Best Way to Take Dancing to the Streets 2015 | You & Me | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Way to Take Dancing to the Streets

You & Me

Dancer and RedLine resident Tara Rynders is on a global mission to bring her moves right out into the streets, and she's been doing it, country by country, since 2011, when she launched You & Me, an ongoing series of site-specific interactive performances that has been on the road ever since. The model is both simple and a little complicated, but it all comes together in a magical way: Last year, in a Denver-based version, guests moved from one individual, multidisciplinary, artist-led experience to another during an evening that kicked off with a dance in an empty lot and culminated in a community dinner that was an art experience all its own. (tararynders.net)

Best Hands-On Artist Workshop

Processus

Processus is one of several projects that have opened in the newly renovated Temple building. It consists of a community workshop with a multi-use wood and sculpture shop, a darkroom, a clean room for printmaking and a small gallery space, well equipped with tools and equipment. And it's all available to members who pay a reasonable $100 monthly fee or people who purchase $200 punch cards good for eighteen hours of workshop time. The dream of Denver artist couple Viviane Le Courtois and Christopher Perez, who put months of hard work into fundraising for the project, Processus will soon add lectures, gallery shows, hands-on workshops and pop-up events.

Best Healing Art

The Art of War Project

Iraqi war veteran Curtis Bean found healing in art and yoga, and now he's helping other soldiers find peace through his Art of War Project. Bean founded the homegrown art-therapy program in 2013, through the Denver VA Medical Center. Last summer, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post #1 purchased a space on Santa Fe Drive where Bean could expand his program to include yoga, photography classes and film nights. Everything is free for veterans and their families, and aspiring artists are given gallery space and a chance to show their work to viewers on First Fridays.

Best Arty Coffee Shop

Kaladi Coffee

Denver's galleries and museums are top-notch, but art lovers can also view premier work at other venues. Many bars and coffee shops celebrate our town's talent, filling their walls with dedication and a careful eye. But Kaladi takes that up a notch, rotating the work of quality artists — whose pieces are often affordable and approachable — on a frequent basis and making the shop feel like as much like a pop-up art space as a coffee spot.

Best Snapshot of Denver Art

Open Press

The original intention of Open Press: Celebrating 25 Years of Printmaking was to toast Denver's premier print-atelier master printer Mark Lunning. But the show also turned out to be a salute to the Denver art scene during the last quarter-century. Of the fifty artists included — which was a who's-who list — most still live and work in the Denver area. The enormous show was the keystone event of the inaugural Mo'Prints: Month of Printmaking, a biennial that alternates with the more well-established Month of Photography. It's hard to imagine how next year's print-event organizers will be able to top this riveting extravaganza dedicated to Open Press, a genuine Denver treasure.

Best Landscape Solo

Stephen Batura: Stream

The thing that immediately set Stephen Batura: Stream apart from its peers was the fact that once viewers were inside the gallery, they were completely surrounded by landscape paintings, mostly set along the Platte River. Interestingly, the exaggerated horizontal views depicted in the show's seventeen works didn't have continuous compositions, so the images didn't flow from one to the other. To further the point that each panel was a separate work, Batura gave each a distinct palette. The paintings are based on amateur photos by Charles Lillybridge that Batura found at History Colorado; he used the Lillybridge snapshots as preliminary "sketches" for the paintings but only loosely responded to the photos, changing their details at will. Using historic images as a source for these landscapes pushed Batura's work into the realm of conceptual realism — and created a truly extraordinary visual experience.

Best Landscape Duet

Far North & Outer Space

It turns out that landscapes depicting Alaska's Denali and the surface of Mars look a lot like those of the scenery in the West. That was confirmed by the marvelous Far North & Outer Space, which featured the work of Beau Carey and Lanny DeVuono. Carey, a former Coloradan who now lives in his native New Mexico, was represented by paintings of the frozen north that he conceived of during an Alaskan residency for the National Park Service. DeVuono, who moved to Denver from Washington State, has based her paintings on satellite photos of the Red Planet's surface. Though both artists captured the recognizable details of their chosen landscapes, they also conflated representation with abstraction, each in an individual way. It was these differences as much as the similarities that made Far North & Outer Space jell.

Best Landscape Quartet

Forsman, Dorfman, Sharpe and Hayeur

The large exhibition rooms at Robischon Gallery allow co-directors Jim Robischon and Jennifer Doran to mount large solos that are linked thematically. That was the case with these four shows, each of which examined the politics of the landscape. Chuck Forsman: Markers featured the famous Boulder artist's iconic paintings of the environment under siege. Next were the digital photo-based images of Elena Dorfman: Empire Falling. These montages depicted scenes that the California-based photographer encountered in a tour of abandoned quarries. Beyond was David Sharpe: Waterthread, which comprised a breathtaking array of large-format pinhole photos in color by local photographer Sharpe. And finally, there was Isabelle Hayeur: Flow, a video projection by a Canadian artist that depicts a landscape morphing from bucolic to industrial. One of Robischon's strong points is presenting programming that functions separately but works well together.

Best Environmental Show

Kevin O'Connell

Natural resources are a major concern in the West. Water in particular can be scarce, and its actual and implied absence was the theme of Kevin O'Connell: Memories of Water. One of the region's most notable contemporary photographers, O'Connell is best known for his moody and often tiny photos of the plains, but in this show, he displayed monumental color photos pointing out that the plains were once a sea bottom. Thus, as dry as they are now, they still carry with them the memory of the water in the evenness of their topography. O'Connell's lens goes spontaneously to the horizon, just as it would if he were at sea. Despite the implicit political content of O'Connell's photos, they are mostly striking for their elegant minimalism.

Best Solo by an International Art Star

1959

Courtesy Clyfford Still Museum Facebook page

The late abstract expressionist Clyfford Still was an irascible character — even going so far as to formally announce in 1951 that he was withdrawing from the art world. And he mostly did just that, refusing to exhibit his paintings for the rest of his life. A rare exception was the solo he put together himself for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1959. Interestingly, Still included both his full-blown abstracts and his earlier surrealist compositions in that show. Since the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver owns nearly everything that was in that initial show, it made sense for museum director Dean Sobel to re-create it, and that's what he did with 1959: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery Exhibition Recreated. It was spectacular, conveying what Still was thinking when he was at the height of his powers.

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