More than any other medium, ceramics has achieved a high level of artistic development in Colorado. The glorious early history of ceramics here was partly determined by the availability of high-quality clay. Beginning in the 1890s, potters from the East and Midwest migrated to Colorado in a kind of clay…
Cydney Payton, the director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, has little trouble filling the place with exciting exhibits. In fact, she’s crammed so much into BMoCA that one of the four current shows, Housed, begins not in the museum, but on the street out front. Housed is a…
Over the past twenty years, blockbuster shows have become a necessary evil at museums. When they succeed–and they usually do, at least financially–they increase attendance, and that’s the bottom line in the exhibition business. But while they may attract big numbers economically, such shows can be aesthetically bankrupt. At the…
Russell Beardsley emerged on the Denver art scene while still a student. The first shows of his conceptual metal sculptures were presented to both critical and popular acclaim in 1993, a year before he earned his BFA from the University of Colorado at Denver. Back then, his pieces most often…
The Colorado History Museum’s major exhibition this season is Spirit of Spider Woman, an intelligent and elegantly presented examination of Navajo weaving that’s been two years in the making. But don’t expect the dry, straightforward approach that is typical of the CHM. Instead, like the exhibit’s catchy title, Spider Woman…
When John Hull moved to Denver last year to become the head of the art department at the University of Colorado’s Denver campus, the city didn’t gain just another academic. It also netted itself an important artist, as shown in John Hull Narrative Paintings, Hull’s regional debut exhibit at the…
The landscape has served as both artistic inspiration and subject matter for thousands of years, dating back to Neolithic cave painting. And today the landscape’s allure is just as strong, even if the pieces it inspires are often far from traditional. Like landscape-driven art, Eight Ounce Fred, a funky little…
The role of photography in contemporary art hasn’t always been black and white. Although today photography is highly prized, as recently as thirty years ago, many in the art world–including the director of the Denver Art Museum–questioned whether it qualified as fine art at all. As the story goes, the…
When British artist Erica Daborn moved to Los Angeles in 1987, she came empty-handed. Leaving her work back in England, she arrived in the United States with little more than her art degrees from the Winchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art and a reputation for her…
By the early twentieth century, artists from the East Coast, as well as emigres from Europe, were making their way to the handful of art colonies springing up out West. They came to places like Santa Fe, Sedona, even Colorado Springs, for a variety of reasons, ranging from magnificent scenery…
The string of rooms on the ground floor of the funky Sibell-Wolle Fine Arts building that are rather grandly known as the CU Art Galleries have just undergone a makeover that makes them more worthy of the name. The formerly plain-Jane spaces have been dressed up with a fresh coat…
The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver finally has a somewhat permanent address: Sakura Square. The ground-floor, two-story MoCA/D space fronts a garden done in a handsome Japanese style, with rocks, gravel and several of those tortured miniature Ponderosa pines that are native to our state. It makes an appropriate entrance for…
Since Virginia Folkestad received her bachelor of fine arts degree from Metropolitan State College in 1991, she’s gained a considerable reputation for her thoroughly thought-out environments. In 1993 she simultaneously joined Spark and Edge, guaranteeing at least two annual opportunities to express her artistic vision through the interrelated installations she…
Though still in its inaugural year, Ron Judish Fine Arts has already established itself as one of the city’s most interesting galleries. Although director Ron Judish has earned this reputation with excellent exhibits featuring nationally famous artists, he doesn’t ignore local talent. And his current show, 3, is a real…
The private passions of two collectors have gone very public in Boulder. Sans Titre: Works From the Collection of Peggy Scott and David Teplitzky, which opened in mid-January at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, has been attracting huge crowds–and not just the partyers who broke all BMoCA attendance records…
Many collectors are interested in buying so-called museum-quality artwork. For a gallery owner, the trick is to convince potential clients that what they’re looking at could just as easily hang in a museum as in their own home. But Bill Havu, owner of the William Havu Gallery, came up with…
Perhaps because of its majestic scenery, or maybe because the skies are not cloudy all day, Colorado has become, in the twentieth century, an important regional center for fine-art photography. What’s most remarkable about this wonderful state of affairs is that photography has flourished here in the near total absence…
A couple of weeks ago, a group exhibit called Views of Solitude opened and thus served as the premier display of the brand-new William Havu Gallery. The show and, even more so, the gallery itself, elicited audible gasps from many of the more than 500 exhibition-goers who attended the opening…
For its holiday offering, LoDo’s Robischon Gallery has teamed up a pair of disparate shows that together give viewers some sense of the pluralism reigning at the end of this century. In the series of rooms that make up the gallery’s main space, including what is from time to time…
In the expansive Hamilton Galleries on the first floor of the Denver Art Museum is a glorious show, Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art, which highlights a dazzling array of American Indian art. The Fred Harvey Company was a hotel and restaurant chain in the…
Ron Judish Fine Arts, which opened just this past spring, has already distinguished itself as one of the city’s finest commercial galleries. But the current Judish show, Andres Serrano: A Survey, which sketches out the career of one of the nation’s most famous photographers, really puts the place on the…
With the grand opening of the much-anticipated Denver Pavilions adjacent to the Adam’s Mark Hotel addition that was completed last year, it’s now official: The three blocks that line the south side of the 16th Street Mall between Court Place and Welton Street now make up what is surely the…
