Visual Arts

Though it’s 106 years old, the Stanley Hotel continues to fascinate tourists (about 430,000 a year, to be exact) and locals alike. As the inspiration for Stephen King’s best-selling novel The Shining, it lives in pop-culture infamy. It’s also supposedly haunted and has a controversial owner who, for better or for worst, capitalizes on its allure. Brush up on your history and learn more about the hotel’s future in our recent coverage.

It’s time to dive into Denver Arts Week, and First Friday is the perfect introduction. If you don’t get out to the galleries throughout the year, this is the night to change your tune. Here’s a sampler of what you’ll find. Contemporary Fiber 2016 Niza Knoll Gallery Now through November…

In January 2014, Hugh Grant, founder of Denver’s Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, announced that the beloved cultural attraction would be vacating its original Capitol Hill location at 1311 Pearl Street and moving into a new facility to be erected at the corner of West 12th Avenue and…

The best thing about Denver Arts Week? It amplifies what we have here all year along, and especially in mid-fall, when local culture is completely up and running for a bright new season. From November 4 through 12, it’s the best chance you’ll have this year to explore what’s happening…

Spark Gallery on Santa Fe Drive consists of a pair of mid-sized rooms and one very small one, so the space can get cramped when each area is assigned to a separate exhibit. The crowded feel is exacerbated when the styles of the art in the various exhibits don’t jibe…

In the hierarchy of exhibits, the retrospective solo ranks at the top of the heap, as it allows viewers to follow an artist’s aesthetic life through the course of a career. The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is currently hosting just such a show, Kim Dickey: Words Are Leaves, organized…

Aside from when I was a baby in New Jersey and two years in Ohio for grad school, Denver has always been my home. But a home is a different thing from a community: You can have many communities, and in the age of the internet those communities can be…

Ritualcravt, the shiniest, eco-metaphysical mineral and herb store in the Mile High City, has recently expanded with a new location at 2842 West 44th Street. Still in Sunnyside but up the road and off the beaten path, Ritualcravt now boasts a significantly larger storefront with some much needed elbow room. The new space coincides with the shop’s one-year-anniversary, being celebrated this weekend with a seance on Friday October 28 and an all-day anniversary party on Saturday, October 29.

Bobbi Walker, owner and director of Walker Fine Art, has assembled Inherent Intent, a seamless group show that brings together seven contemporary abstract artists from across the country. All of these artists employ subtlety as their principle aesthetic philosophy, yet none of them can be called minimalists — at least…

This summer, as the start of an abstraction extravaganza, Space Gallery presented Expanding the Dialogue: Part One (which I reviewed September 14), and now Expanding the Dialogue: Part Two is on view. While the first show explored the subtlety of certain approaches, the second takes the opposite tack, looking at…

When you step out of the elevator on Level Four of the Denver Art Museum’s North Building over the next few weeks, you’ll see a colorful Quetzalcoatl flying above the lobby, letting loose two trails of Monarch butterflies into the pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial galleries. They’re part of Las Almas…

Conceptual art has a century-long history, dating back to Marcel Duchamp’s radical “Readymades” in the early 1900 s. By appropriating a snow shovel and then calling it a sculpture, for instance, Duchamp proved that artists had the sole authority to define what art was. From there, conceptual art grew to…

One of the reasons why people in this post-post-modern world respond so passionately to outdoor artis its impermanence. It will not be there forever, reminding us of our own fleeting existence. And ‘Duct Work, a massive mural project just completed in the viaduct space under I-70 at 46th Avenue and…

How great a visual wonder is 4,000 lanterns floating through the air at once? Enough to stop traffic. The entirety of cars in both lanes on I-25 came to a crawl on October 15 to witness the beauty as lanterns glided just above traffic to the west on a slight, warm, October…

Since opening in May 2013, Cold Crush has been place where artists could express themselves without restraint. Art was an integral part of the bar at 2700 Larimer Street, from the performers inside to the exterior of the building, including the south-facing facade that became a street-art canvas known as…

This weekend you can explore a colorful survey of traditional indigenous textiles at the Museo de las Americas or take in the most contemporary examples of contemporary art at Dateline —  and that’s not all. Here’s a sampling of what’s new at Denver galleries. A Mano/By Hand Museo de las…

Below the bustle of the highly-trafficked corridor where Speer Boulevard meets Broadway, there’s a new, reflective set of murals along the banks of Cherry Creek. Called “Paramount,” the two murals were painted over the past several weeks by Alexandre Orion, a world-renowned artist from San Paulo, Brazil. And they are…

Michael McClung and Warren Campbell — the Michael and Warren behind Michael Warren Contemporary — have done a good job of introducing Denver audiences to Colorado artists who live and work outside the metro area, especially those from the Western Slope. An excellent example is the current exhibit Chasing Dragons:…

“Start at the bottom of the ballot.” Those were the final words of wisdom from Deborah Jordy, executive director of the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts, at the October 4 breakfast meeting designed to chew over the results of the CBCA’s latest “Economic Activity Study of Metro Denver Culture.”…

The editors of birdy like to joke that their magazine is banned in Thornton. And it’s true that the collectible arts and literary publication is no longer allowed inside the lobby of a particular art company there. birdy had donated a free advertisement to the Thornton-based business, but the owners were offended…

The Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities is marking its fortieth anniversary with two notable shows: Looking Back: 40 Years, 40 Artists, a survey of Colorado contemporary art over the past four decades that I reviewed last week, and Moving Forward: The Next Forty Years, an exhibit in the…

Every time I buy a tube of toothpaste, I fail. Part of my intention with the Mayday Experiment is to change everything, and that includes what I buy, and what I put down the drain. The drain issue is partially functional: Since I opted for only a greywater tank in…