Chance Operations Gallery (232 East 20th Avenue, 303-894-0377) is a pretty funky place. In fact, I nominate it as the funkiest art venue around. There’s the requisite bohemian location, of course — a shabby storefront in a row of shabby storefronts at the very shabby northeast end of downtown (you…
Foothills Art Center, which was founded in 1968, is located in the charming old part of Golden, next to the Colorado School of Mines campus. The center is so quaint, it looks like it came right off a postcard. Ensconced in a nineteenth-century church and a pair of red-brick Victorian…
Terry Maker is one of Colorado’s most relentlessly innovative artists, constantly changing approaches. Over the years, she’s exhibited hard-edged paintings, sculptures made of old books, and beach balls covered in latex and wax. For heaven’s sake, she even did an installation inside a travel trailer. Her latest wild creations are…
New York City is not just the center of the art world; it’s the center of American culture. That was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt almost a year and a half ago by the tragic events that occurred on 9/11. With that event, the city’s place in the…
The Museo de las Américas (861 Santa Fe Drive, 303-571-4401) is hosting Frida Kahlo, a photography show documenting the life of the iconic Mexican painter, who died almost fifty years ago. During her short life, Kahlo was hugely famous, but she is even more famous now. Celebrities such as Madonna…
It’s all but official: Young Denver artist Emmett Culligan can now be considered one of the top contemporary sculptors in Colorado. And the proof is in the spectacular Emmett Culligan: Sculpture, currently on display at Judish Fine Arts. The show, which opened a couple of weeks ago, has generated a…
It’s hard to believe today — what with underwear-clad models dancing in Kmart commercials and Joe Millionaire running around in a skimpy Speedo — that twenty years ago, the idea of a man as a sex object was considered outrageous and clearly in bad taste. Then, in the 1980s, along…
I think it was triggered back in the 1990s, as people looked ahead to the new millennium. When the 21st century dawned, everyone everywhere and in every field of human endeavor seemed to look to the past to chart the course of the future. This retrospective mood constituted a major…
Roach Photos has been in its distinctive old building on Broadway and Ninth Avenue, just south of downtown, since the mid-1970s, but its long and proud history goes back way before that. The business, which specializes in the production of photomurals, was launched in 1936 by the late commercial photographer…
Last week, Jeanie Nuanes King unveiled her long-awaited Fresh Art with the inaugural exhibit Momentum, a contemporary group show of painters and sculptors. It’s hard to believe that just over two years ago, King opened her first gallery in a tiny storefront on South Broadway — especially considering how far…
The typical show at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) highlights the work of the co-op’s members. But around this time every year, Edge presents a show devoted to non-members. The current version, which is on display now, is titled Emerging Artists: 2003 Edge Invitational. In the past, this annual…
Photography is a complicated topic from the perspective of the fine arts. There are so many different types of photography — scientific, documentary, fashion, advertising, experimental — all of which may or may not qualify as fine art. Not only that, but the very nature of the medium is difficult…
Last year, Kathy Andrews, gallery director at the Arvada Center (6901 Wadsworth Boulevard, Arvada, 720-898-7200) jumped ship to take on a similar gig at Metro’s Center for the Visual Arts in LoDo. Although the current Arvada shows were set in the schedule by Andrews, they were put together without her…
Studio Aiello, under the direction of Tyler and Monica Petty Aiello, is set to grow into a full-scale art center over the next few years. In an old commercial building and on an adjacent lot in the far north reaches of the downtown railroad yards, the Aiellos plan to hold…
Each year, the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (1513 Boulder Street, 303-455-8999) selects three members as prizewinners and presents their works in an annual exhibit. The latest version of the show has the already-outdated-sounding title of 2002 CPAC Member Awards. (In fairness to the organizers, the exhibit opened in December, so…
It doesn’t have what I’d call a seasonal character, but Eye Candy, at Judish Fine Arts, does feel at times like a really wild holiday party. As the title implies, the exhibit is not sharply defined, but comprises things whimsically selected by gallery director Ron Judish according to whether they…
It all started in November, when Art Students League artist Cong Lu won a prize for his painting “Self-Portrait of a Martyr.” Conservative in style, it shows a very buff Lu raising his T-shirt, revealing that his abs are strapped with explosives. Some students and viewers objected, and this thin…
Contemporary art is dangerous territory to map. There are so many different aesthetic and intellectual paths to follow, half of them leading in opposite directions. There’s a confusing array of named and unnamed stylistic tendencies vying for attention and comment — some concerned with championing the object, others with destroying…
With so much attention directed at all the major exhibits around, many modest but equally worthwhile offerings get lost in the shuffle. Hopefully, that won’t be the fate of a quartet of interesting solos in two of the city’s co-ops. In the front space at Spark Gallery (1535 Platte Street,…
Though his studio was in Pennsylvania, internationally known modernist-sculptor and designer Harry Bertoia, who died in 1978, had a number of Colorado connections. For many years he served as a fellow of the Aspen Institute, and there are important pieces of his work in the permanent collections of the Denver…
As a part of the Leah Cohen Festival of Books and Authors at the Mizel Center (350 South Dahlia Street, 303-316-6360), the Singer Gallery is fitted out with Illustrations by Leonard Baskin, Michelle Barnes and Barry Moser. The show was organized by gallery director Simon Zalkind and is made up…
In television, ratings determine everything. That’s why the networks pull out all the stops in programming during sweeps weeks. There are only a few of them during the year, but you know when one comes around, because the entire Godfather series runs on Bravo, MTV airs a Jackass marathon, there’s…
