Just in time for the gift-giving season, the Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) is presenting its annual fundraiser, Blue Light Special, in which nothing costs more than $200, and a portion of each sale is donated to Edge. Although the Edge-sters want their alternative gallery to look like an…
After seeing the stunning Martha Daniels, Amy Metier, Betty Woodman installed on its first floor, I’m tempted to say that the William Havu Gallery has never looked better. This is hardly surprising, and it’s obvious why: All three artists are stylistically linked to one another in a variety of ways…
Last spring, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center announced an incredibly stupid expansion plan. Cooked up by Minneapolis-based facility planner Hammel, Green and Abrahamson, the concept called for a huge box to be plunked down on the front of the building. That building, as it happens, is a 1936 moderne…
Clark Richert is surely on everyone’s list of the most significant Colorado artists of the last quarter-century, and his work has been included in museums and corporate and private collections around the country. What made him famous around here is the work that he began to produce in the 1960s:…
With so many people staying home this winter, it’s virtually a public service that the Spark Gallery (1535 Platte Street, 303 455-4435) has been transformed into a vacationland of the imagination. In the front gallery is Being There, a selection of charcoal drawings and oil paintings by Barbara Shark that…
Last summer, the Denver Art Museum surprised everyone by announcing that it had received the Harmsen Collection of Western and American Indian Art as a gift. The locally famous collection, put together by Bill and Dorothy Harmsen, is made up of thousands of pieces ranging from important paintings and sculptures…
The Andenken Gallery (2110 Market Street, 303-332-5582) is presenting Works by Dianne Barnes, Michelle Barnes, Tracey Barnes, a group show representing two generations of the same family. The senior Barnes is Dianne; Michelle and Tracey are her daughters. Dianne’s work, a series of miniature garments and shrines in Plexiglas boxes,…
Cydney Payton, director of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, feels that the museum’s facility in Sakura Square is too cramped — and who could disagree? As she points out, the space also has a lot of environmental problems: Sunlight streams annoyingly into the galleries, producing glare and uneven lighting; there…
Although Go Fish! (see page 67) fills the first floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art, there’s another show in the gallery upstairs. What do you see when you look over there? (2000 Cooley, East Palo Alto, California) is a photo-based installation by Galia Shapira, an Israeli artist living in…
It is no exaggeration to say that Denver’s entire art landscape changed for the better last week when Ron Judish Fine Arts cut the ribbon on its new and unbelievably grand gallery in Highland. The gallery had been located on Wazee Street in LoDo before shutting down in the middle…
The Spark Gallery (1535 Platte Street, 303-455-4435) typically hosts two shows at once, which is the ordinary practice for most co-ops. Unfortunately, more often than not, the shows are incompatible. I suppose this is the inevitable result of the vagaries of scheduling and the very heterogeneous membership at Spark. This…
The Human Factor: Figuration in American Art, 1950-1995, now showing at the Center for the Visual Arts, is every bit as compelling as the Denver Art Museum’s current Alice Neel exhibit. In fact, not only do both shows explore late twentieth-century representational art, but Neel even makes an appearance at…
Lisa Spivak has put together a show that’s so good you’ll think you’re at the Denver Art Museum’s Close Range Gallery rather than the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design’s Phillip J. Steele Gallery (6875 East Evans Avenue). An economical survey of the region’s dean of modern sculpture, Robert…
The current state of affairs in the world, involving the destruction of the World Trade Center, the war in Afghanistan and the use of bio-agents as weapons, has incidentally made some art exhibits edgier and more difficult than had originally been intended by their organizers. Especially problematic are shows with…
Looking Forward, Looking Black, in the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver (2121 East Asbury Avenue, 303-871-2846), is a tremendously impressive traveling show that explores the perception of African-Americans in art. Most of the artists are African-American, and many deal specifically with racial identity. That’s certainly true…
In the past, administrators at the Denver Art Museum have had a bad habit regarding the scheduling of temporary exhibitions. They’ve lined them up one at a time and then shuttered the rooms — usually the first-floor Stanton and Hamilton galleries — in the downtime between shows. Sometimes this state…
Fresh Art Gallery director Jeanie King is talking about expanding. “I’m looking at two places right now, but I’m not sure I’m going to take either one,” she says. “I’ll decide by the end of the month, with the idea of being open in the spring.” For the foreseeable future,…
Capturing the human form has a very long tradition in the visual arts, going back over 12,000 years. And despite the rise of abstraction and its progeny a century ago, artists are still drawn to the figure as a subject redolent with possibilities. Here in Denver, a number of galleries…
Every once in a while, a show at one of the city’s alternative spaces is as good as — or better than — any exhibit in a prestigious gallery or museum. Chain Reaction: new works by Gail Wagner, at the Edge Gallery through Sunday, October 6, is just such a…
Like that of the academic world, national television and professional football, the art world’s season starts in the fall. Although a few pre-season openers were unveiled in Denver over Labor Day weekend, most of the 2001-2002 entries were set to open a week or two later. I don’t need to…
About thirty years ago, serious fine-art photographers began taking scenic shots that incorporated not only the magnificent landscape — the focus of their predecessors — but also glimpses of development’s litter. By now these poignant dichotomies, once so groundbreaking, are a standard of contemporary landscape photography, particularly here in the…
The modern and contemporary department at the Denver Art Museum has essentially been on a forced retreat for the last year or so. Pushed out of the spacious Stanton rooms on the first floor in order to make room for various traveling blockbusters, the department has had to deal with…
