Art Attack: Clear Your Mind With Art at Denver Galleries

This week, galleries are stepping up to the plate and knocking it out of the park, with a lineup of solo exhibits from some of the area’s ranking spaces and even a show about doughnuts. Although a few of these foresee holiday madness, this is a week to stave off the encroaching stress and just enjoy some art.

Kick back at the following shows:
Juntae TeeJay Hwang: Sweaty Wedding
Union Hall, The Coloradan, 1750 Wewatta Street, Suite 144
Thursday, November 10, through January 7
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 10, 6 to 8 p.m.
Performative Artist Talk: Wednesday, November 16, 6 to 7 p.m.
Juntae TeeJay Hwang mixes and matches mediums, piece by piece, to build installations brimming with contemporary themes such as cultural and gender identity, social justice, diasporas and racial inequality. Ceramic figures endowed with inner personalities often show up in such work, and these are at the center of his series Sweaty Wedding, opening this week at Union Hall. These particular figures display the sweat of inner pressure and the work humans do to sustain family structure, represented by the wedding. These charming and sometimes alarming creatures worm their way into the viewer’s heart, and perhaps ring a bell of recognition. For Hwang’s performative talk on November 16, the artist will present his exhibition aims while wrapped in an infrared sauna blanket, sweating himself.
Danielle SeeWalker: Native American Heritage Month
Koelbel Library, 5955 South Holly Street, Centennial
Thursday, November 10, through November 30
Author/Artist Talk and Reception: Thursday, November 10, 6 to 8 p.m.
Artist and author Danielle SeeWalker, a Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta and citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota, has been ripping it up along the Front Range this fall with displays of artwork that present a realistic view of present-day Indigenous identity, backing it up with an honest sense of real history. Her work is currently on view during November (and Native American Heritage Month) at the Koelbel Library in Centennial; hear from the artist and see the show at tonight’s reception.
BRDG Project, Game, a Group Exhibition
Modis in the City, 1553 Platte Street
Thursday, November 10, through January 1
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 10, 6 to 9 p.m.
BRDG Project employs its quarterly artist showcase series at Modis in the City for Game, a group show of work focused on the animal world through the different points of view held by Michael Dowling, Cody Kuehl, Brett Matarazzo and Michael Vacchiano. Come to the reception, or see it through the end of the year, during the restaurant’s business hours. Then look for the wandering BRDG Project to pop up early in January at NEXT Gallery.
Letitia Quesenberry, Future Maybe
Linda Nguyen Lopez, ʎpoqǝɯos
David B. Smith Gallery, 1543 A Wazee Street
Through December 17
Continuing at David B. Smith are shows by sculptor Letitia Quesenberry, here all the way from Louisville, KY, and Linda Nguyen Lopez, a ceramics artist from Fayetteville, Arkansas, who returns for a show in the Project Room. Quesenberry’s painted and polished target-like discs of color and resin, called “Pacifiers,” glow on the wall, framed by effects creating a sense of Polaroid-format photos. Lopez’s ceramic “Furries,” fashioned in earthenware and porcelain, studded with dripping shapes in graduating colors, will make you smile.
Beau Carey and Ian Fisher, Carey Fisher
RedLine Contemporary Art Center, 2350 Arapahoe Street
Friday, November 11, through January 8
Opening Reception: Friday, November 11, 6 to 9 p.m.; $5 suggested donation at the door
Two RedLine alumni — traveler and landscape artist Beau Carey, now based in Albuquerque, and Denver’s master of cloud-painting, Ian Fisher, who remains in the city — revisit the gallery as a duo to catch up with the effects of climate change. It’s designed by curator Cortney Lane Stell, of Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, as a new stage of work that signals the need for visual reflection about what’s happening to natural places and weather patterns in the contemporary world. It’s also the first in a series of shows by past residents that celebrate RedLine’s fifteenth anniversary.
Ukrainian Wartime Posters Exhibition
Sheppard Project Space, Ent Center for the Arts, 5225 North Nevada Avenue, Colorado Springs
Friday, November 11, through December 3
Opening Reception and Curator’s Talk: Friday, November 11, 5 to 8 p.m. (talk at 6:30 p.m.)
War begets art, probably since the first caveman drew warriors with spears on a wall. So it is in Ukraine, where the spirit of sadness and rebellion drive artists to express the pain all Ukrainians are feeling, as well as to show the true story of what life is like there in a wartime marred by human-rights violations by Russian troops. Curator Olena Speranska of the Contemporary Art Researchers Union, an independent Ukrainian nonprofit, collected posters by ten graphic artists working in Kyiv and Kharkiv for an exhibition that comes to UCCS Colorado Springs from the Ukrainian House in Kyiv, after a stop in New York. Speranska will speak at Friday night’s reception at the Ent Center. Visitors moved by the exhibition are encouraged to donate to the Ministry of Health of Ukraine’s Nizhynsk Municipal Maternity Hospital, in the Chernihiv region; learn more on the website.
Fall 2022 MSU Denver BFA Thesis Exhibition
Friday, November 11, through December 9
Center for Visual Art, 965 Santa Fe Drive
Opening Reception: Friday, November 11, 6 to 8 p.m.
Eleven artists and designers emerging from undergraduate studies this fall at Metropolitan State University of Denver are being feted with a BFA Thesis Exhibition of work expressing modern concerns in a wide range of mediums, such as installation, design, video, performance, drawing, painting, ceramics and sculpture. It’s always fulfilling to see where savvy artists of the future are heading as they leave art school, at least at the undergrad level.
Fifth Anniversary Party
Vee Guereca, Uncharted
Eleux Jewelry Trunk Show
Balefire Goods, 7513 Grandview Avenue, Arvada
The Olde Town Arvada retailer and gallery Balefire Goods has made it through five years of business in the charming district, in spite of the months of social distancing that crippled businesses everywhere. Community-minded owner Jamie Hollier put her marketing skills and good heart into keeping the store going, so this event is going to be a three-way blowout, with an elegant party with champagne and a signature cocktail; the opening for a great photography show by Vee Guereca; and a trunk show by Eleux, a local jewelry maker.
Hang Time at the Firehouse: Friday, November 1, through November 27
Nancy Eastman, Winter Artist-in-Residence: Sunday, November 13, through February 1
Firehouse Art Center, 667 4th Avenue, Longmont
Opening Reception: Friday, November 11, 6 p.m.
The Firehouse gets ready for the holidays with Hang Time, an invitational show of giftable works by artist members that leads up to the center’s upcoming holiday market on November 26 and 27. So much art to buy! Sixteen artists working in paint, pottery, photography and sculpture are participating. Meanwhile, Firehouse’s new winter resident artist Nancy Eastman is moving in and ready to meet the public. She’ll host a meet-and-greet in the studio on November 11, where she’ll be working until February, when a culminating exhibition will open.
Broadway Donut Social Art Show
Talk Gallery, 4382 South Broadway, Englewood
Friday, November 11, 6 p.m.
If all goes well, donuts — portraits of donuts — will be flying out of the house at Talk Gallery Friday, when the Broadway Donut Social Art Show opens Friday, instigated by artist Jon VonFunk with help from friends including TJ Little, Indigo Violet, Faim Worldwide, Jack Jensen and John R. Hamilton 3. The walls will be awash in mouthwatering candy-colored pictures drenched in frosting and sprinkles, but please donut eat the art. Guessing Talk will be serving calorie-licious refreshments.

Aurora Potters' Guild Fall Sale
Aurora Community College Student Center Rotunda, 16000 East Centretech Parkway, Aurora
Friday, November 11, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday, November 12, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Folks who’ve caught the pottery bug can’t stop playing with the clay. Luckily, the members of the Aurora Potters' Guild who made too much work during the summer can put it out for the group’s affordable fall sale. You’ll find plenty of functional and not-so-functional pottery, from mugs and platters to whimsical sculptures, to take home to wrap up as holiday gifts.
Maria Valentina Sheets, Air Venus
Pat Marek, In Tarnation
Valkarie Gallery, 445 South Saulsbury Street, Belmar, Lakewood
Wednesday, November 9 through December 4
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 12, 5 to 8:30 p.m.
Stained-glass worker Maria Valentina Sheets, who uses age-old techniques developed for creating stunning church windows, ditches Bible stories for more contemporary symbolic imagery in shimmering colors. Pat Marek, on the other hand, plays with imagery of the Old West in stylized canvases.
Her Brush: Japanese Women Artists from the Fong-Johnstone Collection
Bonfils-Stanton Gallery, Martin Building, Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway
Opening Sunday, November 13, through May 13
This beautiful show includes works from the Fong-Johnstone Collection, a recent acquisition for the Denver Art Museum, that have never before been seen by the public. It’s a triumph for women artists, who continued working despite stiff social restrictions, but there’s more to it than that. As Christoph Heinrich, the DAM’s Frederick and Jan Mayer Director, notes, it serves “the museum’s ongoing commitment and mission of elevating voices of overlooked artists and their art” and fits into a concerted effort by the DAM to raise the art of not one, but all diverse cultures.

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