Five Arty Things to Do and See This Weekend

Sometimes you have to go the extra mile to see great art, and that can mean driving to another city or traipsing down an alley to find an alternative gallery space. Other times it’s right in your face, and that’s good, too, if you like a bit of occasional glitz in your life. Here are five ways to do one or the other this weekend in Denver and beyond.

Yoshitomo Saito, Millionyearseeds
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs
Through April 29
10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday
10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday
Admission: $5 to $10 (members free)
Time is almost up for Tokyo-born Yoshitomo Saito’s solo exhibit millionyearseeds at CSFAC, which Saito, who now resides in Colorado, calls one of the most significant shows of his career. That’s saying a lot for an artist who’s been garnering high praise for his graceful cast-bronze sculptures and wall installations inspired by forms from nature. Don’t let the drive south to the Springs hold you back. To make it even more worth your while, Chiho Aoshima’s video works Takaamanohara and City Glow will also be coming down after Sunday.


MSU Denver Visiting Artists Lecture: The Yes Men
Center for Visual Art MSU Denver, 965 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, April 26, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
RSVP on Facebook event page
The Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, cultivate their own trickster-y brand of satirical performance art in the name of social justice, exposing unscrupulous capitalists and corporations through a series of sensational practical jokes. The self-named “laughtivists" hoodwink such offenders with carefully planned acts of sabotage, fake newspaper headlines and dummy websites. MSU Denver’s art department snagged Bichlbaum for an eye-opening lecture on the subversive side of visual-media manipulation that might have you laughing and crying at the same time.

Grand Opening Group Exhibition
Mirus Gallery Denver, 1144 Broadway
Friday, April 27, 7 to 10 p.m.
Free, reserve tickets on Facebook
Paul Hemming’s Mirus Gallery in San Francisco has always been more than a gallery, though it does that quite well by representing a trendy stable of top-level urban street artists. But under the aegis of Hemming’s Zen Compound, a mixed-use concept of which the gallery space is a part, it also rubs elbows with a coffee bar and a co-working space by day; the Temple nightclub takes over at night. Hemming has now brought the whole concept to Denver at a second location, which makes this the hottest commercial gallery opening in town this weekend. Get your free ticket on Facebook while you can.

Mari Crespin: This thing which I cannot hold
Georgia Art Space, 952 Mariposa Street
Friday, April 27, 7 p.m. to midnight
Saturday and Sunday, April 28 and 29, 1 to 5 p.m.
Enter gallery through the alley
Sommer Browning’s intimate garage gallery Georgia is back with its first pop-up show in 2018, a walk-through multimedia installation by Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design student Mari Crespin that is best experienced one person at a time. We won’t spoil it for you with too much information, so we’ll just say that it might make you feel uncomfortable, transfixed, or like a fly on a weird wall. At the Friday night opening reception, films by polymath Erin Espelie, an instructor in film studies and critical media at CU Boulder, will also be shown.

Amy Metier, Eugene Newmann, Robert Delaney
William Havu Gallery, 1040 Cherokee Street
April 27 through June 9
Opening Reception: Friday, April 27, 6 to 9 p.m.
Havu Gallery unveils three new solos this weekend, including abstracts by Amy Metier, Santa Fe painter Eugene Newmann’s semi-abstract canvases and, on the mezzanine, kinetic sculpture by Robert Delaney. It’s a well-balanced trio with modernist leanings, whose adjacent works will both challenge and please the eye.

Interested in having your event appear in this calendar? Send the details to [email protected]. For more events this weekend, see our 21 Best Things to Do in Denver.