Boulder came of age in the 1960s, right along with the first baby boomers. The beautiful little town became a national center for the counterculture and the New Left, creating social and political currents that flowed into the 1970s. The visual arts got caught up in the times, too, thanks…
Weilworks (3611 Chestnut Place, 303-308-9345) is an elegant little contemporary gallery in the River North area, not far from downtown. It’s in a smart-looking building that’s something like a post-modern farmhouse. For the current offerings, which opened late in June, owner Tracy Weil wanted to come up with something that…
Cydney Payton’s name has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue because of the roster of 72 artists that she included in Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 — Present, the over-the-top spectacular currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (“Home Run,” June 22), the Center for Visual Art…
It seems like everyone has their own list of who should be in Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 — Present at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Center for Visual Art, the Gates Sculpture Triangle and the Carol Keller Project Space. I’ve even done my own roster, “Extra Innings,” on…
Cydney Payton, the director and curator of Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, has really outdone herself with Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 – Present, her four-part paean to the art of our region. The first chapter in the blockbuster is on view at the MCA itself, where Payton has installed the…
Of the four aspects of Cydney Payton’s marvelous Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 – Present, the part on view at the Carol Keller Project Space (1513 Boulder Street, 303-298-7554) is by far the edgiest. When I first heard that the Keller spot was part of the Decades extravaganza, I naturally…
For the first time in its history, the Museum of Contemporary Art/ Denver is hosting a set of exhibitions that collectively work like a blockbuster. Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 – Present sets out to be a sociological analysis, if not a historical survey, of the art scene on the…
Cydney Payton, the director of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, must be a workaholic. Not only was the groundbreaking for the new David Adjaye-designed building just a month or so ago, but she is now undertaking the most ambitious show of her curatorial career, Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 -…
Sitting on the lawn of the Colorado Convention Center adjacent to Speer Boulevard is “Indeterminate Line,” that enormous rusted-steel spiral doodle. The piece, created by Bernar Venet, is one of the most important works of art in the city. The French-born but New York-based artist has an international reputation, but…
Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173), one of the top alternative art spaces in town, is currently given over to a group of shows that highlight the use of photography in various ways. This kind of aesthetic unity at Edge is very rare considering that there are usually three completely…
You’d think that by now artists would have tired of recording the sights of the world in the tried-and-true mediums of painting and drawing. For heaven’s sake, representational art has been done for the past 15,000 years. Just thinking about it makes me drowsy. But, no. Despite the rise of…
It may seem like there’s a new gallery opening in town every day, but it’s actually only about one ribbon-cutting per week. One of the latest to open its doors is Translations Gallery (773 Santa Fe Drive, 303-629-0713), which specializes in contemporary textiles. This makes Translations unusual in Denver –…
Believe it or not, in the 1950s, Colorado’s main art scene was seated not in Denver, but in Colorado Springs, of all places. The most sophisticated art in the region was being created by a loosely affiliated group of artists who were based down there and who represented a veritable…
Like the pop charts, boutiques and Hollywood, the art world is always looking for the latest thing. And because the newest ideas are usually found in the ranks of unknown and emerging artists, juried shows are worth looking at, because that’s who they feature. Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive,…
The swank David Cook Fine Art has been riding the recent wave of interest in the art of the American West, a formerly untapped treasure trove. One way the gallery has done this is by presenting consistently great shows on the subject, filling them to the brim with first-rate pieces…
Surely one of the city’s funkiest, grungiest, edgiest and strangest art galleries is Capsule (554 Santa Fe Drive, 303-623-3460), the brainchild of artist Lauri Lynnxe Murphy. I don’t see every show presented here, but I’ve seen enough to know that whatever’s on view will at least be interesting, if not…
At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, artists were attracted to the West by its majestic scenery. Then, in the late twentieth and early 21st centuries, artists began to notice how people were wrecking those formerly perfect views. A typical approach for many of…
During the past ten years, the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (1600 Pierce Street, 303-753-6046) has emerged as a local powerhouse. Although there are fewer students enrolled in the entire school than there are fine-art majors at Metropolitan State College of Denver, there have been more significant emerging…
On the morning of Monday, May 1, throngs of Mexican-Americans, most of them young, marched through downtown Denver — and cities across the country — in support of the rights of undocumented immigrants. The story of these Mexican exiles is well known, with many of them toiling in the unforgiving…
During the groundbreaking ceremonies for the new Denver Museum of Contemporary Art last week, executive director Cydney Payton addressed the crowd (see “Next Up”). In her remarks, she pointed out that the MCA was “not a hundred-million-dollar project,” since it’s projected to cost only $15 million. Though she didn’t say…
Among the standard features of the visual arts, two attributes rise above the others: what something looks like, and what it means. The rise of modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, to a great extent, all about appearances, with formalism providing a kind of conceptual justification…
Ivar Zeile, director of + Gallery (2350 Lawrence Street, 303-296-0927), went to college in Utah and during his student days became friends with painter Jean Arnold. As so often happens, the two friends drifted apart after school. When Zeile recently came upon Arnold’s work on the Internet, it had been…
