Art Attack: What to See in Denver This Weekend

The final weekend of Denver Arts Week is crammed with last-minute things to do, and galleries are bustling, too. Shows include Colorado painter Emilio Lobato’s big exhibition at William Havu Gallery, a huge resident-artist show at RedLine, a gallery full of work by artists with Indigenous roots at ILA, a full house at Edge Gallery, a reboot of the Buell Theatre exhibits, a masterly art incubation featuring Tya Anthony at Leon and the Denver Art Museum’s last big blockbuster of the year.

Find the details for all of these and more below.

Chromatic Cogitations: Rhythm Reboot
form/re/form: New Work by Trey Duvall
Redline Contemporary Art Center, 2350 Arapahoe Street
Through January 23
Curatorial Tour with Resident Artists: Sunday, November 14, 1 p.m. POSTPONED
Chromatic Cogitations: Rhythm Reboot takes RedLine full circle by mixing the work of current artist residents with that of a stellar compendium of past ones. It also gets to the heart of what each resident does best, whether it’s happening in the present or was learned in former RedLine rites of passage. Whatever the case, it’s worth celebrating, and a tribute to artists and art-making. As a sidebar, alumnus Trey Duvall is showing a large-scale kinetic sculpture separately from the main body of work.

Julie Anderson, Kim Ferrer, Doug Haeussner, Peter Illig, Mark Penner-Howell, Karin Schminke, Matter of Time
Walker Fine Art, 300 West 11th Avenue
Through January 15
Time is on the minds of six artists – Julie Anderson, Kim Ferrer, Doug Haeussner, Peter Illig, Mark Penner-Howell and Karin Schminke – featured in Matter of Time, opening this week at Walker Fine Art. The theme pops up in myriad ways: as a marker for the march of history and evolution, in minute changes caught on camera or transformed by traveling light, and even in the sense of being outside of time, unimpeded by its rules. In other words, it’s a load of interesting art sharing borders under one roof.

Tya Anthony, Muscle Memory
Leon Gallery, 1112 East 17th Avenue
Through December 30, Thursday and Saturday afternoons
Leon’s nonprofit status gives the gallery free rein to let artists experiment and try new things. Tya Anthony’s Muscle Memory, a blend of photographs, sculpture and performance, is a beautiful example. It pays tribute to the coronavirus victims, protest movements, police violence and the racially discriminating incarceration of Black men we’ve all been coming to terms with over a period of nearly two years, all reflected in the mixed-media environment Anthony has installed in the gallery. But the performative part is key: Anthony is booking fifteen-minute one-on-one meetings to chat and drink tea on Thursday and Saturday afternoons throughout the show’s run. These spots are going to fly.

Leon’s Eric Nord also curated the Night Lights Denver programming for November; through November 30, you can still catch work by Tya Anthony, bunny M, Cymon Padilla, John Heenan, Jordan Knecht, Laleh Mehran and Holiday McAllister on the side of the Clocktower Building from 5 p.m. to midnight Tuesday through Sunday.
No Borders
ILA Gallery, 209 Kalamath Street, Suite 12
Through December 5
ILA Gallery gets serious about modern Indigenous art with the Native American Heritage Month group show No Borders, inspired by this war cry from modern Mexican-Americans with Indio roots who face discrimination at the border: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” The group – a mix of Pyramid Lake Paiute, Lakota, Chicano, Latino, Mestizo and all gendered and non-gendered derivations – produces art that fights back and seeks restitution.

Frea Buckler, Loops
Conny Goelz Schmitt, Zero Gravity
Steven Baris, Never the Same Space Twice
Jodie Roth Cooper, Corona’s Thunderbird
Space Gallery, 400 Santa Fe Drive
Through December 18
Space Gallery has a quartet of new solos opening this weekend: Steven Baris’s new paintings resemble chains or schematics leading from one place to another like a road trip, moving across exurban space between urban centers; multi-disciplinary artist Frea Buckler focuses on geometric color studies painted on paper with acrylic; Jodie Roth Cooper brings architecturally aligned steel sculptures to the gallery; and Conny Goelz Schmitt presents geometric three-dimensional sculptural works of repurposed vintage book covers.

Gayla Lemke: Light and  Dark: Circadian Rhythms
Mark Farrell: Unsolved Mysteries
Travis Vermilye: Sporangia
Eric Havelock-Bailie, photography
Mark Brasuell, Last Year Everyone I Knew Died
Edge Gallery, Art Hub, 6851 West Colfax Avenue, Lakewood
Through November 28
Edge Gallery is packed this month with art from members both new and returning. Gayla Lemke forgoes clay here for monochromatic watercolor drawings from nature; Mark Farrell contributes large, color-saturated representational oil paintings on canvas that tell spooky stories; Travis Vermilye blends digital art and short films capturing fruiting bodies of molds and slime molds in transition (fun stuff!); Eric Havelock-Bailie, an original Edge member who’s just returned to the fold, shows paintings and photographs from the San Luis Valley; and another new member, Mark Brasuell, is hanging a series of abstract watercolors on paper titled Last Year Everyone I Knew Died.

John Davenport, Robert Lewis Moller, Judith Grey
Pirate: Contemporary Art, 7130 West 16th Avenue, Lakewood
Through November 28
In his first show as a full member at Pirate, photographer John Davenport offers a series of black-and-white diptychs of vintage photos, but has also invited his longtime friend Robert Lewis Moller to fill the rest of his exhibit space with abstract paintings and pastel drawings.

WOW Wide Open Whatever
Katelin Geman, Life, Still, in the Annex
Core New Art Space, Art Hub, 6851 West Colfax Avenue, Lakewood
Through November 28
A Core tradition, the open-entry, cafe-style WOW Wide Open Whatever, is back with a whole mess of artists showing “whatever,” as the title suggests. Some are members, some are not, but it’s a fun grab bag of art, often affordable. In the Annex, representation painter Katelin Geman shows oil paint still lifes, as well as portraits and figure studies in charcoal and graphite.

I Like the West, the West Likes Me
Visions West Contemporary, 2605 Walnut Street
Through December 4
No real question about where this show is going thematically: Luke Anderson, Beau Carey, Gregory Hardy, Bayard Hollins, Danielle Winger and Sarah Winkler wax on the Western ethos through landscape painting.

Art + Music Balcony Series: Sharon Feder and Dallas Parkins, HERE again STILL
Buell Theatre lobby, Denver Performing Arts Complex
Through March 27
What’s the story here? Art couple Sharon Feder and Dallas Parkins, who both address architecture – Feder in paintings and Parkins in photographs – in bold, cool artwork where signs of human life are completely absent. Together, they mounted the show Still. Here. in February of 2020 at the Buell Theatre. The pandemic began soon after, and the Buell was closed indefinitely. Until now. The show is HERE again STILL but essentially the same, waiting for viewers to enjoy the work. This is your opportunity, and electronic musician Mark Mosher will add some aural flavor to the free reception.

Emilio Lobato, Lessons Learned
William Havu Gallery, 1040 Cherokee Street
Through January 8
Artist Emilio Lobato hails from the southern Colorado town of San Pablo, where his family first settled nearly 300 years ago, but he’s known for his sophisticated abstract work. While it seems hard to connect the dots between his background and his powerful compositions, the inspiration becomes clearer when considering the symbolic energy of the area’s traditions of religious and indigenous arts. Havu Gallery offers insights by mounting a large solo show by Lobato.

Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in France
Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway
November 14 through March 13
Admission: $5 to $28 (children five and under free)
Now that the excitement over the Martin Building reveal and opening has passed, the Denver Art Museum is ready for its holiday season blockbuster on the other side, in the Hamilton Building. Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in France is a gold mine of work by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, in particular, who all learned to incorporate European styles of the period in varying degrees. It’s a history lesson in the development of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American painting, telling a story of ideas being exchanged. Tickets are on sale now.

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