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Best Contemporary Asian Art Lesson -- Museum

Waves on the Turquoise Lake

A study of contemporary artists from Tibet is a pretty off-the-wall topic, but Waves on the Turquoise Lake was a spectacular exhibit. Jointly conceived by CU Art Museum director Lisa Tamiris Becker and the Mechak Center's Victoria Scoggin, the show was definitely a situation where the East met West head-on and where the old crashed into the new -- just like in Tibet.

Best Contemporary Asian Art Lesson -- Gallery

Under the Radar

China has long had a rich cultural tradition, but the country has been out of the art picture for a century or more. Times are changing, and now that Wal-Mart has turned the place into an economic powerhouse, its art is again coming to the fore. Robischon Gallery's Under the Radar: Chinese Contemporary Art -- curated by gallery co-director Jennifer Doran -- illustrated the importance of this hot new category. The show's title is a play on the Denver Art Museum exhibit RADAR: Selections From the Collection of Vicki & Kent Logan, which works well because the Logans even lent Robischon a couple of pieces. Asian art is certainly a hot topic in Denver.

Best Historic Photo Show -- Group

From Nordenskiold to Nusbaum

You knew the show at the Denver Central Library was serious simply by noting the word count of the title: From Nordenskiold to Nusbaum: Archaeology, Photography and Tourism in the Early Years of Mesa Verde National Park. Whew, seventeen! The Nordenskiold part refers to Gustaf Nordenskiold, who explored Mesa Verde in 1891, and the Nusbaum part addresses Jesse Logan Nusbaum, who became an early superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park. Their photos were supplemented with images by William Henry Jackson, George Beam, Laura Gilpin and others. The exhibit was curated by the Colorado Historical Society's Thomas Carr and the library's Trina Purcell, who together selected some of the best pieces from their respective institutions to pull off this knockout of a show.

Best Historic Photo Show -- Solo

Denver's Pictorial Photographer

Pictorialism is a photographic style in which images are blurred to create the atmospheric quality normally associated with a painting. It was all the rage a hundred years ago -- and it is again right now. Believe it or not, Denver had its own first-generation pictorialist, R. Ewing Stiffler, who was the subject of Denver's Pictorial Photographer at Gallery Roach last spring. Stiffler moved to Colorado as a teenager, but he studied his craft across the country, including at the Art Institute of Chicago. To say that this exhibit was a rare viewing opportunity would be more than an understatement, since some of the pieces had not been displayed since the Denver Art Museum did a pictorialist show back in 1935.

Best Iconic Photo Show

Marilyn Monroe: Beginning
to End

When you talk about photogenic, you've got to talk about Marilyn Monroe. After all, more than a few photographers built their entire careers on their memorable images of her. Camera Obscura Gallery, granddaddy of the city's photo scene, hosted an interesting duet comparing and contrasting Andre de Dienes's earliest shots of the glamorous siren with George Barris's moody photos, taken a few weeks before the actress died, in 1962. Barris is believed to have snapped the last pictures of Marilyn, but like the gentleman that he was, he refused to publish them until long after she died.

Best Contemporary Photo Show -- Solo

John Bonath: Blessings Revisited

Well-known digital photographer John Bonath had a hell of a year battling cancer. So it's amazing how well he kept his spirits up -- even naming his one-person show at sellarsprojectspace Blessings. Man, what a trouper! In his pieces, Bonath created fantasy worlds that are completely believable because they were made up of images of real things. Most of these digital photos included figures, both male and female, while others incorporated shots of carved wooden hands to stand in for the missing human subjects. Bonath's chemotherapy has been successful; best of luck to him with that.

Best Showcase of Photograph Trends

(REAL): Photographic Constructs

This dynamite show, put together by Center for Visual Art director Jennifer Garner and assistant director Cecily Cullen, featured eight photographers who were pushing their medium to the absolute edge. Local talents Jon Rietfors, Gwen Laine and David Zimmer were joined by internationally famous artists Zeke Berman, Gregory Crewdson with Susan Harbage Page, Bruce Charlesworth and Meridel Rubenstein. With photography coming on so strong in recent years, this intelligent show gave viewers a good snapshot of some of the best work being done across the country.

Best Sculpture Solo

James Surls

The star attraction at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art last fall was James Surls: A Cut Above. The sculptor made his name in the 1980s from a studio in Texas, but he moved to Colorado in 1998 and has been here ever since. Surls's medium of choice is wood, which he carves into attenuated shapes based on organic forms. He assembles his sinuously cut sections into unlikely arrangements or clusters, typically leaving the material in a subtle array of natural tones. Some of the pieces stand on the floor while others hang from the ceiling. Coloradans don't usually cotton to Texans, but since Surls is among the region's best sculptors, we'll just have to make an exception.

Best End to a Daydream

Matthew Rose: Spelling With Scissors

Lauri Lynnxe Murphy is a one-woman art scene. In the past, she was involved with Edge Gallery, was one of the founders of the long-closed ILK co-op, which she ran, then opened Pod, a boutique that morphed into Capsule, an alternative gallery. Experimental shows were a specialty, with the over-the-top Spelling With Scissors being the last of them. For this outing, Matthew Rose, an American in Paris, covered the walls with nearly 900 funny and weird neo-dada collages cut from the pages of newspapers and magazines. In December, when the show closed, so did Capsule. Murphy found that selling art was harder than renting space to other people trying to do it, so she opened the Capsule Art and Events Center next door. We wish her the best.

Best Ceramics Show -- Solo

Martha Daniels

Martha Daniels's work riffs off the history of ceramics, combining Mediterranean and Asian influences in the same way as her mentor, Betty Woodman. The most remarkable creations in the show at William Havu Gallery were her delicate -- though gigantic -- towers that subtly referred to work by the great Brancusi. Among Daniels's strengths are her expressive handling of the forms and the way she uses glazes as though they were paints. Long one of the best ceramicists in the time zone, Daniels is a city treasure.

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