The MCA trumps logistics to present an intriguing group exhibit

As it did last summer, MCA Denver has given itself over to a single exhibit for the season rather than presenting multiple shows, and there are some obvious reasons why. First, it allows the powers-that-be at the museum to mount major exhibits, and second — and probably more important —…

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15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

Trash and Treasure

Jennifer Garner, the director of Metro State’s Center for Visual Art (965 Santa Fe Drive, 303-294-5207, www.metrostatecva.org) has organized Reclamation, featuring pieces made from trash. “It’s not recycling,” Garner points out. “It’s reuse.” Garner had conceived Reclamation as a group show, but there’s an unexpected solo within it. Ann Weber,…

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15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

Eight great shows make up the brilliant Marvelous Mud at DAM

If you haven’t yet seen Marvelous Mud, the homegrown, summer-long blockbuster at the Denver Art Museum, you might think it’s a single show. But it’s actually eight different exhibits, a series of workshops, lectures by artists and curators, various special events, and even a symposium. For the DAM, it’s an…

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15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

At Edge, there’s more to representational art than meets the eye

Broadly speaking, realist work with a conceptual component has been around a long time, but it wasn’t until the 1980s and ’90s that it really took hold, arguably becoming the stylistic choice for contemporary artists during that time. Now the idea is well established, and there’s no shortage of it…

Flash Mob

Because of conceptual art — and because of the transition of photo-related and photo-based imagery from film to digital — photography seems like it’s the master medium of contemporary art. In The Anxiety of Photography, at the Aspen Art Museum, associate curator Matthew Thompson added his own take on the…

Shine a Light

The artists represented in the two solos opening tonight at Ice Cube Gallery create their own distinctive work, but they share an interest in the same topic: light. In the north half of the gallery is Sophia Dixon Dillo: Light and Line, while in the south half is Sara Goldenberg…

That’s Italian

You don’t have to know much about history to have heard of the Italian Renaissance — you know, the time after the aptly named Dark Ages when Europe got back on a civilization kick. In Cities of Splendor: A Journey Through Renaissance Italy, opening at noon today at the Denver…

Great Walls

After a century of international irrelevance, Chinese painting and sculpture have stepped out big time in the past decade, storming into the international contemporary art scene. Reflecting this renaissance, the National Museum of China in Beijing mounted an exhibit in 2007 exploring the connections between Chinese and American art. That…

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15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

Group shows are a staple of the summer arts season

From my point of view, solo shows, and retrospectives in particular, occupy the top place in the hierarchy of art exhibitions. But group shows organized around a theme are a close second, and they are a staple of the summer season. At the moment, there is an astounding array of…

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15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

John Haeseler Revisited is small but well worth a look

When an artist does work that is ahead of his or her time, it usually means the work is under-appreciated or even unnoticed. To some extent, that’s what happened to John Haeseler, who, beginning in the 1970s, created pieces that responded to both dada and pop art while addressing social…

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A Ceramic Collaboration. To celebrate the fourth anniversary of his Plinth Gallery, which is specifically dedicated to contemporary ceramics, Jonathan Kaplan has mounted a show that highlights the clay scene in Colorado. Conceptually, the show has two parts, but it’s been installed as a single idea. The first part is…

15 Colorado Artists explores the state’s modernists

The story of art in the twentieth century is well known. The center of the world in 1900 was in Europe, while American art was dominated by regionalism, a representational style derived from realism. With the rise of the Nazis and the advent of World War II, however, European artists…

Lights Out

For the second time, MCA Denver director Adam Lerner has decided to devote the entire museum to a single exhibit — in this case, Another Victory Over the Sun, a show about darkness and light. “We have great local and international artists,” says Lerner, “but the most dramatic experience for…

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15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

Now Showing

15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…