The Nazis had a perversely high regard for the arts. As early as 1933, Adolf Hitler’s goons began a campaign against modern art, closing art schools, expelling modernist art teachers from German universities, and arresting and incarcerating scores of artists. Hitler, after all, was a failed artist who, as a…
The Round World gallery opened quietly last fall on the edge of downtown Denver, moving into a pair of rehabbed storefronts that share a red-brick Victorian building with the popular La Coupole French restaurant. It’s an obscure location for an art gallery; the neighborhood is neither LoDo, which remains downtown’s…
Vance Kirkland was the biggest name in Denver’s art world for much of the twentieth century. From the 1930s through the 1970s, he dominated the local art scene, not just as the city’s premier modern painter, but also as an influential art teacher and a powerful force at the Denver…
It used to be that real estate developers actually had to have plans to build something new before the Denver City Council would let them demolish a historic building. But at the council meeting February 23, Denver developer Bruce Berger didn’t have to come up with even that much. He…
Two compelling photography exhibits now at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities include nearly 100 works of art–and almost as many different ideas. The first show starts off with a titillating posted proviso: Children will not be admitted unless accompanied by an adult. But don’t get too excited…
The building at the corner of 17th and Wazee Streets, where Metropolitan State College’s Center for the Visual Arts occupies most of the ground floor, is currently shrouded in a jungle of metal pipes. But the oddly artistic maze isn’t part of the center’s fabulous Contemporary Metals USA exhibit. Instead,…
For many years, getting real was the chief preoccupation of the world’s painters. The Stone Age artists who decorated all those caves in France and Spain wanted views for their viewless spaces, and they painted what they knew: mainly bison and horses. The idea that painting exists to provide a…
Already, the art season that began last fall and will end this spring has seen its share of newsworthy events. Some of these developments, especially those in the publicly funded realm, seem all to the good. In November there was the completion, after five years of effort, of the multi-million-dollar…
It was with the idea of “breaking the winter doldrums” that Emmanuel Gallery director Carol Keller organized the compelling installation exhibit Ed & Stan at Emmanuel. Consider those doldrums broken. The “Ed” of the show’s title is sculptor R. Edward Lowe, and the “Stan” is photographer Standish Lawder. Though they…
Downtown Denver has been home to nearly all of the largest, most expensive and most important buildings constructed in the Rocky Mountain region over the past 100 years. It’s a history book written in stone. But there are some missing chapters. The buildings still standing in the central business district…
New York-based artist and author Art Spiegelman is among the most important contemporary cartoonists in the world. And his considerable fame is based almost wholly on Maus, a sometimes hard-bound comic book first published in 1986 by Pantheon Books. It’s no exaggeration to say that Maus is a masterpiece. The…
Mark Sink is both a prominent Denver photographer and a member of a prominent local family. That explains why he’s a tuxedo-clad semi-regular on the society pages of the city’s dailies, typically seen in photographs with one or the other of his divorced parents. His father is Chuck Sink, an…
If things had gone slightly differently on the night of December 22, 1989, the Denver Art Museum’s current show Old Masters Brought to Light: European Paintings From the National Museum of Art of Romania would never have happened. Because that night, as the iron grip of reviled Communist dictator Nicolae…
The Colorado History Museum’s new exhibit on the 1960s and ’70s is filled with contradictions. It’s elegant in places, crude elsewhere; there are joyful moments and sad ones. And conveying these contradictions is exactly what the show’s principal organizer, Stan Oliner, had in mind. “As I looked at the period,…
LoDo’s been a work in progress for a long time. Torn-up streets and sidewalks have been a neighborhood standard for the past decade–as have those many hooded parking meters around the ubiquitous construction zones. But nothing’s been worse than the situation that has confronted patrons of the CSK Gallery, which,…
It’s been a hectic few weeks for Carol Keller, director of the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria campus. When she hasn’t been scrambling to protect a permanent collection of photographs from art thieves, she’s been pulling a few capers of her own–in her case, perfectly legal ones. First, the thievery…
Just in time for the holidays, the Denver Art Museum has raised the curtain on its seven-year, $7.5 million facelift. Judging by the crowds–more than 13,000 visitors showed up on the first weekend alone–many people have found it worth the wait. But we may have to wait a little longer…
Just what is well-known Denver artist Roland Bernier implying when he calls his current show at the Mackey Gallery Casting Pearls? Is the audience–the gallery-going public–the swine? “The title is taken from one of the pieces in the show which literally pairs pearls and swine, so I wasn’t trying to…
Each of the artists in the Arvada Center’s current show Steel: Nature and Space gets plenty of room to stretch out. And that’s a good thing, since Robert Mangold, Andrew Libertone, Russell Beardsley and Carl Reed–four of the most talked-about contemporary sculptors in Colorado–create wildly different forms of sculpture. Oddly…
It’s no exaggeration to say that American culture got its greatest boost ever from the rise of the Nazis in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. Hitler’s hatred for modernism in the arts led many of the most important contemporary figures to flee the continent and seek safe haven in…
The spectacular show The Collectors Vision marks the first exhibit presented under the auspices of Denver’s new Museum of Contemporary Art. And though it’s been a very long time coming, this show on the mezzanine of the 1999 Broadway Building has proven well worth the wait. The idea of a…
Those cold fronts that have recently swept down from Wyoming can mean only one thing–the start of the fall art season. And the forecast for this year’s exhibition climate? Batten down the hatches. Exciting shows are cropping up everywhere, even at the almost-always-overcast alternative spaces. And there are some big…
