Five Arty Things to Do This Week in Metro Denver

Fall is here, and so are a host of new art shows going in fresh directions. Be adventurous and try all five of these.

Mark Fitzsimmons: Hard Comforts
Dateline, 3004 Larimer Street
Thursday, September 28, 6 to 11 p.m.
Army veteran Mark Fitzsimmons, now a student at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, takes on post-traumatic stress disorder and social expectations versus the military identity in a one-night pop-up performance on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his enlistment. Hard Comforts takes place in and around a soft-sculpture installation, with two performances at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.

Bruce Price: Sinner in Gingham
Stephen Batura: River Paintings
Ted Larsen: Lined Out
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
1750 Thirteenth Street, Boulder
September 28 to January 21
Opening reception: Thursday, September 28, 5:30 p.m.
A trio of fall exhibits showcasing regional artists takes over BMoCA’s galleries on September 28, including a retrospective of Bruce Price’s 2-D and 3-D works incorporating gingham fabric, Stephen Batura’s monumental paintings based on the historical nineteenth-century photographs of Charles Lillybridge, and Ted Larsen’s scrap-metal installations. That’s an eyeful, and a good one, at that.

Americana
Colorado Photographic Arts Center
1070 Bannock Street
Through November 4
Opening Reception: Friday, September 29, 6 to 9 p.m.
CPAC celebrates Final Friday in Denver’s Golden Triangle Art District and heads into autumn with a juried group exhibition with a wide-open Americana theme broken up into categories of people and landscape/architecture. Darren Ching of New York’s Klompching Gallery tossed out the rose-colored glasses to select works by 26 photographers for a show with a national scope and a contemporary view; get a sneak peek at the slideshow on the CPAC website.

Diorama of the Cosmos
Fiske Planetarium
2414 Regent Drive, Boulder
September 30 to December 21
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 30, 7 to 10 p.m.
Denver artists Katy Zimmerman and Genevieve Waller teamed up to create Diorama of the Cosmos, a grown-up kids’ craft project that colors outside the lines of the text-book universe. Have some fun with the installation, a fantastical treatment that picks up where science leaves off and the imagination takes over, and while you’re there, maybe you can catch a planetarium show, too.

FLIP
Boulder Creative Collective
2500 47th Street, Suite 10, Boulder
September 30 to October 27
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 30, 6 to 9 p.m.
There will be no pussyfooting around the Boulder Creative Collective’s in-your-face group exhibit FLIP, for which participants were each invited to create a new work on the subject of social change using a medium new to each artist. Expect something fresh: The show poster (see above) will prepare you for what’s in store by giving you the finger; edible photographs and an exterior installation by New Yorker Mary Mattingly are promised, too.

See Westword’s calendar listings for more art events and openings.