On the morning of August 9, Mayor John Hickenlooper stood on the front steps of the City and County Building and made a stunning announcement: The City of Denver had formally committed to building a museum to house the work of abstract-expressionist giant Clyfford Still in exchange for a promise…
Walking into the front space at Pirate: a contemporary art oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) is like stepping back into the early ’90s when half the shows at the alternative galleries were installations of questionable quality. There’s a reason for this: Wake Up Little Susie: Pregnancy & Power Before Roe…
Colorado has been a regional center for ceramics for just over a century. The reason is obvious, at least to gardeners and structural engineers: It’s all that darned clay. This readily available natural product led to what I call a “clay rush” beginning in the 1890s. In the late-nineteenth and…
The Sandra Phillips Gallery (744 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-5969) has kept a pretty low profile since it opened last summer. Though I’d heard of it, I didn’t have any idea where it was. In retrospect, this is strange because it’s right across the street from Space and just a few…
Though it’s a block or so to the south, there’s no missing the University of Denver campus while driving along I-25. For that matter, you can’t miss it from South University Boulevard or Evans Avenue, either. It’s all those recently built, eye-popping post-modern buildings. This architectural prominence wasn’t always true…
Along with a lot of other people in Denver, I had my heart broken last winter when Skyline Park was bulldozed. The decision to destroy the park, which runs for three blocks along Arapahoe Street between 15th and 18th streets, was the last of many terrible moves made by the…
It’s the biggest art news of the summer — but don’t get excited, because it’s not necessarily a good thing: The + Zeile Judish Gallery is now minus Judish and has changed its name to + Gallery. Both the story and the new name strike me as ridiculous. I spoke…
Peter Illig’s solo (see review) is rocking the front of Pirate: a contemporary art oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058), making it a hard act to follow. Luckily for us, emerging artist Warren Kelly, whose show children’s games is installed in the Associates’ Space, stands up to Illig’s more ambitious endeavor…
Members of the Denver City Council and community leaders have been talking a lot lately about improving East Colfax Avenue. And I have to admit, even if I love the honky-tonk character of the street — and I do — it does look pretty shabby in places. This is strange,…
A few years ago, University of Colorado regents made the rash decision to abandon the school’s Health Sciences Center campus in east Denver and move it to the Fitzsimons campus in Aurora. As illogical as that idea was, there’s no second-guessing it now, because it’s a fait accompli. Departments of…
There are a number of noteworthy changes under way at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Now, surely I’m not the only person in the area who cringes when the word “change” is used in the same sentence as “Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.” Others will recall, as I do,…
In the intimate gallery at the front of Artyard, (1251 South Pearl Street, 303-777-3219), Kansas artist Marc Berghaus is the subject of the solo Linguistic Utopias, #1. Berghaus has been exhibiting his sculptures in the area for a few years; just in the past few months his work has been…
There’s a magnificent retrospective at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art devoted to the work of the late John David Rigsby, who was a major powerhouse in Colorado’s art scene. Dots, Blobs and Angels surveys more than forty years’ worth of the remarkable artist’s paintings and sculptures. The year 1993 was…
There’s a great new gallery called weilworks (3611 Chestnut Place, 303-308-9345) that just opened this past spring. It’s located across the street from Ironton, in the industrial neighborhood north of downtown. Unlike most of the businesses around here — including Ironton — weilworks is housed in its own custom-designed structure,…
There’s an unusual convergence of related art shows at many of the state’s galleries, particularly those in Denver. Scores of venues have arranged their schedules to feature the topic of weaving (broadly speaking) in conjunction with the sixteenth biennial meeting of the Handweavers Guild of America, taking place at the…
In the front room of Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) is the notable solo Telling Fantasies, which features recent paintings and drawings by Denver artist Irene Delka McCray. McCray’s style is realistic, and she’s thoroughly accomplished technically. She revels in accurate renderings of fabric folds and…
Repetition is a key to all human endeavors, from music to math to the sciences, from the spoken word to the written one. And don’t forget history and the social sciences, which are all about repeating things. In the fine arts, too, repetition is basic and, as far as I…
Here’s a delicious irony: Many of the artists exploring what’s inaccurately called “the cutting edge” are in their fifties, sixties and even seventies, while many of the twenty-somethings are into traditional art. Go figure. This youthful interest in traditional art is amply demonstrated by an important show titled cadence at…
I think it’s exciting to watch the Denver Art Museum’s new Frederic C. Hamilton Building rise out of the ground, as it has been doing over the past few months just south of West 13th Avenue along the vacated axis of Acoma Street. Currently, the Daniel Libeskind-designed structure is merely…
Earlier this season, Cordell Taylor Gallery and Ron Judish Fine Art merged into the new +Zeile/Judish Gallery (2350 Lawrence Street, 303-296-0927), and everyone must have known that some of the artists they each represented would have to go. There were just too many of them. Owner Ivar Zeile, partner Ron…
For a long time, art done in the Western states during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was held in low regard. It suffered in comparison to both earlier Western art and art done in New York during the same time period. But things have started to change during…
Last summer, the ILK co-op all but disappeared, and for a long time, its space, just inside the main entrance of Pirate gallery, was not only closed, but boarded up. Then a new crew of members, headed by artist and writer Troy Briere, took over and began to present shows…
