In a recent episode, Extreme Makeover — Home Edition came to Arvada to build a duplex for two low-income families and, next door, a community park. Young hotshot David Mazza was tapped to create a sculpted entry for the public space. Inside a week, Mazza turned around “Renaissance Park Archway,”…
Put together during the few short months when Ivar Zeile was teamed up with Ron Judish, Bruce Price: Fill was a major success — unlike the partnership. Price is a local pioneer of post-minimalism, known for pattern paintings based on his theories of decoration. For Fill, which debuted in New…
Nationally known Colorado artist John Hull likes to mix Hollywood-style shoot-’em-up imagery with traditional painting techniques; taken together, his cyclical narrative pieces could be called visual novels. In Pictures From Sonny’s Place, Hull told the story of an imaginary rural junkyard — based on an actual place in Wyoming –…
The Lakewood Cultural Center has made ceramics a specialty, with regular group shows devoted to the medium. The center hosted a rare solo show last fall, when Michael Coffee’s smart-looking Place of Mind was installed in the north gallery. Coffee, a retired architect who turned to ceramics ten years ago,…
One of the state’s biggest and most important annuals, Colorado Clay, has been held at Foothills Art Center in Golden since the ’70s. This year’s guest juror, Peter Held, from the Arizona State University Art Museum, took a new approach: Instead of choosing objects, Held chose artists — and fewer…
The Powerball lottery seems an unlikely source for paintings and prints. But in Random Art Two, his smashing solo at Capsule@Pod, Brandon Borchert assigned a specific image to each of the Powerball numbers, one through 53. The images illustrated one of four subjects: sex, death, food and art history, and…
Andy Miller: A Deconstruction of Life knocked everyone out when it was shown at Pirate last spring. The show featured four monumental steel and neon sculptures that depicted simplified images of men committing suicide. One was hanging by a noose from the ceiling, another aimed a gun at his head,…
The William Havu Gallery pays as much attention to sculpture as any place in town. There’s always a piece on the sidewalk, and there’s a proper sculpture garden in back. For Three Dimensions, a great indoor show, owner Bill Havu gathered work by three established sculptors from the region: Denver’s…
The rambunctious Group Show 2 was the latest version of Studio Aiello’s biennial. This time around, Kathy Andrews, director of Metro State’s Center for Visual Art, served as a single juror, selecting all of the pieces herself. Among the dozens of objects that Andrews chose was “Evolution of Form &…
Justin Beard went all out to create his funny, smart and somewhat politically incorrect installation “Second Hand Smoke” at Capsule@Pod. The meticulously crafted piece was also interactive. Beard placed a black table in front of a red-vinyl-covered banquette. On the table was an open, bound sketchbook, which contained a stencil…
Ron Wohlauer was a legend among Colorado photographers, with a style best exemplified by his majestic black-and-white landscapes. Sadly, he died last year after battling repeated bouts of cancer. In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction moment, Wohlauer’s latest book of photos, SMALL ROOMS and HIDDEN PLACES, came out just a few days after…
For his self-titled show at the Robischon Gallery, photographer David Sharpe focused on unfocused shots of the Western landscape taken with primitive, homemade cameras — the kind of thing he’s done for years. His pinhole cameras are made from cylindrical containers such as oatmeal boxes. Aping the method of nineteenth-century…
Sometimes shows in Pirate’s cramped and awkwardly shaped Associates’ Space outshine the main attractions up front. That was surely the case when Conor King’s Sentience was on view there. The twenty-something King, a recent University of Colorado graduate, created six photo enlargements framed in natural-wood boxes. The photos were illuminated…
Open Press LTD: A 15-Year Anniversary was a short course in the recent history of printmaking in Denver. The show, presented at the Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, was an enormous survey of the fruits of the fine press founded by master printer…
Computers have had a big effect on the visual arts, especially photography: Digital cameras and digital printing are now the standards. And though the pieces in Quintin Gonzalez: digital images resembled digital photos, they were actually drawings created with a variety of software applications. One of the most striking features…
Unstitched: A Voyeur’s Idiom, displayed at weilworks, was both confrontational and beautiful, an outlandish and hard-to-achieve combination. Photographer Jimmy Sellers used his childhood interest in G.I. Joes to create political works that comment on the issues of gays in the military and same-sex marriage. In color and black-and-white digital prints,…
Susan Goldstein’s POLI VESTURE lent the Edge Gallery a creepy, haunted-house mood last spring — not surprising, considering that Goldstein’s photos were shot in an abandoned factory where religious articles were once produced. The title of the show was taken from the name of the factory, which was located in…
Under the direction of Gwen Chanzit, a professor at the University of Denver and a curator at the Denver Art Museum, a group of DU students organized IN LIMBO, a terrific show at the school’s Victoria H. Myhren Gallery. The exhibition featured works generously loaned by big-time local art collectors…
The West has inspired artists for over a century, and LoDo’s David Cook Fine Art is one of the best places in Denver to check out some of the genre’s older creations. The gallery rarely presents exhibits, so The Painter’s Eye, on display last summer, was an unusual treat. The…
The Denver Art Museum’s New World department includes both pre-and post-Columbian sections, and patrons Jan and Fred Mayer were principal sponsors of two relevant shows designed to showcase both. First was the post-Columbian offering, Painting a New World, which surveyed Mexican colonial painting. Then came the pre-Columbian Tiwanaku, which examined…
In the early ’90s, architect Cab Childress designed a mountain home for University of Denver chancellor Daniel Ritchie. The imposing stone structure was done in an unusual neo-traditional style, with a copper roof called “Granny’s Castle.” Though Childress didn’t know it at the time, the building was his audition for…
Assembly art gallery is know for showing more controversial, cutting-edge works than some of its neighbors on Santa Fe Drive. But it wasn’t an exhibit that got director Jared Anderson in trouble with the City of Denver. No, it was his yard art, “Womb.” Designed as a freestanding monumental sculpture,…
