Though abstraction began pushing aside other styles almost a century ago, modern artists have persisted in their desire to capture the human figure. The Human Factor, at Metro State’s Center for the Visual Arts, proved the point. Half of it was a traveling exhibit highlighting objects from Nebraska’s Sheldon Memorial…
Although Skip Kohloff has long been one of the guiding forces behind the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, he has almost never allowed his work to be exhibited there. But when he retired from Cherry Creek High last June after 25 years as the head of the school’s photography department, he…
Since the 1970s, the Foothills Art Center has consistently presented the region’s most important annual ceramics exhibit. The most recent version, Colorado Clay 2001, lived up to the tradition. Center director Carol Dickinson called on Wayne Higby, a world-class, New York-based ceramic artist with considerable Colorado connections, to help. Higby…
Alisa Zahller had just been hired as the assistant curator of fine and decorative art at the Colorado History Museum when she was handed the job of organizing the season’s major exhibit. The result was Quiltspeak: Stories in Stitches, an intelligent, engaging and beautiful show that examined the history and…
Although Chain Reaction highlighted six installations by Boulder artist Gail Wagner, all six came together as a single, seamless work. Wagner’s specialty is forms made of crocheted rope that is dyed, painted and accented by tiny, sewn-on charms. Her preferred shape is a circular appendage that sometimes looks like a…
Only the stout of heart and the sharp of eye have the courage to historically evaluate the material culture of our own time. But that’s exactly what R. Craig Miller, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of architecture, design and graphics, has done with US Design 1975-2000. Still open, the exhibit…
Maybe it was the change in the millennium that put everyone in a retrospective mood, but for whatever reason, history has gotten a lot more popular lately. Cable TV and popular magazines are jammed with it. Colorado’s art world has not been left out, with a number of historical exhibits…
Simon Zalkind, director of the Singer Gallery of the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, has long been known for his high-quality exhibitions. The most recent case in point is Revolutions: Generations of Russian Jewish Avant-Garde Artists, which is still on display. It’s a knockout that examines modern and contemporary…
The Gates Family Foundation, in celebration of the millennium, commissioned Barbara Grygutis of Tucson to create “Common Ground,” a mammoth sculpture, for the recently completed Commons Park. Northeast of the intersection of Little Raven and 15th streets, the park is close to where Denver’s first settlers established their camp. The…
For most of its history, the Denver Art Museum paid little attention to the art of the American West, so vital to our region. But if the museum turned up its nose at Western painting and sculpture, private collectors did not. Among the top rank of these collectors are Bill…
Last year, the powers that be in Englewood took stock of their town, and they didn’t like what they saw. Possibly for the first time, the complete lack of cultural amenities seemed to matter — so city leaders began casting about for something they could do to change the situation…
Denver’s Museo de las Américas is one of the only institutions anywhere that focuses on the art of the Southwestern United States, along with that of Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean, and it programs it all from within the modest facilities on Santa Fe Drive. But Museo…
It’s common wisdom that once an artist dies, his or her work should soar in value, but more often, the artist fades from the collective memory. That’s what happened to Edgar Britton, who in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s was Colorado’s most famous sculptor. But last year, nearly twenty years…
In 1939, German-Jewish artist Max Lazarus came to the United States from Trier, Germany, where he was that city’s most important expressionist painter. Prominent in the Jewish community, Lazarus was commissioned to paint a mural on the ceiling of Trier’s main synagogue. But the 1930s was not the best time…
In 1980, a group of friends opened an alternative art space in a then-rough part of town and gave it the difficult and unconventional name of Pirate: a contemporary art oasis. But the co-op’s name perfectly reflected the difficult and unconventional work that has so often found a home in…
You have to hand it to the folks who strive to try something different, and the Other Side is just such an effort. Rather than being just another artist cooperative, it’s more of a true collective, where artists not only share studio and gallery space (and daycare), but attempt to…
Hair today, gone…well, you know the drill: When local artist/entrepreneur Lonnie Hanzon decided to cash it all in, sell his workshop and auction off nearly everything in it, he also decided to drop his three-foot tresses, what he liked to call his “greatest work of art,” and put them on…
They used Colorado Yule Marble for the Lincoln Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In fact, anytime someone wants to make something look grand, they call for the sleek stone that’s quarried in the town of Marble, near Aspen. At the Marble Institute of Colorado’s MARBLE/marble XIV classes…
Who can argue with a tradition that’s been handed down for centuries, has its origins in a mystical fertility ritual, and involves grown people dressed in white holding antlers on their heads? That’s the core of the solemn annual rite known as Abbott’s Bromley Horn Dance, which leapt across the…
This program for young dancers places an elite crew of twinkletoes in the spotlight for the annual Colorado Ballet staging of The Nutcracker. It’s a wonderful experience, of course, for any second-grader keen on turning pro, but the fast-track connections that come out of the mingling of so many upper-suburban…
Hard to say if it was dance, theater, circus or dressage, but whatever it was, Cheval Théâtre provided an astonishing evening of entertainment during its extended Denver run last fall. Sitting in the audience, you sensed some mysterious, Cirque du Soleil-influenced story must be responsible for the goings-on in the…
Denver should be grateful for the foresight and dedication that originally gave birth to the Denver Center Theatre Company, which has assembled a talented group of artists and every year offers an eclectic and intelligent mix of plays — classic and contemporary, angry and light, humorous and tragic. The production…
