Many galleries go the route of the easy-to-do group show in the month of December, because it provides viewers with a wide variety of potential gift selections and because the holidays are overflowing with other kinds of seasonal events. Only during the dog days of August–a time when no one…
One of the great art soap operas of the past year has been the acrimonious split between Open Press, the respected printmaking outfit, and CSK Gallery, one of the newer kids on Wazee Street. Since December 1993, the printmaker and the gallery had been joined at the hip, sharing the…
In the 1950s, when it seemed as if every artist in America was working in an abstract style, a handful of visionaries in the San Francisco area were creating to the beat of a different drummer. The “Beats,” close cultural allies of the Beat poets, defied fashion by addressing recognizable…
Russell Beardsley’s sculptures, wall reliefs, mixed-media pieces and an installation are interspersed with Debra Goldman’s photos and photo-constructions in the current show at the Mackey Gallery. Though there are few obvious similarities between Beardsley’s Absence Reveals Presence and Goldman’s Recordar, the exhibits are highly compatible in tone, perhaps the product…
If it’s a taste of Manhattan modernism you’re craving this fall (and who isn’t?) run, do not walk, to Options 3–Robert Motherwell, the Denver Art Museum’s exhibit of twenty newly acquired paintings, collages and works on paper from this modern-day giant. Critics have sometimes dismissed Motherwell’s work as too pretty…
The Alternative Arts Alliance Open Show, which closes this weekend, is an annual demonstration of just how difficult it is for artists to create credible installations. Thank goodness an antidote is at the ready: Vital Connections, an intelligent and deeply felt installation by Virginia Folkestad that currently occupies the front…
Quick–name three women artists from Latin America. Well, there’s Frida Kahlo, of course, and then there’s, uh…er…. That most of us know so little about the art of our neighbors to the south makes a point about how art appreciation in this country can be xenophobic–that is, when it’s not…
The American frontier of the nineteenth century was a bonanza for both nature-loving romantics and the pragmatic forces of manifest destiny. And at the nexus of these two very different groups were the artists who recorded it all firsthand as members of the four major survey parties sent to map…
Fads, fashion and fancy are all reflected in the historic art that is of interest to people today. And just like art itself, the study of art history is subject to change over time. One of the sea changes in the field in the last twenty years has been the…
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of that country’s most famous contemporary artists have come to settle in the West, especially in New York City. This colony of Russian expatriates has had a profound effect on American contemporary art. And the artist’s artist of the group is Oleg…
Expressing a variety of minority views through art is the goal of two exhibits currently on view at Golden’s Foothills Art Center. According to center director Carol Dickinson, the shows also are intended to reflect how minority artists can use their art to “triumph over victimization.” The Holocaust is a…
Several current local shows zero in on the renewed vitality of abstract art in the Nineties. Chief among these are the group exhibit Reinventing the Abstract, at the Mackey Gallery, and a single-artist display, Gary Passanise, at the CSK Gallery. In the Mackey show, gallery director Mary Mackey includes her…
It truly is fall in Denver, and the trees themselves are coming down along with the leaves. Given this loss to our visual environment, it’s some solace that another, more expected feature of autumn also has arrived: the start of high season for the art world. This year in Denver,…
Museum-quality art can often be found at LoDo’s Robischon Gallery. Rarely, though, are the gallery’s three display spaces all devoted to the work of a single artist, as they are in the current exhibit John Buck–New Work. The special treatment is warranted, given Buck’s formidable artistic output of the last…
Lately, and increasingly, museums across the country and around the world have begun “deaccessioning”–selling off parts of their existing collections as a ready source of “free money” to pay for new acquisitions. It’s money, more than art, that’s hard for many of these institutions to come by, especially in recent…
Words, just like art objects, are subject to fashion. Suddenly everyone is using the word “venerable” or mouthing a phrase like “narrative content.” Everywhere I go these days, artists, especially those associated with the alternative scene, are talking about a “critical mass”–or, more properly, the lack of one in Denver’s…
People often talk about art when they’re actually referring to something else. We hear about the art of the deal, the art of medicine. There’s the art of cooking. And the art of politics. Even the art of baseball. Aren’t comedians and rock stars called artists? In fact, it seems…
To many in the art world, painting is the center stage, the place where the aesthetic stakes are the highest. The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s thought-provoking exhibition Pure Painting provides snapshot views of current events in the venerable medium. Organizing such a show (this one was put together by…
The depiction of the nude figure in the fine arts isn’t just ancient–it’s genuinely age-old. In the Paleolithic cave paintings of France and Spain, usually seen as the oldest works of art on Earth, those famous bison and deer are being pursued by nude men with spears. In the tens…
A principal benefit of following the Denver art scene is the wealth of local artists who pursue their work oblivious to the shifting sands of contemporary trends. Sometimes, though, a solitary approach can lead an artist right into the middle of those trends. That’s apparently what’s happened with Roland Bernier’s…
For nearly twenty years, the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute has chosen a handful of writers, dancers, visual artists and others to receive “associateships”–essentially $1,000 stipends. Since the institute’s founding in 1976, more than 100 individuals–not all of them women–have been selected. And from these awards has emerged an annual art…
Buildings are among the most public of artifacts–they’re really out there, literally. So it’s a shame that most of Denver’s built environment is so bad, more “narcotecture” than architecture. On the bright side, this sorry situation makes the good structures all the easier to recognize, even for neophytes. And surely…
