Visual Arts

New Year’s weekend is here, and Denver is ripe with free and cheap events from December 28 to 31.

A new exhibit at NXT STG Collaborative Gallery brings viewers behind the scenes of Opera Colorado’s La Bohème.

The six days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve tend to be a bit of a lull, typically occupied by sluggish post-holiday travel, a grudging return to work or, for some lucky Denver residents, a few extra idle days to spend with family…or attending a great free event around…

Looking back on the ten biggest arts and culture stories in Denver in 2017.

Summit Middle School students created an art installation dubbed “Wire You Polluting?” – a look at ocean ecology.

Denver artist Nick Scotella’s heading to Atlanta for Bassnectar’s Annual New Year’s Eve celebration as one of only eighteen artists selected by Lorin Ashton’s team to participate in the event.

Over the past few years, women artists have finally been given their due. The Denver Art Museum has been a leader in the effort to right this wrong: Last year it presented Women of Abstract Expressionism, which rewrote the history of American art in the 1950s, and now it’s hosting the blockbuster Her Paris: Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism.

Colorado Symphony will be performing the live score of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth film in the series, at Boettcher Concert Hall in July 2018.

Save your money for presents; here are five great free events in Denver December 18 through December 22, 2017.

SupaStore, British artist Sarah Staton’s response to the overarching rise of online commerce in the new millennium and how retail is losing its human touch, has come to Denver, in the guise of SupaStore Human—We are the Product, a singular iteration of Staton’s artist road show.

Take in some art before the year is over at these shows and more.

Denver artist Tom Ward’s been busy painting a new mural at Tommy’s Thai on Colfax Avenue.

The current offering at William Havu Gallery, Transmutations, brings together three abstractionists — a sculptor, a painter, and an artist who uses smoke on paper to create drawings — for solo shows that masquerade as a group effort. Occupying the floor space are sculptures by well-known Denver artist Michael Clapper,…

For all the transplants — as well as longtime Denverites who’ve forgotten their civics lessons or skipped them altogether — History Colorado is now providing a primer with Zoom In: The Centennial State in 100 Objects, an exhibit that draws from its collection to offer a true object lesson in Colorado history.

Being inclusive of non-Christians at Christmas time is a perilous task, but Cleo Parker Robinson Dance pulls it off in Granny Dances to a Holiday Drum.

Rick Griffith, the design maven and letterpress wizard of MATTER Studio, has a whole different way of approaching commerce as a community-based social action. In his world, every person — rich or poor, black or white, unschooled or highly overeducated — is a cog in the wheel of fair and equal commerce, and no one gets left out.

Looking for free and cheap things to do this weekend? We’ve got you covered.

Think you can get through the next few weeks without hitting the mall or setting foot inside a big box store? It isn’t necessary to empty your pockets soullessly on plastic junk and electronics just to make that space under the ChristmaHanuKwanzaa bush look as good as the one over at the Joneses. You’ve got this, and we’re here to help.

Pirate Contemporary Art, the city’s flagship artists’ cooperative, found a new home outside of Denver, in Lakewood. These are the wages of gentrification: The city’s alternative art infrastructure is being off-shored to the inner suburbs.

Group and small-works shows abound at co-ops, studio enclaves and commercial galleries, too, making December an opportunity to scope out the breadth of Denver’s many-faceted art scene. Have a holiday-season lark and get to know every kind of artist better at these ten events.

It’s not too early to start thinking about the biggest arty party of 2018. Artopia, Westword’s annual celebration of art, culture and fashion, will be livelier than ever next year, on a new night, in a new location and with a new emphasis on art created before your eyes.

With all the hurly burly of construction in the Golden Triangle (including the dismantling of “Lao Tzu” outside the Denver Art Museum), it’s a relief to see the new shows at the nearby Goodwin Fine Art and the new display by Linda Herritt at Rule on Santa Fe Drive.