The return of the series comes thanks to Rory Padeken, the museum's Vicki and Kent Logan Curator of Contemporary and Modern Art. After arriving here in 2022, Padeken looked to Eyes On for a possible re-launch, as a "way to keep abreast of artists locally but also nationally and internationally, within a larger, encyclopedic or universal art museum," such as the DAM.
"These kinds of 'special exhibitions,' in quotations, need not only happen within our special exhibition spaces," says Padeken. "'Contemporary' should be evergreen. It should be constantly presented at the museum, and it can happen in different spaces." In other words: new, fun and interesting things should be popping up at the museum all the time, as Wick's Eyes On does at the entrance of the Contemporary and Modern space, blooming with walls of yellows, greens, oranges and pinks.
Wick represented a challenge for the revived format; her vast output resists easy categorization and could easily fill at least a few galleries. She has been making art in many different mediums for over six decades, often producing new pieces daily. In her painting, the artist tends to wiggle playfully between representation and abstraction, but the overall concern is to be continually "making." Her artistic training began in textiles, but she also creates mosaics, masks, clothing, book-arts, paper and found sculpture. In some cases, these formats mix and overlap.
To gather the current display, Padeken made careful, key selections from Wick's wide oeuvre, which includes paintings, handmade artist's books, collages and other creations from the relentlessly productive artist. At its center are a series of forty rarely seen works on paper, made during a period around 1996 when Wick was developing a monthly art subscription concept.
As he began to work with Wick, Padeken found that project particularly intriguing. "People could buy a yearly art subscription from her, and then every month she would mail a work like this. I found that fascinating that works like these could potentially exist anywhere in the world," he says.
"The other thing is that these pieces were never meant to be shown in a museum," he adds. "They were meant for personal enjoyment, right? The work is received via mail and then opened in one's home to be displayed. That, in and of itself, is a beautiful kind of idea."

Eyes On: Susan Wick is in the Hamilton Building's Modern and Contemporary Art Galleries.
Courtesy of Denver Art Museum
"These works on paper feature all of the visual elements that have populated Susan's practice since the 1970s," explains Padeken, "and so you see her kind of re-using this imagery over time, but always in new ways."
The '90s paintings are useful as an entry point to Wick's style and preoccupations, but the series also illustrates one of the most salient features of her nature: a perennial restlessness. Her career is a long line of projects, many bewilderingly different from each other. "It wasn't a plan," she told Padeken. "I didn't have a goal, but I did have the commitment to myself that I wanted to make things."
Originally from Madison, Wisconsin, Wick was established in the Bay Area by the 1970s. She received her master's in Environmental Design: Textiles from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969. That led to a collaboration with fellow artists Mary Winder Baker and Deborah Rapoport in the experimental collective "Baker/Rapoport/Wick," a feminist-inclined project combining performance art and textiles. The trio showed their work throughout California and took their offbeat blend of influences as far as Italy and Switzerland before disbanding.
After that, Wick continued solo, heralded by her first show in 1976 in San Francisco, Wick's Books, which was devoted to her growing passion for handmade artist's books. Resisting any calls from the larger art world, she chose instead to relocate to Denver in the early '80s and "work in relative isolation."
The Mile High City benefited from her arrival. Wick came at a pivotal time and connected with developer Mickey Zeppelin, whose newly formed Zeppelin Development was beginning its influential work reimagining Denver neighborhoods that would eventually include Lower Downtown, the Golden Triangle and River North. Wick and Zeppelin launched City Spirit — or rather, it organically tumbled from simply being Zeppelin's office space into an art and architecture bookstore, then a restaurant, and eventually a legendary meeting place for the free-spirited from all over.
On any given night at City Spirit, you might encounter an art exhibition, a fashion show, Acid Jazz Night or the "next big thing" band road-tripping across the country. Patrons downed its signature cocktail, the "La La," by the bucket, and out-of-town names like Beck and Lauryn Hill dropped in after hearing raves about its healthy fare. Some who worked the bar there went on to be influential in their own right, like RiNo Art District co-founder Tracy Weil. Legend has it that one night, the Smashing Pumpkins even treated the cafe to an impromptu acoustic set.
If City Spirit's 1434 Blake Street location was, for a time, the center of Wick's public-facing activity, her private sanctuary has always been ZWick Place, the artist studio she created within a repurposed industrial building at the northwest end of RiNo. It was here that Padeken and his curatorial assistant, Hadia Shaikh, spent much of last year, meeting with Wick, exploring her massive collection (the building is stuffed full of her creations) and making tough decisions about what to include in the necessarily limited DAM show.
"It is a completely singular, otherworldly experience to be in Susan's home and studio," Padeken says. "It is literally filled from floor to ceiling with art, because it is a compendium of works made throughout her lifetime." Looking through her work with Wick was "an incredible experience," he recalls, but also "quite overwhelming."
In the end, Padeken found a successful approach by taking a step back and asking: "'How do we celebrate the essential qualities of her work?'" That prompt led him to conceptualize an "exhibition that becomes like this jewel box."
After City Spirit, Wick continued to work steadily, following her continual curiosity wherever it took her, which included a residency in Japan, among other travels. Despite seeming quite content to inhabit a world of her own making, the one outside of ZWick Place's walls has also come calling, with shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2006), the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Wild Women Never Get the Blues, 2015), the David B. Smith Gallery (Through an Open Frame, 2024) and now the DAM. Coinciding with her MCA show, that institution named her Colorado's "Artist of the Year."
Now the Denver Art Museum is hosting Padeken's "jewel box" tribute to the prolific artist, complete with a special celebration of her work on May 20.
"There's so many projects that Susan has done in her life," Padeken attests. "I think for Susan, it was always important to continually make art, and that was her job as an artist: to make art, and to continually practice one's craft, and that's what she's done."
Eyes On: Susan Wick is on display at the Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue, through July 26, 2026. There will be a celebration of the show at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 20, included with general admission to the museum.