When you walk into the Black Book Gallery for the opening of Oh, The Places You Will Go! on Friday night, the lights will be turned off and the only thing you will see are the fantastical light-boxes of husband-wife duo Hari and Deepti. See also: Filmmaker Guy Maddin on…
As the daughter of a U.S. Air Force chaplain, Heather Bingham got to see a little bit of the world as a child: she was born in Turkey and spent several years on the island of Crete before her family moved back to Colorado Springs. And it was during her…
The exhibit Testing Grounds, which runs through this weekend only at Robischon Gallery, brings together artists who look to nature, especially the Western landscape, as sources for their disparate approaches. As usual at Robischon, there’s enough room to allow the artists to essentially be given solos, so that the work…
Art naturally evolved from representation (pictures of things) toward abstraction, argued modernist art critic Clement Greenberg and his fellow formalists. Portraiture and landscape painting be damned: In pure art, paintings do nothing but express their essence as painting. But in the 1960s, painting about painting fell out of style and…
“National Velvet”: love it or leave it. Denver Public Art brought together art fans, everyday critics and passersby last week for the Big Red Street Fair, a happy-hour celebration of one of Denver’s more controversial works of public art. Artist John McEnroe’s bright-red light-up sausage-elisk was the focal point of…
You can find art all over town — not just on gallery walls. In this series, we’ll be looking at some of the local artists who serve up their work in coffeehouses and other non-gallery businesses around town. Back when she was an art student at Colorado State University, Becky…
Night Job is a collective show featuring artists who represent a young, working-class, art class perspective united by a sensibility that combines urban grit, an ineffable dream-like quality and an almost haunted yearning for connection with the essence of life. The work also embodies a blend of seeming thematic opposites…
The art at Union Station has been one of the surprise hits of the $54 million renovation project. The building holds more than 600 pieces of art, a collection so extensive that the Crawford Hotel, which fills the upper three floors, has both an electronic and a published guide to…
Michael Paglia isn’t a big fan of the City & County of Denver when it comes to architectural and artistic decisions. After all, he writes, officials there have fumbled everything from I.M. Pei’s Zeckendorf Plaza, which was demolished in 1996, to the proposed destruction of Civic Center Park. Now the…
I’ve never been a big fan of the City & County of Denver when it comes to architectural and artistic decisions. They’ve repeatedly dropped the ball on everything from I.M. Pei’s Zeckendorf Plaza, which was demolished in 1996, to the proposed destruction of Civic Center Park’s beauty in 2006, to…
Part of a crop of new galleries that have been sprouting up like mushrooms around town in the past few months, Michael Warren Contemporary occupies the storied Santa Fe Drive space that formerly housed the van Straaten Gallery, and before that, the Sandy Carson Gallery. The current exhibit, Introductions II,…
In rapidly changing neighborhoods, gentrification can lead to a lack of community unity. But small, physical projects can help give a sense of place — which is why Denver created the P.S. You Are Here grant program. And yesterday, city officials went to Whittier, one of those rapidly changing neighborhoods,…
“I’m really not known at all in the art tribe,” says Keith “Scramble” Campbell. “I’m more known in the music tribe, and I take my art like a musician does: live and on the road.” Often referred to as the “guy painting at Red Rocks,” Campbell has done more than…
Summer’s nearly over, as kids go back to school and vacations wrap up. This weekend, you can wander through a last summer festival before the fall grind commences, see what’s new on the contemporary scene or catch up with the co-ops. It’s all good. Here are some suggestions: See also:…
The traveling poster party ARTCRANK started in 2007 in Minneapolis and has grown to include several cities across the nation and even overseas locations like London and Paris. But Denver was the first city of that expansion, back in 2009, when founder Charles Youel, who’d been looking for a way…
Michael Paglia has been writing about the art scene in Denver and Front Range for twenty years, following the latest shows, trends and news at museums and galleries. Read his latest review, of Beyond Pop: A Tom Wesselmann Retrospective, now posted on Show and Tell…
In the 1960s, when Tom Wesselmann, whose work is currently on display at the Denver Art Museum, first gained national attention, and into the ’70s, his name was mentioned in the same breath as that of Warhol, Johns and Rauschenberg. Today, not so much. On a personal note, I teach…
For those of us who lack the drive to be a designer, there’s now a website for that. But The Cotery was really created to make it easier for talented designers to do their work without having to get bogged down in the production and distribution side of the business…
You won’t find Adatto Menswear in any storefront. Instead, Adatto comes to you: You can consider this company your personal tailor, stylist and concierge. And now, in collaboration with Modern Gladiator, a Denver-based online magazine, Adatto is ready to put this region’s men in fighting form — a development they…
Does the world really need another tarot deck? Writer Jason Gruhl, fine artist Jonathan Saiz and artist/designer Andi Todaro think so, though there are already hundreds, and possibly thousands, of themed sets circulating out there, some of them dating back to medieval times and others cheaply modern, all kitschy and…
You can find art all over town — not just on gallery walls. In this series, we’ll be looking at some of the local artists who serve up their work in coffeehouses and other non-gallery businesses around town. “I haven’t been selling work for very long,” admits up-and-comer Deyanna Lambert,…
New exhibitions include an exploration of Chicano activism in art at the Center for Visual Art and a roomful of art, some of it created on site at Access Gallery, by a disabled artist with powerful messages (see below). The weekend will also see the introduction of a new lowbrow…
