Cydney Payton, director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, is set to leave the institution she essentially created out of thin air at the end of the year. The handsome Elbows & Tea Leaves — Front Range Women in the Visual Arts (1974-2000) is the next-to-last BMoCA exhibit that…

In the main room at Pirate, co-op member Tony Coulter is presenting Only Mercy, an exhibition of a dozen elegant abstract paintings. Coulters method is simple: He smears paint horizontally and vertically on a linen canvas. The best pieces in this show are the three large ones that incorporate found…

By way of celebrating the first anniversary of its opening, Bayeux Gallery owner and operator Carla St. Romain has mounted her most important show yet, the 3rd American Tapestry Alliance Biennial Exhibition. Bayeux is an appropriate stop for this national traveling exhibit, because it’s the only regional gallery specializing in…

Ties That Bind, at the Singer Gallery of the Mizel Arts Center, though nominally a group show, is actually three solos, as each artist has been given a separate section. The first featured artist is Amy Lee Solomon, who rarely exhibits locally. Her Structures of Atmospheric Turbulence: series, which is…

A solo show in the Denver Art Museum’s Vance Kirkland Close Range Gallery is the most highly sought-after gig in the entire exhibition world in Colorado. It’s not that the Close Range is an impressive room — it isn’t. Rather, it’s an awkwardly shaped space shoved into the corner of…

Last Thursday the atmosphere in Schlessman Hall, on the first floor of the Denver Art Museum, was positively electric. DAM trustees and staffers, community leaders, politicians, interested members of the community, reporters and photographers all gathered to hear Mayor Wellington Webb announce the name of the architect for the new…

Under the direction of Sally Perisho, the Metro Center for the Visual Arts on Wazee Street has, more often than not, offered museum-quality shows, and this summer’s 20th Century Drawings and Objects, on loan from the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, is no exception. But wait a minute: What…

Pirate: a Contemporary Art Oasis is now hosting a group of interesting — though flawed — sculpture shows. In the main space up front is Soul Catchers, which features a large collection of abstract sculptures by Craig Robb. Some are on the wall, some are on the ceiling, some are…

Subtly placed at eye level on the front door of Ron Judish Fine Arts is a letter-sized sheet of paper with an advisory for viewers of Horse: the male as sexual entity. It states that the exhibit, which is now showing, includes the depiction of the male nude and that…

There are two compelling shows at the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria campus through tomorrow: Jerry Allen Gilmore on the main floor, and Christopher Nitsche in the loft. The Gilmore show is made up of drawings and paintings that combine abstract painting techniques such as splashes, drips and runs with…

It’s a basic contradiction of the art world: Artists compete with each other to get into the best galleries, while the galleries compete with each other to get the best artists. A standard offshoot of this situation is the endless chain of introductory exhibits, meant either to acquaint the local…

Theres a rumor that has been spreading through the art world for months: that one of the states most accomplished artists, Bill Stockman, is set to pull up stakes in the fall and move to, of all places, Philthy-delphia. Now, I was born in Philly, and I can tell you…

The appeal of minimalism, in any of its many stylistic guises, is based on the aesthetic philosophy that less is more — even when, as in pattern painting, that idea is not strictly honored. Modern art has embraced the minimal component for nearly a hundred years. It began with the…

Two interesting shows are now located back-to-back at the Edge Gallery. In the front space is Quaternion, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Kimberlee Sullivan; in the middle space is a very strange display of sand paintings by Roger Beltrami titled Echoes From the Canyon. Sullivans pieces have…

Ironton Studios & Gallery, which opened in April, is a hard place to find — unless, of course, you work in the freight-hauling trade or some other light-industrial pursuit that might bring you to the corner of 36th Street and Chestnut Place. Actually, it’s not far from Coors Field, but…

Its no understatement to say that without Phil Bender there would be no Pirate co-op. One of the founders of the group in 1980, Benders the only one to stick around. And stick is a good word to use, since hes the glue that held the place together during difficult…

Among the pleasures of Golden’s Foothills Art Center — other than the wonderful old church and parish house it occupies — are several shows that are a part of its regular schedule. One of these, the North American Sculpture Exhibition, or NASE, can be counted on to be one of…

Mark Lunning is better known as an artisan — a master printer — than he is as an artist. But at the same time that hes been working with some of the best artists around at Open Press, his fine printing shop in Broadway Terrace, hes also been making his…

There’s a lot of gossip in the local art world. Some of the rumors don’t make sense, which usually means they’re not true. But I’m privy to one group of gabbers who wind up being correct most of the time. It’s hard to pinpoint the source of this collective commentary…

Potenza, Italy, is one of Denvers many sister cities around the world. But unlike some of the others, Potenza makes sense as a civic sibling, because a lot of Denvers nineteenth-century Italian immigrants came from there. In fact, the Potenza Lodge social club was founded here in 1899 and was…

The show’s title implies that the art history we were taught in school — in which every stylistic phase appears in a neat chronological order — has fallen by the wayside. Now anything goes, as tight representational imagery is hung side by side with non-objective compositions, abstract sculptures are paired…

Pirate is teeming with good shows right now, and the varied directions of the exhibiting artists are astounding. In the main space, co-op members Richard Colvin and Katherine Temple present collaborative installations in Re-Echo. In many of their pieces, the two artists play with the difference between reality and illusion…