Mark Masuoka took over as director at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver on January 1, 2000, and he quickly transformed the place from what had looked like the city’s largest co-op into something that could pass, on a good day, for a bona fide museum. But less than ten months…

Open Press, the fine print-making shop, is currently featuring a handsome group show in its gallery. Relief Prints refers to a process of making prints with blocks, either wood or wood-faced linoleum, that have been carved with patterns in relief. The blocks are then inked and finally pressed onto paper…

Less than a year ago, when I learned that Mark Masuoka was set to take on the director’s job at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver on January 1, 2000, I told him, “May God save your immortal soul.” Masuoka gave out a ready guffaw, but I wasn’t even half-kidding…

Lisbeth Neergaard Kohloff, exhibition director of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, says she selected the three photographers in the group show Retro Truth because all are working with memories, with the past. The title says it all retro. The first featured photographer is New Yorker Carol Golemboski. In toned gelatin…

Over the last few years, Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery has increasingly specialized in abstract painting, with contemporary takes on minimalism often given center stage. “I’ve come to it by living in this environment,” says director Robin Rule, referring both to the austerity of much of the Western landscape and…

Is That Jazz? is a real oddball of a show, a collection of bizarre, yet somehow quaint, paintings, watercolors and a construction by Dallas artist David McCullough. The pieces are dense, opaque and thick — words that also describe the tangle of theoretical concepts that underlie his work. Like Jung,…

Over the last century, hundreds of dedicated, masterful artists have worked in Colorado. But while a score of them have achieved genuine international recognition — on the level of Vance Kirkland, for example — only a handful made art history. There’s Boardman Robinson, the social realist painter who worked in…

The Rocky Mountain Womens Institute has gone down a rocky road in recent months, and its this years pair of RMWI Fine Art Associates, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy and Dania Pettus, whove blazed the trail. It began when the two artists notified the RMWI that the pieces they planned to create…

Located within the Jewish Community Center, the Singer Gallery’s association with the Jewish community might create the assumption that it explores only Jewish themes in art. But for a long time, Singer has presented shows that, while typically of interest to the Jewish community, have not, strictly speaking, been Jewish…

Emerging artist Colin Livingston has put together a moving show made up of paintings and mixed-media pieces that depict his mother. Mom, currently at the Apart Modern Gallery, takes up a difficult topic, however: Livingston’s mother committed suicide when he was in the fifth grade. The artist addresses this deeply…

Jerry Kunkel’s name is well known in these parts: He’s been on the art faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder for more than thirty years, and for a while in the 1970s, he fronted the punk band Joey Vane and the Scissors. But though many people have heard…

Four provocative shows now occupy the discrete spaces at Pirate. In the main gallery is an installation by Kathy Hutton titled White Towers. Based on a pictured farm structure, parts of this ambitious piece, which includes nine metal and paper towers, are quite nice. For instance, theres the vaguely seasonal…

Master printer Bud Shark has been making prints in and around Boulder for a long time since he first established his fine-art press, Shark’s Inc., in the 1970s. Bill Havu, director of his namesake William Havu Gallery, has been around for a long time as well, selling fine prints in…

Its last call for Critical Mass, the summer group show thats not about ethnic identity. The exhibit runs through the weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. Organized by MoCAD director Mark Masuoka, the show aims to be inclusive of women and racial minorities while at the same time showcasing…

The first shows of the important fall season are just getting under way, and already there’s an exhibit that is essential viewing for everyone: the scholarly and exhaustively titled Time and Place: One Hundred Years of Women Artists in Colorado 1900-2000, which is the season opener at the consistently interesting…

Two solo shows now at the Spark Gallery take up the topic of realism — but each takes a clearly different path. Occupying a full two-thirds of the gallery, Robert Gratiot: Recent Paintings is made up of a group of striking hyper-realist compositions. Gratiot is particularly interested in meticulously reproducing…

It’s hard to believe that it was only last November that the city’s voters gave the Denver Art Museum the go-ahead to construct a badly needed new wing by selling $62.5 million in bonds. And although there have been no physical changes on the southeast corner of West 13th Avenue…

Though Steven Alarid lives in Dillon, hes exhibited his idiosyncratic paintings, watercolors and drawings in Denver for more than a decade. Currently he is the subject of a solo show in the front gallery at Pirate. Its made up of pieces from his Empirical: series, which includes the untitled painting…

With the Labor Day weekend looming just ahead, and the important fall season hard on its heels, there’s only one or two days left to catch two of the most significant exhibits presented this summer: Peter Durst, which combines installation with ceramic sculpture at the Curtis Arts and Humanities Center,…

The funkiest of the funky new galleries to open in the last few months must surely be Apart Modern Gallery on South Kalamath Street. The two-building complex, joined by a rough-hewn courtyard covered in gravel and accented with sculptures, is located hard by a busy railroad track. The gallery is…

It was a couple of years ago that Jane Fudge, at the time an assistant curator at the Denver Art Museum, came up with the idea for Colorado Masters of Photography, the exhibit currently on display in the Merage Gallery on the DAM’s first floor. But the show, which is…

Mind Over Matter, an exhibit of recent paintings by Victoria del Carmen Perez that now occupies ILK’s south gallery, may be an uneven show, but the best pieces are extremely good. And unusual. In fact, some viewers may be put off by the materials that the Cuban-born painter uses, and…