You can explore the botanical world with Susan Rubin and Sue Simon at Spark Gallery, experience the trials of living in a circle of self-pain with Madi Brunetti at Bell Projects, feel the energy of liminal vibes with Frank Lucero at Alto Gallery, and catch a powerful show by emerging artists at Dateline.
And that’s not all! Read on for this week’s best shows:
Susan Rubin, Snapshots
Sue Simon, Plantae
Janice McDonald, Murmurings, in the North Gallery
Spark Gallery, 900 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, February 1, through February 25
Artist Reception: Saturday, February 10, from noon to 5 p.m.
Last Look: Sunday, February 25, 1 to 4 p.m.
Spark artists Susan Rubin and Sue Simon both portray the botanical world in their concurrent shows. Rubin applies a steady touch to hyper-real colored-pencil drawings of leaves and blossoms, and Simon explores the complex chemistry of plant life in acrylic paintings marked by genetic sequences or chemical processes. Both express a scientific perspective in different ways, from Rubin’s scientifically correct botanical illustrations (her drawings of plants captured during world travels are even rendered on place-marking backgrounds of maps or scenery) to Simon’s eye for how flora transform light into energy, or network under the ground. In the North Gallery, Janice McDonald shows abstract compositions of collaged narrative vignettes.
Susan Goethel Campbell, “Flint Carpet,” earth, roots, grass grown in plastic water bottles.
Susan Goethel Campbell
Center for Visual Art Metropolitan State University (CVA MSUD), 965 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, February 1, 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.
Free, register here
Livestream link here
Pressing for Change continues at the CVA, where there will be the first in a series of artist talks on Thursday, with Susan Goethel Campbell explaining her work's relationship to our suffering environment. This, as well as upcoming talks, centers on the exhibition’s theme of championing activism through cheaply made art forms such as posters or, in the case of Goethel Campbell’s “Flint Carpet,” natural materials and plastic water bottles.
Art Elevated: Meet the Maven Makers
Maven Hotel, 1850 Wazee Street
Thursday, February 1, 5 to 7 p.m.
Have a different First Friday experience at the Dairy Block’s Maven Hotel in downtown Denver, where guests are invited to tour seven high-profile new murals painted in the hotel through a collaboration with RedLine Contemporary Art Center. Meet the artists — Koko Bayer, JayCee Beyale, Sandra Fettingis, Lares Feliciano, Gregg Deal and Jasmine Holmes (Raymond Bonilla will not be present) — as they finish murals on each floor. You’ll also find artist A. Michel Velazquez of Velart Denver live painting, music by Brianna Straut and a pop-up by Chained Up Permanent Jewelry in the lobby, while complimentary bites and cocktails are served throughout the hotel.
Terise Harrington Phillips, "The Light Within."
Terise Harrington Phillips
Artists on Santa Fe, 747 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, February 1, through February 25
First Friday Opening: Friday, February 2, 6 to 9 p.m.
Artist Opening: Friday, February 16, 5 to 8:30 p.m.
Artists on Santa Fe turns its focus on gallery member Michelle Lundquist and fellow artist Terise Harrington Phillips for Material Connections, described as a celebration of fiber and collage art. Phillips will show delicate collages of hand-dyed, stitched quilt-like fiber assemblages, while Lundquist has her mixed-media wall assemblages, collaged with old photographs and mementos.
Madi Brunetti, “Becoming Clean,” 2023, oil, thread and insects on canvas.
Madi Brunetti
Bell Projects, 2822 East 17th Avenue
Friday, February 2, through February 25
Opening Reception: Friday, February 2, 6 to 10 p.m.
Madi Brunetti’s like an open wound addresses the artist’s history of self-cutting that began when she was a bullied twelve-year-old, driven by self-hatred that erupted when it became too much to bear. Like the subject, it’s not pretty, but don’t turn away: Her paintings demonstrate the hardwired need to self-harm on a never-ending cycle. And besides being an oil painter, the talented young artist also works with mixed media and embroidery, portraying lighter subjects from the insect and garden worlds.
Frank Lucero: Lifelines
Alto Gallery, 1900 35th Street, Suite B
Friday, February 2, through February 24
Opening Reception: Friday, February 2, 6 to 10 p.m.; RSVP here
Frank Lucero returns to Alto after three years with a new set of vertically striped, minimal paintings on backgrounds of subtly brushed and layered surfaces. For Lifelines, Lucero’s intent is to address the possible existence of invisible brain waves that radiate to create tension. To that end, the paintings do have a visual relationship to energy waves captured on a screen in ragged lines, defining the journeys of the brain, sound, light or electricity. Can telepathy be far behind?
Jordan Garelick, "A Place to Think," 2024, oil on canvas.
Jordan Garelick
Dateline Gallery, 3004 Larimer Street
Friday, February 2, through March 30
Opening Reception: Friday, February 2, 6 to 10 p.m.
Feeling neither here nor there? Dateline hosts a group of four artists — Azul Camacho, Jordan Garelick, Ainsley Gilbard and Lucas T. McMahon — for Between a Stone and a Soft Place, a show that, like Lifelines above, feels its way around liminal spaces we traverse in life. Curated by George Bangs, Lifelines will take you to places spiritual, metaphysical, inward-looking, energy-heavy and dreamlike — places where we allow our hopes and dreams to do the talking — through art that’s heavy, as with Ainsley Gilbard’s ceramic works that ape medieval iron pots, or very light, as seen in Jordan Garelick’s wild visual calligraphics.
Dark Heart Show
Kanon Collective, 6501 West Colfax Avenue
Friday, February 2, through February 25
Opening Reception: Friday, February 2, 5 to 9:30 p.m.
Kanon’s Dark Heart show is an annual Valentine’s Day tradition, with a theme taking the flip side of hearts and flowers, as the title suggests. This year, the fun show with a gothic shadow was fittingly juried by Denver power couple Merhia Wiese and Andrew Novick, who share a nose for dark love and gallows humor. At the opening, peruse the affordable art and create your own conversation heart ornament at the craft table.
Clarence Shivers, "Untitled" (detail), oil on board.
Clarence Shivers, courtesy CSFAC
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, 30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs
Friday, February 2, through July 6
Opening Celebration: Friday, February 9, 6 p.m.; free, RSVP here
Clarence Shivers made his name as a Tuskegee Airman and career military man, albeit one who lived in a segregated aviation community. But behind the uniform, Shivers was an artist whose work showed the humanity of his personal world as a Black man, painting portraits and making figurative sculptures, as well as — you might call it aerodynamic — abstract art. More than thirty works by Shivers, who lived in Colorado Springs later in life, will go on display through July at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in Clarence Shivers: Experimenting With Form, just in time for Black History Month.
Lisbeth Cheever-Gessaman and Michael Bailey, Sacred Heart, Sacred Art: A Divine Collaboration
Commonwheel Artists Co-op, 102 Cañon Avenue, Manitou Springs
Friday, February 2, through February 26
Opening Reception: Friday, February 2, 5 to 8 p.m.
The symbologies of Valentine’s Day pop up again this month at the Commonwheel collective in Colorado Springs, where guest artists Lisbeth Cheever-Gessaman and Michael Bailey conjure fantasy versions of love. Cheever-Gessaman specializes in showcasing the divine feminine counterpart of patriarchal religious figures, painting fairy book women derived from the romantic tradition. Bailey, an avid collector of antique hearts, creates mixed-media assemblages that house hearts in shadow boxes, lamp globes and the like.
A Matter of Light and Death
Abend Gallery, 1261 Delaware Street
Saturday, February 3, through February 24
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 3, 4 to 7 p.m.
A Matter of Light and Death at Abend Gallery’s Golden Triangle location mines the tools of the chiaroscurist and visual storyteller Caravaggio, a master of the high-contrast painting style, deep with shadows and dramatic pools of light, through the eyes of thirty contemporary-realist artists.
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