Best upstart exhibition organizer 2000 | Jason Thomas, director | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best upstart exhibition organizer

Jason Thomas, director

Six months ago, Jason Thomas was working as a security guard, his fine-art degree in the pocket of his uniform. Then Guiry's, the commercial paint and fine-art supply business that's been around Denver since the nineteenth century, opened a new store in an old building on Market Street in the Ballpark neighborhood and hired the ambitious twentysomething to run its gallery there. Over the past year, Thomas, using his many connections in the art world -- he'd been an intern at Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery before he took up the badge and gun -- booked Guiry's with one good show after another, alternating group displays of local modern masters with solos devoted to young, untried talents. Thanks to Thomas, Guiry's also hosted the Invisible Museum exhibits, featuring some of Denver's biggest names in sculpture, photography and interactive art. As a result of his efforts, Thomas has lured nearly everyone interested in art in Denver through Guiry's doors to see some of the best shows in town.

Best combination of funky and fancy

Shows organized by Jim Robischon and Jennifer Doran

There's no question about it: Robischon has been the preeminent contemporary gallery in Denver for more than twenty years. And it's kept its top-rank reputation not by resting on its laurels, but by being unpredictable. More often than not, the shows at Robischon are going to be weird -- like last summer, when sculptor Tom Nussbaum's figures were on display, or when the gallery presented those really strange and falsely naive-looking Fay Jones paintings. Sometimes the space even exhibits artists who are officially associated with the funk movement of the late twentieth century, such as the Manuel Neri and Robert Hudson shows last fall and winter. This interest in work that pushes our concepts of beauty reflects the taste and judgment of the gallery's co-directors, the husband-and-wife team of Jim Robischon and Jennifer Doran.

Best combination of funky and fancy

Shows organized by Jim Robischon and Jennifer Doran

There's no question about it: Robischon has been the preeminent contemporary gallery in Denver for more than twenty years. And it's kept its top-rank reputation not by resting on its laurels, but by being unpredictable. More often than not, the shows at Robischon are going to be weird -- like last summer, when sculptor Tom Nussbaum's figures were on display, or when the gallery presented those really strange and falsely naive-looking Fay Jones paintings. Sometimes the space even exhibits artists who are officially associated with the funk movement of the late twentieth century, such as the Manuel Neri and Robert Hudson shows last fall and winter. This interest in work that pushes our concepts of beauty reflects the taste and judgment of the gallery's co-directors, the husband-and-wife team of Jim Robischon and Jennifer Doran.

Best example of the work ethic as applied to the fine arts

Chuck Parson

This past year, it seemed that Denver sculptor Chuck Parson was everywhere at once. His work was displayed at the Arvada Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Museum of Outdoor Art, the Gallery at Guiry's and in the sculpture court at Artyard. And that was just around here. Parson was also feted to a solo last fall at Wyoming's Nicolaysen Museum, and he created a large installation for Chicago's Pier Show earlier this summer. Even more astounding than his participation in so many art exhibits is the medium he prefers -- mammoth sculptures made of such minimally portable materials as concrete and steel beams, which would seem to discourage all that traveling. But the best thing about Parson's sculpture is not that it's so easy to find, but that it's so very good.

Best example of the work ethic as applied to the fine arts

Chuck Parson

This past year, it seemed that Denver sculptor Chuck Parson was everywhere at once. His work was displayed at the Arvada Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Museum of Outdoor Art, the Gallery at Guiry's and in the sculpture court at Artyard. And that was just around here. Parson was also feted to a solo last fall at Wyoming's Nicolaysen Museum, and he created a large installation for Chicago's Pier Show earlier this summer. Even more astounding than his participation in so many art exhibits is the medium he prefers -- mammoth sculptures made of such minimally portable materials as concrete and steel beams, which would seem to discourage all that traveling. But the best thing about Parson's sculpture is not that it's so easy to find, but that it's so very good.

Best photo show -- solo

Hal D. Gould: Visual Legacy

After fifty years as a professional photographer and more than 35 years as an exhibition organizer, Hal Gould finally allowed someone to give him a solo show. Presented at Gould's own gallery, the Camera Obscura, last winter, the exhibit was organized by Loretta Young Gautier and Mollie Uhl Eaton, which marks another first: Visual Legacy was the only show ever presented at the twenty-year-old gallery not to have been put together by Gould himself. The best pieces in this large and important show were those that took up the theme of the vanishing West, a favorite subject for Gould, who addressed it again and again in works dating from the 1950s to the present.

Best photo show -- solo

Hal D. Gould: Visual Legacy

After fifty years as a professional photographer and more than 35 years as an exhibition organizer, Hal Gould finally allowed someone to give him a solo show. Presented at Gould's own gallery, the Camera Obscura, last winter, the exhibit was organized by Loretta Young Gautier and Mollie Uhl Eaton, which marks another first: Visual Legacy was the only show ever presented at the twenty-year-old gallery not to have been put together by Gould himself. The best pieces in this large and important show were those that took up the theme of the vanishing West, a favorite subject for Gould, who addressed it again and again in works dating from the 1950s to the present.

Best photo show -- group

Photography and the Creative Process

This large show, occupying both the Colorado Photographic Arts Center and the adjacent Carol Keller Gallery, was associated with a conference by the same name held at the Auraria campus. The exhibit featured the work of the conference's speakers, including such well-known local photographers as conference chairman Ron Wohlauer and his peers Ray Whiting, Eric Paddock, Bernard Mendoza and William Sutton. The show was thrown together at the last minute by CPAC Exhibition Director Lisbeth Neergaard Kohloff with gallery owner Carol Keller -- and they couldn't have done it any better if they'd had a year's prep time.

Best photo show -- group

Photography and the Creative Process

This large show, occupying both the Colorado Photographic Arts Center and the adjacent Carol Keller Gallery, was associated with a conference by the same name held at the Auraria campus. The exhibit featured the work of the conference's speakers, including such well-known local photographers as conference chairman Ron Wohlauer and his peers Ray Whiting, Eric Paddock, Bernard Mendoza and William Sutton. The show was thrown together at the last minute by CPAC Exhibition Director Lisbeth Neergaard Kohloff with gallery owner Carol Keller -- and they couldn't have done it any better if they'd had a year's prep time.

Best show to highlight a Playboy photographer

Ted Williams, Tone Poems

Now, calm down. The Playboy photographer in question, Ted Williams, made a career not from those famous cheesecake centerfolds, but by recording, in classic black-and-white shots, America's jazz scene of the 1950s to the 1970s. A photographer since his childhood days in 1930s Texas, Williams became one of the first African-American photographers to enter Chicago's prestigious Institute of Design. The school, now a part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, is sometimes referred to as the American Bauhaus, since much of its faculty consisted of refugees from the Nazis who had taught at the original German Bauhaus. Having experienced discrimination themselves in Berlin, the school's teachers, Williams says, "weren't going to have none of that" in Chicago. Playboy wasn't, either; the magazine hired Williams in 1958, and on that beat he captured all the greats. The most interesting aspect of Williams's photos is that he employed an unlikely formula to make his celebrity pinups: Instead of taking a careful, posed shot, as is the standard in the field, he used the candid-camera technique, catching his subjects in unguarded moments, a method favored by street photographers. In Williams's hands, the results show off the best of both worlds.

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