One of the early standouts of Denver’s Month of Photography is Presence: Reflections on the Middle East, at the Center for Visual Art, Metropolitan State University of Denver’s off-campus exhibition space in the Art District on Santa Fe. The show comprises more than sixty works by a dozen artists, all natives of Muslim-majority countries. Most of these artists no longer live in their homelands, though, and have immigrated to the United States or Canada.

Geometric abstraction, an international current, has played an outsized role in the modern art of the American West for the past fifty years, maybe longer. Consider the career of Colorado’s Clark Richert, Agnes Martin’s work in New Mexico…you get the idea. This type of work has not only held on to its relevance, but it’s currently making a comeback. A strong case for that return is The Connected Edge, at the William Havu Gallery, where a trio of artists — two from New Mexico and one from Wyoming — are showing compositions with strong linear elements.

March marks Denver’s biennial Month of Photography, a tremendously successful, multi-venue event founded by photographer and photography advocate Mark Sink in 2004. Each iteration of MoP sees many of the area’s exhibition spaces mounting shows at least tangentially related to photography. The Arvada Center has already opened two of them: Double Exposure: An Exhibition of Photography and Video, a large group show, and Stop/Look/See: Photography by James Milmoe, a major solo.

Michael Warren Contemporary, one of the city’s top galleries, often presents two exhibits back to back, as is the case right now. The star attraction, Throw My Ashes Into the Sea: New Works by Daisy Patton, takes over the sprawling multi-part front space, while the gallery’s companion solo, Creative Destruction: New Works by Margaret Lawless, is installed in the more intimate gallery at the back.

The eye-dazzling yet somehow relaxing Lumonics Then & Now: A Retrospective of Light-Based Sculpture by Dorothy & Mel Tanner transforms the interior galleries of the Museum of Outdoor Arts into a world of their own.

Colorado artist Michael J. Dowling, the subject of a striking solo, You Already Know How This Will End at Leon Gallery, has built a solid reputation based on drawings, paintings and now sculptures that have an old-master classicism that he intentionally undermines through additions and subtractions, what he calls “redactions.”

Nearly ten years ago, philanthropist Laura Merage created RedLine with the goal of providing studios for artists and exhibition spaces for art. Considering the crunch on artist spaces in Denver right now — the Rhinoceropolis eviction being just the tip of the iceberg — Merage was prescient. At the time…

David B. Smith Gallery currently has two shows on display: Chris Oatey and Dylan Gebbia-Richards are featured in one; Donald Fodness in the other.

Bobbi Walker has created a group show, Amalgamated Contemplation, as her first exhibit of 2017. Two artists emerge as the starts of the show; sculptor Brandon Reese and the late Roland Bernier, a painter and mixed media artist.

After 25 years, Christo has abandoned the “Over the River” project on the Arkansas. Is Trump to blame? That’s what the New York Times thinks.

Robischon Gallery is currently showing eight solos, some small and most fairly large. But these solos resolve into a single coherent visual experience because all of the artists are dealing with the same issue: how to do something different with contemporary abstraction, arguably the style of our time. And they all succeed in their own distinctive ways.

The Fulginiti Pavilion for Bioethics and Humanities is a little jewel box set among the behemoth buildings of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Though small, it has a big job: to build a bridge between the sciences that dominate the campus and the largely neglected arts. The Fulginiti’s…

Organizing faculty shows can be challenging, since the pieces involved are often tied together by nothing more than the fact that they were created by artists who live and work right in town. Collective Nouns, the current show at the Center for Visual Art, was a particular challenge: Metropolitan State…

Painter Stanley Bell’s kaleidoscopic paintings are on display at Michael Warren Contemporary through January 21.