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…
In the last decade or so, the Mexican religious holiday El Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) has not only been observed in Denver’s large Hispanic community, but it has also become a marked occasion for celebration in the city’s art world. This is mostly because for years,…
Surveying the two exhibits that make up the fall opener at her namesake Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery, director Robin Rule is clearly pleased. Her bright mood reflects the fact that not only do the two shows each highlight the thoughtful and interesting work of very good contemporary artists, but–and…
Only rarely can one individual literally change the cultural landscape of a major city. But that’s exactly what Nancy Tieken has done since she came to Denver for health reasons in 1991. Bored by a lengthy recuperation process, Tieken, a lifetime art historian with a BFAfrom Radcliffe, volunteered at the…
Though it may seem as if the current exhibition season has just gotten under way–and it has–some of the fall openers have already closed. But there’s still time to see three marvelous shows that are just entering their final days at two of the city’s most notable galleries. These three…
Eight years ago Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp hired his old friend Craig Miller, with whom he had worked at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, to put together a design collection at the DAM. The museum had accumulated a hundred years’ worth of chairs, vases and candlesticks, but…
Words may be the currency of the 1990s in the same way money was the lingua franca of the 1980s. Never has this been more clear than in the political crisis that has reached a dramatic pitch in recent weeks. We’ve all heard President Clinton “parse” his words, while his…
It’s hardly unexpected to find art shows at museums–unless the museum is that funky Platte Valley landmark the Forney Transportation Museum. It is this unlikely venue that well-known contemporary artist Stephen Batura chose for his most recent, untitled show. In a sense, the Forney was a natural for this Denver…
