Here are just a few of the ways that you can join in.
Josephine Lobato, "Rites of Passage," 1998, wool on cotton.
Courtesy San Luis Valley Colcha Embroidery Project
Davis Gallery, Shwayder Art Building, 2121 East Asbury Avenue
October 24 through December 4
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 24, 5 to 7 p.m.
Now in her late eighties, Josephine Lobato grew up in the San Luis Valley, where she took up the centuries-old Spanish Colonial craft of colcha embroidery, which came to Colorado from New Mexico in the nineteenth century. Along the way, the art evolved into a form of decorative folkloric storytelling delicately stitched upon coverlets. Lobato’s lifelong work in this medium has earned her a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and national recognition as a master of her craft. The University of Denver joined forces this year with the San Luis Valley Colcha Embroidery Project to present the exhibition Josephine Lobato: Mi Vida en Colcha, a comprehensive retrospective of Lobato’s work, including additional work by her daughter and granddaughter. The show of forty colchas offers insights into the stories from life in the valley that they depict through text, family pictures and a video portrait of the artist. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., and by appointment only on Mondays.
Chelsea Gilmore: Hiraeth
Art Gym Staff: Free Range
Art Gym, 1460 Leyden Street
October 24 through December 1
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 24, 6 to 9 p.m.
Art Gym’s new round of shows could be grouped as a couple of family affairs — Chelsea Gilmore’s fiber installation, Hiraeth (meaning “a longing for a time or place that may have never existed”), weaves together salvaged lace collected by her grandmother and 1960s army parachutes, reminders of her grandfather’s soldiering years in the ’60s. Meanwhile, the Art Gym staff show, Free Range, celebrates the gallery's family of community through works by nine expert staff members at the all-purpose co-arting and printmaking space.
Courtney Cotton, "White Space Totem."
Courtesy Courtney Cotton
Blue Tile Gallery, 3944 S. Broadway, Englewood
October 25 through November 24
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 24, 6 to 9 p.m.
Studio/Moving Sale: Saturday, November 23, and Sunday, November 24, noon to 4 p.m.
Artist and Blue Tile Gallery studio-mate Courtney Cotton is packing her bags and moving to South Carolina, near where she grew up. Although she will continue to maintain a presence in Colorado, her inventory of colorful abstract paintings will be offered during at reduced prices for the next month, with a two-day studio/moving sale wrapping things up on November 23 and 24. The exhibition, Color Pop, opens with a reception on October 24. Boulderites can also find Cotton’s work for sale at Messinger Gallery in the Boulder JCC (6007 Oreg Avenue, Boulder) through December 4. Learn more at courtneycotton.com.
Artist x Fabricator Panel Discussion: "Smoke & Mirrors"
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), 1750 13th Street, Boulder
Thursday, October 24, 6 to 7:30 p.m.
Admission: $5 to $15 at Eventbrite
In conjunction with the current exhibition, Smoke & Mirrors — a group show by eight sculptors whose large-scale works include specific materials that lend visual distortions guaranteed to mess with the viewer’s mind — BMoCA will host a panel discussion that reveals how their mind-teasers are made. Hear Trey Duvall, Collin Parson and Joel Swanson explain how industrial fabricators and designers help tune effects in collaboration with artists.
Ann Hamilton, “ciliary,” wall-mounted lithograph and fabric assemblage with bamboo support.
Courtesy Ann Hamilton and Robischon Gallery
Derrick Velasquez, The Continents
Ann Hamilton, Select Early Work: 1984-2010
Robischon Gallery, 1740 Wazee Street
Opening Reception: Friday, October 25, 6 to 8 p.m.
Robischon Gallery focuses on three solos for notable gallery artists Judy Pfaff, Derrick Velasquez and Ann Hamilton, who all share student-teacher relationships: Pfaff, who turned away from minimalism toward something quite the opposite, reinventing installation art in explosive definitions along the way, mentored Hamilton, as a visiting professor at Yale, her alma mater. Hamilton went on to embrace multimedia concepts as an installationist; both are MacArthur Foundation Fellows. But wouldn’t you know it, when Hamilton landed at Ohio State University as a distinguished university professor, she taught Denver artist Derrick Velasquez, whose own multimedia practice has earned him a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and other awards. That makes for a well-decorated trio of exhibitions with a side of hometown flavors, with new and recent work by Pfaff; sculpture, painting and collage by Velasquez, and in the Viewing Room, early works by Hamilton, including prints and photography.
Maurice Sendak, “Where the Wild Things Are,” 1963, watercolor, ink and graphite on paper.
©The Maurice Sendak Foundation, courtesy Denver Art Museum
Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway
Friday, October 25, 6 to 10 p.m.
Museum Admission: Free to $30 (Additional fee, free to for $30, required to visit Wild Things)
At just the right moment, the quarterly delicious fun and games of the Denver Art Museum’s Untitled: Artist Takeover series are back, with Maurice Sendak’s imaginative canon as a stepping-off point, along with a focus on spoken word and poetry with Slam Nuba. Curated by Slam Nuba director Hakeem Furious, the evening offers plenty of wordsmithy, a first-person history of Slam Nuba as told by its founders, pop-up art and hands-on art workshops — and, if you pay up, a chance to walk through the exhibition Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak.
Harvey Park Open Studios
Saturday, October 26, noon to 3 p.m.
Free, RSVP here; map here
Fall is open-studio season around these parts, and this year, the Harvey Park neighborhood (and general southwest Denver area) is joining the fray. Nearly twenty artists are participating in this new community experiment showcasing local creatives and their works. If you’d prefer a paper map to the online version, drop by the Harvey Park Recreation Center, 2120 South Tennyson Way, between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., and pick one up (while they last).
A parasol flies through space as part of Kathy Mitchell-Garton's exhibition, Parasols of Protection.
Kathy Mitchell-Garton
Kathy Mitchell-Garton, Parasols of Protection
Richard Neff, Infinite Dimensions
Nanette Fazio, Flux, in the Annex
Core Art Space, 6501 West Colfax Avenue
October 25 through November 10
Opening Reception: Friday, October 25, 5 to 10 p.m.
Core’s latest full house includes Deborah Abbott’s abstracted aerial views delicately overlaid with meandering paths of found objects, Kathy Mitchell-Garton’s suspended parasols evoking Tibetan Buddhism’s protection symbols and Richard Neff’s geometric eye-puzzles (who remembers the poiuyt?). In the Annex, ceramic artist Nanette Fazio shows clay sculptures eliciting nature’s hand in the landscape's slow changes.
Katherine Johnson: Free-Falling
Sara-Lou Klein: small
John Horner: New Tangents: Explorations of Bas Relief and Its Implications
Eric Havelock-Bailie: Goodbye, Hello
Core Art Space, 6501 West Colfax Avenue
October 25 through November 10
Opening Reception: Friday, October 25, 6 to 9 p.m.
What’s new at Edge? Katherine Johnson offers unplanned abstract paintings directed by the free-fall of process, Sara-Lou Klein sweetens the gallery with whimsical birds and other animals, John Horner experiments in bas relief by carving his own animal images into wood-veneered panels, and finally, photographer Eric Havelock-Bailie documents personal changes after moving from a longtime off-the-grid situation to the city for Hello, Goodbye, a cross-pollination of before and after images.
Karen Eberle-Smith, Layered
Gwen Hill-Pollara with Brenda Jones, Respite and Repose
Next Gallery, Core Art Space, 6501 West Colfax Avenue
October 25 through November 10
Opening Reception: Friday, October 25, 5 to 10 p.m.
Next, yet another co-op gallery in 40 West’s Art Hub, pairs Karen Eberle-Smith’s experiments with handmade paper and the team of ceramic artists Gwen Hill-Pollara and Brenda Smith explore the idea of letting go in in clay provocative sculptures.
A slice of Caribbean folklore from Denise Zubizarreta's installation at RedLine.
Courtesy Denise Zubizarreta
RedLine Contemporary Art Center, 2350 Arapahoe Street
October 26 through December 1
Opening Reception/Artist Talk: Saturday, October 26, 6 to 9 p.m. (art talk at 6 p.m.)
Members free; $5 suggested donation at the door for non-members
The multi-talented Denise Zubizarreta accesses her Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage for Descansa en el Poder (Rest In Power), an exhibition with a theatrical feel that plunges into the folkloric stories woven through Caribbean life over centuries. While reaching into the past like a griot passing on history, Zubizarreta’s tools are ultra-modern, incorporating multimedia, illustrative paintings and religious symbols in a post-colonial world where people of all cultures are lifting themselves out of invisibility. Curated by Tya Anthony, another artist interested in similar themes as a person of color, Descansa en el Poder has clearly been stitched together with love.
Chant Cooperative, Temple Is a Portal
The Temple, 2400 Curtis Street
Saturday, October 26, 7 to 10 p.m.
Members of the Chant Cooperative, a loose collective of artists working in studios at the Temple, a former synagogue now housing an artist enclave, turn to the history of their shared space for Temple is a Portal, an exhibition that approaches its subject with a spiritual reverence, in a rainbow of mediums. The opening event turns into a fun house, though, with Halloween party vibes (costumes encouraged) and includes a puzzle hunt dreamed up by local scavenger-hunt architect, Andrew Novick. That said, it could get ghosty around there.
Natascha Seideneck, Decades: Fashion Photography from the Archives + A Denver Icon a Tribute to Steve Trujillo
Seidel City, 3205 Longhorn Road, Boulder
October 26 through November 16
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 26, 6 to 9:30 p.m.
Out in the wilds of Boulder, Seidel City opens its doors Saturday for a Natascha Seideneck showcase of fashion photography and a special visual tribute to the late Steve Trujillo, who ruled Denver’s hair game for more than thirty years, most notably at El Salon in the Washington Park neighborhood.
One Square Foot Fundraiser
RedLine Contemporary Art Center, 2350 Arapahoe Street
Tuesday, October 29, 6 to 9 p.m
Tickets: $75 ($500 patron, including early admission) here
RedLine’s One Square Foot fundraiser is anything but stuffy. For one thing, it doubles as a Halloween party with a costume contest on the theme of “art and artists throughout history.” There will be ping-pong matches, cookie-decorating and pop-up installations, but the main reason to go is for the chance to walk away with a work of fine original art for a flat $150, without knowing a darn thing about it. All of the art, approximately one square foot in size, is displayed anonymously. If you really know your scene, you might have an idea who you’re buying, but it’s not the point. Buy the art, and you’ll be helping RedLine continue its two-year artist residencies, and REACH Open Studio and Satellite Studios programs.
Interested in having your event appear in this calendar? Send the details to [email protected].
