The Singer Gallery of the Mizel Center (350 South Dahlia Street, 303-316-6360) is nominally a Jewish institution, although the programs are typically more secular than religious. However, the current exhibit, Fourteen Stations/Hey Yud Dalet, is thoroughly Jewish, and the subject is the Holocaust. On display are fourteen monumental charcoal drawings…
The Denver Art Museum’s still-new Frederic C. Hamilton Building has impacted the city — and the museum itself — in a wide range of ways, some good, some not so good. On the plus side is the unbelievable publicity the building has generated. The Daniel Libeskind-designed wing is estimated to…
The current Barbara Carpenter solo in the east room at Spark Gallery (900 Santa Fe Drive, 720-889-2200) is called Scapes, and considering the artist’s established track record, it’s something of a surprise. For nearly twenty years, Carpenter has been known for her abstract color photos, but for Scapes, she did…
The world-famous majestic scenery of the nearby Colorado Rockies — the gorgeous mountains, not the sorry baseball team — has attracted artists to our state for well over a century. In fact, Colorado, New Mexico and California all but cornered the market on Western landscape painting during the last part…
Modernist painter Janet Lippincott, who spent most of her career in Santa Fe, died on Wednesday, May 2. Born in New York City in 1918, Lippincott had a privileged childhood and lived for a time in Paris. Showing an early talent for art, she studied as a teenager at the…
In the late summer of 2002, Tyler Aiello and Monica Petty Aiello burst onto the Denver art scene as full-blown players. They pulled off this difficult feat by opening Studio Aiello in the nether reaches of what is now the River North Arts District, north of downtown. Studio Aiello was…
A month or so ago, I received a call from John Davenport, a noted local photographer and a boardmember of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. He was annoyed because although CPAC had organized one show and co-organized another among the exhibits that had received Best of Denver awards in March,…
The current art season, which is just approaching its final bell, has been one for the record books. With the opening of the Denver Art Museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building this past fall, there’s been an unprecedented upswing in art-related activities. At the DAM itself are several important displays, particularly…
There are two member shows at Spark Gallery (900 Santa Fe Drive, 720-889-2200) featuring work by established artists. On the gallery’s west side is the self-titled Susanna Cavalletti; in the space to the east is Mysteries of Babylon, which highlights recent paintings by Peter Illig. The two are as different…
The influence of Latin American culture, and Mexican in particular, is easy to find in Denver. For more than a generation, Chicano artists have been front and center here, creating a distinctive category of art based on ethnic, religious and cultural identity. Also a generation back, local visionary José Aguayo…
As an outsider, I’ve been worried about Pirate (3655 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058), the once-funky alternative space that during the past quarter-century became one of the city’s key art institutions. To put a fine point on it, the problem is the low quality of exhibits. Did anybody catch the anniversary show…
There’s something about abstraction that keeps it keeping on, despite a fairly successful assault from postmodernism’s conceptual realism that posits a sharp rejoinder to abstraction’s decorative tendencies. And sure, painting itself has long been said to be dead — particularly a style as quaint as abstract painting — but it’s…
The stable of artists featured at Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585) work in a range of styles, but one stands out: magic realism. This painterly hybrid combines realism with surrealism, makes folk-art references, and is influenced by comic-book and children’s-book illustrations. Distinctive variants of it are currently…
More than any other institution in the city, the University of Denver should be credited with establishing and nurturing contemporary art in the early to mid-twentieth century. But despite the school’s important role, the accomplishments of artists associated with it have not been properly documented. Dan Jacobs, director of the…
Michael Chavez, the curator at Foothills Art Center (809 15th Street, Golden, 303-279-3922), has organized Pattern Recognition, which looks at art that considers repetition. This is the second show that Chavez has put together at Foothills that surveys a contemporary stylistic category being done in Denver. The first examined contemporary…
The news coming out of the Denver Art Museum over the past few weeks has been shocking. More than 200 staff members spread across every department were offered modest buyouts in exchange for their resigning from their jobs. As of Monday, April 9, thirty had complied. These include some fairly…
The radical forms of Daniel Libeskind’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building have been difficult for the Denver Art Museum’s staff — and builders — to tame, so thank goodness for that old reliable friend, Gio Ponti and James Sudler’s North Building, where, without any fanfare, changes are afoot inside. The North…
I was talking with an artist friend the other day, and as usual, the topic was current aesthetic trends. He told me how tired he is of all the art that looks like minimalism but actually isn’t. Sometimes this kind of thing goes by the name of post-minimalism, which is…
Frequently the alternative art spaces in town feature work that only a mother could love, but every once in a while they feature a show that’s as good as anything else around. That’s the case with the stunning exhibit now at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173), the city’s front-running…
Historic preservation in Denver is really in trouble right now, despite its many successes. The easy-to-understand community benefits of landmark protection are all over the central part of the city — lower downtown, Country Club, Seventh Avenue Parkway, Potter-Highland, Montclair, Larimer Square and on and on — and they make…
Western art and contemporary art would seem to be mutually exclusive, but they’re not. There are many artists in the area who combine the two sensibilities to create what’s called — you guessed it — contemporary Western art. This type of work has gotten a big boost from the Denver…
I’ve sometimes been criticized for promoting our own art scene too much, though my detractors often misunderstand my position. It’s not that I want our local institutions to feature only artists from around here, but rather to better integrate them into their exhibition schedules. In championing this cause over the…
