Just in time for the holidays, the Denver Art Museum has raised the curtain on its seven-year, $7.5 million facelift. Judging by the crowds–more than 13,000 visitors showed up on the first weekend alone–many people have found it worth the wait. But we may have to wait a little longer…

Just what is well-known Denver artist Roland Bernier implying when he calls his current show at the Mackey Gallery Casting Pearls? Is the audience–the gallery-going public–the swine? “The title is taken from one of the pieces in the show which literally pairs pearls and swine, so I wasn’t trying to…

Each of the artists in the Arvada Center’s current show Steel: Nature and Space gets plenty of room to stretch out. And that’s a good thing, since Robert Mangold, Andrew Libertone, Russell Beardsley and Carl Reed–four of the most talked-about contemporary sculptors in Colorado–create wildly different forms of sculpture. Oddly…

It’s no exaggeration to say that American culture got its greatest boost ever from the rise of the Nazis in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. Hitler’s hatred for modernism in the arts led many of the most important contemporary figures to flee the continent and seek safe haven in…

The spectacular show The Collectors Vision marks the first exhibit presented under the auspices of Denver’s new Museum of Contemporary Art. And though it’s been a very long time coming, this show on the mezzanine of the 1999 Broadway Building has proven well worth the wait. The idea of a…

Those cold fronts that have recently swept down from Wyoming can mean only one thing–the start of the fall art season. And the forecast for this year’s exhibition climate? Batten down the hatches. Exciting shows are cropping up everywhere, even at the almost-always-overcast alternative spaces. And there are some big…

Clark Richert comes by his scientific bent honestly. His two older brothers grew up to be physicists, and his younger sister is a physician. Richert followed a different trajectory, studying painting at the University of Kansas, from which he received his BFA in 1963. But the bug was in his…

R. Craig Miller, curator of the Architecture, Design and Graphics department at the Denver Art Museum, is out of step with the current trend in curating–and thank goodness for that. Too many curators today dispense with such inconvenient details as history and style, relying instead on their own instincts and…

It’s no surprise that the name Arthur Szyk is unfamiliar. And not just because of all those consonants. First, Szyk’s chosen forms of expression–miniature painting, illustration and illumination–are hardly the kinds of things that lead to fame and fortune. Then there’s the fact that, instead of working in some modern…

Comics and the fine arts have overlapped “back as far as Hogarth,” muses Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art director Cydney Payton. “Maybe even further back,” chimes in Barbara Shark, chairman of the BMoCA board. Payton and Shark are talking about the show they co-organized, Art and Provocation (Images From Rebels),…

“It was a hell of a decision to make,” says director Paul Hughes. “This is my life. The gallery is my identity.” But even so, Hughes is closing Inkfish Gallery, his life for over twenty years, at the end of the month. Back in 1975, Hughes was the regional manager…

Painting is a very old-fashioned method of making art. After all, it’s been around for at least 15,000 years (as proven by cave paintings). Astoundingly, over those years painting has changed very little, except in terms of style. Otherwise, it’s done the way it’s always been done: An artist applies…

New Mexico’s centuries-long traditions in the fine arts cast a deep shadow over Colorado art, both for better and for worse. It’s not that we don’t have our own strong traditions, particularly in painting and printmaking. It’s just that there’s so much going on in New Mexico that it often…

The world of contemporary art has seen some bad days in the 1990s. It all started when an economic slump brought the art boom of the 1980s to a crashing halt in New York City, the epicenter of the global market. The severity of the resulting freefall is illustrated by…

When we tuned in last fall, there were two groups vying to open a new museum in Denver dedicated to contemporary art. One group included such well-known Denver artists as Dale Chisman, Mark Sink and Linde Schlumbohm. This group dubbed itself “CoMoCA,” which stands for the Colorado Museum of Contemporary…

For many years, the exhibition calendar in the art world featured a preordained hierarchy of shows. In the fall, galleries, museums and other venues presented their most important events. Then, special exhibits launched the winter holiday season. The spring and summer were traditionally the times when the art world would…

This has not been a great year for sculpture in Denver. First, the Solar Fountain by Larry Bell and Eric Orr that had graced the never-landscaped lawn of the Denver Performing Arts Complex was unceremoniously bulldozed off its foundation and tossed into dumpsters. (Would it have killed the Denver Center…

For some reason, all of the important small public art venues in the metro area are located on the northwest side. In Boulder, there’s the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, in Arvada the Arvada Center and in Golden the Foothills Art Center. Each of these municipal facilities has come to…

Since last year, New York-based conceptual guru Christo and his sidekick Jeanne-Claude have virtually taken up residence on the Front Range. First there was that show of drawings and collages at One/West in Fort Collins in the summer of 1995. Then, in 1996, Denver’s Robischon Gallery unveiled the new “Over…

This weekend Denver will be paralyzed by the Summit of the Eight, this year’s version of the Group of Seven conferences that have been held for years. These meetings bring together the leaders of the richest countries on earth–the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan–and serve mostly…

The current revival of 1920s and ’30s academic surrealism has grown into an international school of contemporary painting, and it has local legs that stretch back to the 1970s. Its adherents employ traditional painting genres such as landscapes, portraits and still lifes. But rather than work with a straight face,…

The fine arts almost never get sucked into mass culture’s real Internet–television. And when art does land in the TV spotlight, it usually suffers. Typically, there are three circumstances in which an event in the world of the visual arts will arouse the attention of the networks and CNN: the…