Mile High Fires

On the fifth floor, DAM curator Ron Otsuka has put together another show, the compelling Takashi Nakazato: Contemporary Pottery From an Ancient Japanese Tradition. It's a solo devoted to a Japanese potter who comes to work at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village annually. Nearly all of the pieces in the show were made with Colorado clays and glazes and are distinct from the material he creates in Japan. Nakazato is known in his native country for fine, traditional tea ceremony articles, but here in high country, he's just as likely to make mugs. As an adjunct to the show, Otsuka has installed a small group of splendid pieces by Nakazato's Anderson Ranch-based colleague, Doug Casebeer.

Like the Nakazato exhibit, most of the shows around town focus not on ceramic art history but on contemporary ceramics. That's to be expected at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in Sakura Square, where a gigantic solo, Scott Chamberlin Twelve Years: Drawing and Sculpture fills the entire institution. It's the largest and one of the finest ceramics exhibits in this crowded field.

The show takes an in-depth look at Chamberlin's tremendous output during most of the time that he's served as the head of the University of Colorado's ceramics department in Boulder. His quirky floor sculptures, in the main gallery, are joined by his even quirkier wall pieces, in the forms of both reliefs and drawings.

Ceramics and works on paper is a combination seen in another solo devoted to Chamberlin's distinguished former colleague at CU, Betty Woodman, who now divides her time between New York and Tuscany. At the hard-to-find Singer Gallery at the Mizel Arts Center in Hilltop, Simon Zalkind has organized Betty Woodman: Pots Paper Prints, a handsome exhibit that puts her ceramics, including several "pillow" vessels, in front of her prints and drawings. Her Matisseian prints were produced by Shark lithography, which is now in Lyons.

Mixing ceramics with other mediums is also a specialty of Kim Dickey's, another CU ceramic artist featured in an impressive solo. Holding Pattern: objects in action, at the Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery, combines her theatrical porcelain vessels with photos and a video; it highlights several years' worth of work.

In the front are several nesting bowls based on natural forms via California-made 1930s-'40s moderne-style industrial pottery. In the main gallery are very different and more recent monumental urns that look to be inspired by Mediterranean ceramics.

While you're at Rule, be sure to notice the 1930 Mayan Theater by Montana Fallis, directly across the street on Broadway. It's another of the many great Denver Terra Cotta buildings found in the older parts of the city.

Also in south central Denver, the William Havu Gallery is putting on Glazed Visions, a gigantic group show that includes the work of British ceramic artists Richard Bell, Tracey Heyes and Jim Robison. There are also impressive pieces by well-known Colorado artists such as Martha Daniels and Heather Bussey.

Daniel's sculptures, including pieces from her "Tower" series and her sculptural vessels, are distinguished by their complex shapes and vivid glazes. They have been paired with the ceramic wall-hung installations by Bussey. Also seen here are ceramic sculptures by Margaret Haydon and Margaret Josey, and, on the walls, drawings by Joshua Bemelen and paintings by Emilio Lobato.

At the Robischon Gallery in lower downtown, the amazing Brad Miller: new ceramic sculpture occupies half of the front gallery and extends into the Artforms space. Miller is a major ceramic artist who has worked at Colorado's Anderson Ranch Arts Center for more than a decade, though he's leaving for Southern California soon. The exhibit includes his signature wall-hung sculptures in which disparate organic shapes, finished in a variety of different earth-toned glazes, are assembled into idiosyncratic conglomerations. Many of the sculptures on pedestals are the same, but some of the newest ones are composed of related shapes and are finished uniformly.

In the Viewing Room at Robischon, Jeanne Quinn: Limbo comprises delicate sculptures that are based on traditional functional ceramic forms, notably the teapot. Quinn also teaches at CU in Boulder.

Next door to Robischon, at the Metropolitan State College of Denver's Center for the Visual Arts, the director, Sally Perisho, has organized High Degrees: Ceramics by Colorado Art Faculty -- the closest thing to a Colorado survey that can be found in town.

Some of the standouts here are the Japanesque vessels by Cloyd Snook, the flat wall plaques by Kathryn Holt, the monumental jars by Jim Lorio and the snakes and the tower piece titled "Abandoned Vestige" by Rodger Lang.

Lang, a Metro professor whose work is included in several exhibits, organized the NCECA conference and promoted the idea of presenting ceramic shows by telephoning the city's gallery directors and curators and lobbying them. More so than any other individual, it is Lang who is responsible for the area's current ceramic feast.