Where to Find Great Art in Denver This Weekend and Beyond

As Denver Arts Week winds down, galleries are still going gangbusters. This weekend, see art that tells stories, art about identity, gorgeous art for art’s sake, art in a DIY gallery, and art with a conscience. But check with the gallery before you go to make sure the weather hasn't changed schedules.

Here are just a few ways to warm up your cold weekend with visual heat:

 Narratives: Storytelling Through Art
Visions West Contemporary, 2605 Walnut Street
Through December 7
Visions West gathers five artists — Marc Etherington, Zoe Hawk, Kat Kinnick, Humberto Ramírez and Tracy Stuckey — for the group show Narratives: Storytelling Through Art; as the title suggests, they're visual storytellers with big imaginations. Etherington's naïve genre paintings expose his modern views with a big sense of humor; Hawk shows private worlds of young girls exploring in the wild, away from adult eyes; Kinnick views animals in their habitats; Ramírez shares stories where nature and human accoutrements clash; and Stuckey drops pop-culture cowboys and cowgirls around the pool or posing by L.A.’s Hollywood sign in wild scenarios.
Ascension
Walker Fine Art, 300 West 11th Avenue, Unit A
November 8 through January 11
Opening Reception: Friday, November 8, 5 to 8 p.m., and Saturday, November 9, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Five artists — Elaine Coombs, Gail Folwell, Laura Guese, Julie Maren and Brian Leister — rise to the occasion when Ascension opens this weekend at Walker Fine Art, with work that offers viewers reasons to look up, searching for higher meaning and otherworldly places. Whether that urge takes form in Guese’s towering cloud banks, Leisters’s florals guided by AI collaborations or Maren’s enlarged natural micro-worlds, this is an inspiring group to explore.
Michael Hedges, The Construction Series
Guzzo Pinc, Songs About Nothing
Space Gallery, 400 Santa Fe Drive
November 8 through January 18
Opening Reception: Friday, November 8, 6 to 8 p.m.
Wisconsin-based painter Guzzo Pinc and Chicago artist Michael Hedges bring a hefty shot of color and twentieth-century-influenced abstraction to the walls at Space Gallery. Pinc’s Modern canvases borrow movement from Futurism and compositional trends from ’60s graphic design to make charming statements, while Hedges finds inspiration in the patchwork Abstract Expressionism of Richard Diebenkorn’s landscapes mapped with a bird’s-eye view, and other birds of that feather.

Eileen Roscina with ArtLab interns, On the Table
A.I.R. Annex Gallery, 3575 Ringsby Court, #103
November 8 through December 4
Opening Reception: Friday, November 8, 6 to 8 p.m.
Artist Conversation: Friday, November 15, 6:30 to 8 p.m.
Eileen Roscina uses natural materials in installations that study what humans can learn from nature’s cycles, ecology and processes, if they’d only pay attention. In a world that’s falling apart in the grip of manmade climate change and land-ravaging practices, studying science and nature’s secrets could be very useful. At PlatteForum, Roscina and the program’s ArtLab interns proffer the idea that we can backpedal our gross human mistakes through community, collaboration and a sense of duty to the earth itself. The show opens this weekend, but the artist talk on November 15 is of special note: It’s the first in a series of art discussions in which the interns will interview artists about the resident projects they’ve all shared at PlatteForum. Roscina will be the guinea pig, with Linda Appel Lipsius of Denver Urban Gardens and Roberto Meza of East Denver Food Hub along for the ride.
Curious Realms: Step Into Abstraction, November 8 through January 5
Full Circle: Laura Brenton, November 8 through December 8
Dakota Wind Goodhouse: Thirteen Moons in the Land of Sky and Wind, November 8 through January 6
Bubbling Up: Participatory Installation by Grace Gee, November 8 through December 1
Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut Street, Boulder
Opening Receptions: Friday, November 8, 5 to 8 p.m.
The Dairy offers four new shows under an overarching theme, The Arts Quartet: Winter Visual Arts Showcase, beginning with a group show, Curious Realms, which goes immersive in large-scale works that explore abstract ideas through abstract visuals. Andrea Gordon, Johnny Draco and Olive Moya, known (in no particular order) for their mural work, vinyl toys, design skills and mixed-media and ceramic sculpture, will all produce interactive installations; also on display will be large ceramics, textiles, paintings and other thematic work by Elisa Wolcott, JayCee Beyale, Natalie Thedford, Ilan Gutin and Sean Hogan, Alli Lemon and Kaitlyn Tucek. In the Dairy’s dedicated Sacred Space for Indigenous art, Lakhota artist Dakota Wind Goodhouse beautifully addresses the moons of the Ochéthi Shakówin nation’s calendar in different months and phases, represented by pictographic images. In the Locals Only Gallery, find Laura Brenton’s abstract paintings that express personal evolutions — from ballet to modern dance, landscape painting to free abstraction, and from dance to art. More directly, she says her connections to dance and art are intermingled. And finally, Bubbling Up, an interactive installation by Grace Gee, invites members of the BIPOC community to share stories by writing on balloon-like bubble forms hung on the wall. In addition to premiering the four shows, the opening reception is a first opportunity to get to know the Dairy’s new art curator, Stella Witcher.
In Studio: A Group Exhibition
2400 Industrial Lane, Suite 2700B, Broomfield
Friday, November 8, 6 to 9 p.m.
Artists are always looking for ways to get their work on a wall somewhere. They join co-ops, rent a wall or convince a coffeehouse to let them put up their work; sometimes they luck out and snag a residency or find someone who wants to show their work in a grown-up gallery. And once in a while, an aggregate of artists, colleagues and/or unofficial support group members go DIY for a night in a borrowed space, maybe the studio of a participant in the exhibition. In Studio is that kind of show. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Charles Durer, Places I've Been, Things I've Seen and Done
Julie Jablonski, Pigeon
Guest Artist: Hyde Chrastina
Pirate: Contemporary Art, 7130 West 16th Avenue, Lakewood
November 8 through November 24
Opening Reception: Friday, November 8, 6 to 10 p.m.
Pirate’s back to business after a Día de los Muertos First Friday, with member shows by Charles Durer, who brings in black-and-white plein air sketches and occasional paintings of landscapes, buildings and scenery from his travels, and Julie Jablonski, whose show Pigeons is simply what it sounds like. As anyone who’s spent time observing pigeons from park benches knows, the birds sometimes disparaged as flying rats are actually quite beautiful, with polished iridescent feathers and mind-blowing patterns.

Los Fantasmas, On the Rise: Women and NonBinary Artists of Color
Yolia ArtSpace, 901 Englewood Parkway, Suite 112, Englewood
November 9 through January 17
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 9, 5 to 9 p.m.
Denver artivist collective Los Fantasmas hands the gallery over to the artists of On the Rise: Women and NonBinary Artists of Color for this exhibition curated by Morgan DeVillier and Micah Ramirez.

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