First Friday is for art-walking. Get out there, and do your share.
16 Hands - Featuring Eight Ceramicists
Artists on Santa Fe, 747 Santa Fe Drive
Wednesday, June 5, through June 30
Artists’ Reception: Friday, June 21, 6 to 9:30 p.m.
The Artists on Santa Fe art enclave boasts several ceramic artists, beginning with founder Macy Dorf, who’s been shaping clay for half a century or more. Through June, AOSF will showcase eight of them in 16 Hands, including some guests such as Plinth Gallery’s Jonathan Kaplan. Clay enthusiasts will have no trouble finding something to add to their collections here. In addition, other resident artists will be showing non-ceramic work and studios will be open for visits.
I Regret to Inform You… Rejected Public Art
inFORMed Space: Perspectives in Sculpture
Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Boulevard, Arvada
Thursday, June 6, through August 25
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 6, 6 to 9 p.m.; free, RSVP here
Applying for public-art gigs is a mystery cause, as many artists have found, no matter how stunning their work and design ideas might be. The new Arvada Center exhibition, I Regret to Inform You, is a true work of genius, covering every aspect of the public-art experience as it unfolds for ever-hopeful artists, from the initial fantasy rush of creation to the crushing refusal. The artists with work in the show all have experience, some of it successful, with the public-art cage fight, but none of the examples displayed ever made it off the drawing board. And throughout the run, special events will bring the details to light, including a panel discussion among curators, artists and art fabricators; a tell-all performance night of shared failure stories, and a social-media rejection celebration online. The companion show in the Main Gallery, inFORMED Space: Perspectives in Sculpture, somewhat corresponds, as it explores how a sculptor designs for a specific space — in this case, a four-square-foot area — through examples created by a group of Colorado sculptors.
Detail images: L to R, upper: Emily Oldak, "Swing Time.” Laura Brenton, “Elemental.” L to R, lower: Sandi Miot, "Purple Corals.” Vicky Smith, "Dappled Light.”
Courtesy D'art Gallery
I belong in a museum: Colorado Women Artist Museum
Members Exhibition, Part 1, in the East Gallery
D’art Gallery, 900 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, June 6, through June 30
Opening Reception (CWAM): Saturday, June 8, 5 to 9 p.m.
Opening Reception (Out of the Quiet): Friday, June 14, 5 to 9 p.m.
D’art has an all-female June, including a member foursome, Out of the Quiet, with painters Emily Oldak and Laura Brenton, found-object/mixed-media artist Sandi Miot, and Vicky Smith, who makes clay sculptures and wall pieces in elegant shapes. In the East Gallery, the first of two exhibitions elevating works by members of the developing Colorado Women Artist Museum will also open. The CWAM showcase provides a sneak peek at what’s to come once the brave new museum finds and settles into its brick-and-mortar. Special events are scheduled for this show on weekends throughout the show’s run, including meet-the-artist nights on June 15 and June 23.
Botanica
Urban Mud, 530 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, June 6, and Friday, June 7, 5 to 8 p.m.
Spring has sprung at Urban Mud, where clay works by member artists turn the gallery into a garden.
Ana Mendieta, “Volcán,” 1997, from a suite of six chromogenic color prints.
Courtesy of the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection. Photo: Viero Tomaselli
Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature, through September 1
MCA Denver, 1485 Delgany Street
Summer Exhibition Opening Party: Friday, June 7, 7:30 p.m.; RSVP and tickets, $25 to $65, here
MCA slips a new show — Critical Landscapes: Selected Works From the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection — alongside Gala Porras-Kim’s A Hand in Nature, a holdover from the spring. MCA leader Nora Burnett Abrams worked with Sergio Fontanella of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation to create a group exhibition by contemporary Latin American artists whose work examines the environment and the natural world. Not by accident, Porras-Kim’s work ties right in by focusing on similar ideas and materials. As usual, the summer shows premier with an opening party; get your tickets (see above) while you can. Arlette Lucero: Unapologetic Chicana
Alto Gallery, RiNo ArtPark, 1900 35th Street, Suite B
Friday, June 7, through June 29
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 6 to 10 p.m.
Arlette Lucero calls herself an "Unapologetic Chicana" artist not just for being faithful to her culture, community and traditions, but also because she’s not afraid to embrace bright colors and her ingrained identification as a strong Chicana who grew up marching for Chicano rights. A longtime teacher of schoolchildren at the Escuela Tlatelolco and elsewhere, her artwork is her way to share the myths, stories and history that come with the culture. And Lucero has been taking big steps and making inroads in Denver recently, showing up at CHAC Gallery, where she’s a member, but also at art venues both mainstream and off the wall. Alto Gallery is neither, but with its underlying respect for culture and activism, it's perfect for her. Be ready for a gorgeous, life-affirming show.
Natasha Mistry, “Untitled 3339,” 2023, mica-infused oils, Flashe and graphite on canvas.
Natasha Mistry,, courtesy Seidel City
Seidel City, 3205 Longhorn Road, Boulder
Friday, June 7, through June 14
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 7 to 9 p.m.
Regular gallery hours: Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. or by appointment
Up in the northern outskirts of Boulder along Highway 36, Seidel City will open its gallery space for Natasha Mistry’s Diamond Grid Collection, supported by a mixed exhibition of artists Lee Heekin, Darcie Shively and Daniel Strawn, with a photo gallery curated by Mark Sink for good measure. Mistry’s pattern-based practice spans mediums from ink and embroidery to watercolor, oil paint, mica and more. Using geometrics influenced by Carl Jung’s embrace of the spiritual and the unconscious mind, her work is made to be looked at, and not just for a minute. Instead of mandalas, Mistry uses mesmerizing angles to build her contemplative imagery. Heekin contributes tableaux of tall parallel wooden rectangles, each boxing in medusa-hair masses rendered in long strips of leather. Strawn plays around with a series called Wigheads, blending photographed mannequin heads against painted acrylic backgrounds, and Shively adds prints of smart-looking weavings evocative of the natural settings in which they are photographed. As for Sink’s part in this, let’s just say he organized a few favorite things he recently dug up out of his personal stash.
Mycolandia
Dateline Gallery, 3004 Larimer Street
Friday, June 7, through June 30
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 6 to 11 p.m.
Dateline's latest show, Micolandia, is all about mushrooms, perhaps a theme drawn from changes in mushroom legislation in Colorado. It’s just a fungus, after all. As far as we know, ingesting the artwork is verboten, but as is often the case at Dateline, this is going to be one fun fungus show. See what thirteen or so artists came up with at Friday evening's reception.
Low Brow
CHAC 40 West, 7060 West 16th Avenue, Lakewood
Friday, June 7, through June 30
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 5 to 9 p.m.
It’s always good sense to include veteran artist Carlos Frésquez in the group show Low Brow, because Frésquez knows how to spin pure satire out of the imagery of pop culture. He might be the ringer in this exhibit, but we’ve got to hand it to curators Rob and Tammy Yancey for hanging something different on the walls of CHAC. And no worries: There’ll be plenty of that famous knife-edged Chicano humor to go around.
Free First Friday: Orgullo: Celebrating LGBTQIA+ Pride
Museo de las Americas, 861 Santa Fe Drive
Friday, June 7, 5 to 9 p.m.
Stepping out for First Friday in the Art District on Santa Fe this weekend? Kill two birds with one stone and celebrate Pride, too, at the Museo de las Americas, where the Free First Friday theme is Orgullo: Celebrating LGBTQIA+ Pride. "Orgullo" means pride in Spanish, which fits right in with the current exhibition at the Museo, Espiritu Hermosx: LGBTQIA+, a group contemplation of life in the queer community. Along with the usual First Friday art vendors and food trucks, the Museo will host a drag show performance at 7 p.m.
Alfred Jacob Miller, “The Crows Attempting to Provoke an Attack From the Whites on the Big Horn River, East of the Rocky Mountains, 1841.”
Alfred Jacob Miller, American Museum of Western Art
American Museum of Western Art, Navarre Building, 1727 Tremont Place
Fridays, June 7 through June 28, 3 to 4 p.m.
$10, registration and tickets here, and future topics here
Pride can be artsy, too, particularly for Brokeback Mountain fans, with Queer Frontier, a month-long series of art discussions at the plush, hidden-away American Museum of Western Art in downtown’s old Navarre Building. It starts at 3 p.m. on Friday, June 7, with a history of Scottish adventurer Sir William Drummond Stewart, who wasn’t prone to staying in the closet. The talks continue on Friday afternoons through the end of June: Future topics cover a comparison between concepts of gender in colonial and Indigenous cultures, cowboy love poems and gay painter Marsden Hartley. Register soon — these tickets are going fast.
Deborah Carlson and Judy Doherty, Bustin’ Out 1
931 Gallery, 931 Santa Fe Drive
Friday, June 7, through July 7
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 5 to 9 p.m.
Glass artist Deborah Carlson and watercolorist Judy Doherty present a two-part collaborative show designed to be easy on the eye, with symbiotic colors, themes and techniques, in spite of their differences in style and media. If you like what you see, Bustin’ Out 2 will open on July 12.
Deni Naffziger and Mark Hackworth, Still Life - words and images
Kin Studio and Gallery, 4725 16th Street, Boulder
Friday, June 7, through July 22
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 5 to 8 p.m.
Painter Allyson McDuffie’s proudly queer-owned Kin Studio and Gallery in Boulder opens its first guest-artist exhibition this weekend with Still Life, a collaboration of photography and poetry by Deni Naffziger and Mark Hackworth, along with contributions from artists Ginger Knowlton, Lucy Holtsnider and Terry Cook. As if that won’t be lively enough, McDuffie will also host Tales From a Wild Trail, an hour of five-minute stories with guest writer and storyteller India Wood from 6 to 7 p.m.
Character in Context
AR Mitchell Museum of Western Art, 150 East Main Street in Trinidad
Friday, June 7, through July 27
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 5 to 8 p.m.
City folk will require a road trip to see Character in Context at the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art in Trinidad, but anyone interested in the singular art of illustration, which tends to tell it like it is using traditional media, won’t want to miss what’s billed as the “Largest Show of Illustration in the American West.” Curated by Denver illustrator Elliot Lang, the exhibit channels the spirit of the museum’s namesake while showing each illustrator’s process work alongside the final product. For the trouble, road-trippers can get extra art per gallon of gas at the Cody Kuehl Gallery, located inside the museum building, where a new show by the nationally known Denver artist Colleen Tully will debut. If a stay-over is planned, illustrator Gregory Manchess will give a painting demo at A.R. Mitchell on Saturday, June 8, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free.
A page from Lisa Berley's erasure poetry and collage series.
Lisa Berley, East Window
East Window Patio Gallery, 4550 Broadway, Suite C-3B2, Boulder
Friday, June 7, through September 27
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 7 to 9 p.m.
Another mashup of poetry and art, Lisa Berley’s Nefesh: A Collage of Loss, debuts on Friday alongside the grand opening of East Window’s summery new patio gallery. Berley blends erasure poetry with collage techniques, blacking out or covering over random words in cutouts of found text to form a new meaning. That profound and elegiac labor is her way of processing grief over the accidental death of her son, Aaron.
PPL I’ve Met on the Internet
SP_CE 13 Contemporary Art Gallery, 3157 South Broadway
Saturday, June 8, 6 to 10 p.m.
There’s an experiment taking shape out on South Broadway in Englewood at a venue called SP_CE 13, with the objective of creating space to communicate, collaborate and exchange new ideas. The spot, the innocuous lair of an experimental music network, is now adding art to the concept with an exhibition for the underground, curated by artist Julio Alejandro and including contributions from a long list of familiar names, all people ready to take an extra step. Are you?
Highlands Art Festival
Highlands Masonic Lodge, 3550 Federal Boulevard
Saturday, June 8, and Sunday, June 9, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Free
Conceived in the mold of last weekend’s neighborly Park Hill Art Festival, the Highlands Art Festival brings a similar blend of artistry, music, food trucks, kids’ activities and the chance to win a $1,000 art festival shopping spree. Festival season is here.
Mark Conlon, wheel-thrown porcelain vase with hand-carved pattern and green glazed interior with bare porcelain exterior, and green and pink dots.
Mark Conlon, Smash Fine Arts Festival
Fillmore Square, 105 Fillmore Street, Cherry Creek North
Saturday, June 8, and Sunday, June 9, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Smash has been gaining ground in Cherry Creek for several summers, bringing a quality blend of art and craft vendors to Fillmore Square. Think of it as your test run for the much larger Cherry Creek Arts Festival next month: The art — a mix of painting, photography, metal, sculpture, jewelry, wood and mixed media — is fine, and there are plenty of shops and eateries ready for you to step inside and cool off.
2024 logo artwork by Remington Robinson, winner, "Best Flatirons Image" at the 2022 Boulder County Plein Air Event.
Remington Robinson, courtesy Boulder County Plein Air
Feed & Grain Store Gallery, 291 Second Avenue, Niwot
Saturday, June 8, through July 5
VIP First Look Hour: Saturday, June 8, 5 to 6 p.m.; tickets $20 at Eventbrite
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 8, 6 to 8 p.m.
Artists have been setting up their easels all over Boulder County during the past week to paint the landscape from outdoor vantage points. Now the results are in, and the 2024 Boulder County Plein Air Festival exhibition, hosted by Boulder County Open Studios, will debut this weekend in the charming setting of downtown Niwot. Beat the big crowds with a VIP ticket to the show at 5 p.m. on Saturday, before the doors open to the general public on Sunday, June 9, or see it free beginning at 6 p.m. Find more info and peruse the artist list here.
Eli West, forest freaks—alive and well
The Bardo Coffeehouse, 238 South Broadway
Sunday, June 9, through July 31
Opening Reception: Sunday, June 9, 3:33 to 5:33 p.m.
The anti-curators of Heads of Hydra invite the public to a new show by artist Eli West at the Bardo Coffeehouse on South Broadway, and the exhibition title — forest freaks — ought to tell you that it’s going to be fun. West chases down queer themes cast in cartoon art, paint, fiber and felted wool wall hangings. Just the thing for Pride Month.
Interested in having your event appear in this calendar? Send the details to [email protected].
