The Modern and Contemporary department at the Denver Art Museum gained official status in 1978 when the institution hired Dianne Vanderlip to head it up. During her nearly three decades in the post, Vanderlip facilitated the acquisition of thousands of works for the permanent collection. But between shopping sprees, she…
Last week, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center concluded its nearly year-long search for a new director by hiring Sam Gappmayer (pictured). The job represents a big promotion for Gappmayer, who is currently the director of the much more modest Sun Valley Center for the Arts, in Idaho. Second only…
I’ve long thought of Denver as being the Rodney Dangerfield of American cities, because we just can’t get no respect. But ever since the Democrats announced they would hold their national convention in town, those of us who live here are starting to feel more like Sally Field, because it…
Although he moved away ten years ago, Gary Sweeney has a long and committed relationship with Denver. Sweeney is a conceptual artist with a taste for pop imagery, as seen in his best-known local creation, the pair of decorated maps titled “America, Why I Love Her” at Denver International Airport…
Don’t count me among the biggest fans of what’s called “street art,” a loose category that runs the gamut from graffiti to wall murals, with the former often being used to vandalize the latter. Vandalism isn’t the biggest problem with street art, though; the key issue is that it almost…
The one thing about Denver that I really can’t stand is the relentless lack of support for local artists among the entities that could make a difference. Not only does this wrongheaded approach cheat the artists, but it shortchanges the city, too. The latest affront is Dialog:City, which is being…
Foothills Art Center marked its fortieth anniversary last Friday, and to honor that milestone, the institution is presenting XL: Forty Years on the Frontier of Art, which runs through the end of the month. The main exhibit features a quartet of contemporary artists, while an ancillary show, Foothills Founders: A…
Denver artist Gwen Laine is one of the four artists selected to help celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Foothills Art Center in Golden (see review, page 46). But she’s also completely taken over the Carson/van Straaten Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585, www.sandycarsongallery.com) with her solo, Passing Through. The…
Sculptor Bob Mangold moved to Denver with his wife, Peggy, about fifty years ago and helped to lay the groundwork for the contemporary sculpture scene here today. At the time, sculpture was a fairly undeveloped medium compared to painting, printmaking and even ceramics. There are still many more painters than…
You’d have to have been living under a rock to not have noticed the early-21st-century museum-building boom that’s been going on in Colorado over the past couple of years. There’s the Hamilton Building at the Denver Art Museum, the addition to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and the incredible…
Cydney Payton, outgoing director and curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver (1485 Delgany Street, 303-298-7554, www.mcadenver.org) has been something of a one-woman show, overseeing just about every aspect of the place (see column, page 43) for years. And in addition to all of her other duties, she lines up…
Last week, Cydney Payton, curator and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, announced that she was stepping down, effective this fall. My reaction to the news, which she delivered to me in a phone call, was one of shock, even if I did have a little something more than…
Jack Balas has built a national reputation the hard way. He lives in a small town in northern Colorado, and his style is a very idiosyncratic version of post-pop that’s often messy and crammed with incongruous imagery and text. And if that’s not enough, his chief subject matter — the…
The Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788, www.robischongallery.com) is currently featuring Tattoo Detour, one of two solos in town by Jack Balas (see review, page 45), but there’s a good deal more happening at the gallery as well. In the center space is William Lamson: Experiment, which is the East…
One of the weirdest twists in the art world over the past few decades has been the way artwork with recognizable subjects has gone from being the most traditional aesthetic pose to being at the forefront of experimentation. Of course, I’m not referring to sweet and sappy depictions of animals…
In 2005, Switzerland’s premier photo institution, the Musée de l’Elysée (www.elysee.ch) in Lausanne, celebrated its 20th anniversary by organizing an exhibit called Regeneration: We are all photographers now, which showcased the rise of amateur photography in the digital age and its inevitable mutation into its own full-fledged art form. The…
Painting is making its umpteenth comeback right now after having been declared dead an equal number of times over the years. The reason that paintings haven’t been supplanted permanently by videos, installations and the like is that artists refuse to cooperate. As a result, collectors and curators won’t let go,…
There are a bunch of shows at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173, www.edgeart.org) that link up with one another pretty well. The buzz, however, has zeroed in on the most ambitious of the group: Timmy Flynn’s Hardware Store, which occupies the front gallery. The show, Flynn’s homage to a…
Fort Collins is somewhat off my beaten path. Like Colorado Springs, it’s more than an hour away, but Fort Collins doesn’t have a major art-exhibition venue comparable to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Last week, however, I made my way up there to be a juror for the 2008…
The name Walter Netsch isn’t a household one, but it should be, especially in Colorado, because he’s the man who designed the 1954-1964 Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, unquestionably among the most significant cycle of buildings in the country. At the time, Netsch was a partner at the prestigious…
It was in the nineteenth century that artists in Europe and the United States, for the first time in millennia, went outside to create their works. This led to a rise in the status of landscape paintings, previously a secondary type of art overshadowed by historic narrative painting and the…
Using pictures to tell stories was definitely a no-no in classic modern art and for the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Manipulating form was the thing for painters to do instead. But in the 1980s and ’90s, narrative painting made a huge comeback in contemporary art circles, and…
