…
Spontaneity, politics and confrontation marked much of the street theater and performance art of the Sixties and Seventies. And like many artists who came of age in that free-swinging era, L.A.’s Glugio Gronk Nicadro was drawn to art that encouraged direct interaction with the viewer, literally off-the-wall art forms that…
This state’s prairie lands appear remote–spare, spacy, even boring. But Last Chance to Cope–photographs of Colorado’s northeastern plains on which sit the actual towns of Last Chance and Cope–finds a lot to look at out where most of us see nothing. This exhibit, now on display at Emmanuel Gallery, is…
Artists Who Are Indian, the year-long exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, showcases strong new works of art, some exploring vital spiritual issues and all produced by living Native Americans who reject artistic stereotypes for the freedom–and equality–of the cutting edge. The seventeen contemporary pieces assembled for the show’s second…
The siren call of stellar artists including Ed Ruscha, Red Grooms and David Hockney makes WORD, an exhibit at the Boulder Art Center, hard to resist. But this large show of text-based works fails to thrill, displaying many noncurrent (if not aged) creations, some that have been seen more than…
