Last month, I met former Denver mayor Quigg Newton, who served from 1947 to 1955. His Honor was being interviewed about his association with Denver painter Vance Kirkland for a documentary about the Kirkland Museum called MuseumMuseum, which will air on KBDI Channel 12. I was there as a creative…
The Andenken Annex, a new art-exhibition venue, opened last weekend in the Steelbridge Loft Building in LoDo, at 1449 Wynkoop Street. Although it’s billed as a branch of the Andenken Gallery, the annex is an independent space, and it has its own director: Warren Kelly, an ambitious young artist who…
Well-known and widely respected Denver sculptor Charles Parson (whom everyone knows as “Chuck”) is the subject of a powerful solo at Artyard, Time eventually comes up green, again, and the show is jam-packed with riveting sculptures and intriguing mixed-media drawings. This new work — all of it done in the…
Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp is a genuine visionary. Over the fifteen years that he’s run the museum, he’s made so many brilliant decisions that it would be impossible to list them all here. Among his greatest accomplishments is surelythe flawless way he handled the hiring of an architect…
Heading south out of Denver on University Boulevard is quite an experience. It’s sort of like an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous — minus the famous part. There’s one swanky neighborhood after another, and they come together amorphously to form would-be towns such as Cherry Hills Village…
In the last thirty years, post-modernism, characterized by irony and self-consciousness, has made major inroads into the fine arts. For a while, the sensibility even managed to supplant modernism; more recently, street-level post-modernism has been expressed by the current retro craze in pop culture, especially in automotive design. But off…
The Andenken Gallery (2110 Market Street, 303-292-3281) is so enormous that the front room alone is as big as some entire galleries and can accommodate fifty paintings or half a dozen large sculptures. As a result, exhibits there — even big group shows — can sometimes look mighty thin. Imagine,…
It’s strange how complementary exhibits often run at the same time or in quick succession. A few years ago, for instance, during the course of one season, it seemed like everyone was showcasing art made from recycled materials. Another time, installation was the medium of choice. This season, we’ve seen…
Force, at Fresh Art (208 South Broadway, 720-570-2255), is an elegant little abstraction show that includes paintings by Harry Tulchin, John Clark and Bill Brazzell, along with sculptures by Alex Harrison. In some ways, the work of the three painters is related: All are engaged in late abstraction, and each…
Representational art has been around for, oh, I don’t know, twelve or fifteen thousand years or so, and has always had a strong appeal. So in spite of the relatively recent developments in the arts — such as the invention of photography a century and a half ago or the…
The new Schlessman Family Branch Library is a big improvement over its predecessor, the Montclair branch. For one thing, the new Denver Public Library outpost is in its own flashy, custom-built building designed by Denver architect Michael Brendle, while the old library was crammed into a couple of shops in…
Last October, Carol Dickinson, the director of Golden’s Foothills Art Center, had a crisis on her hands: Her big spring exhibition — the one scheduled to be on display right now — was abruptly canceled by its organizers. “I needed to come up with something fast, and last fall was…
Alone among American cities, Denver has a direct relationship with Italian modern master Gio Ponti: The 1971 Denver Art Museum is the architect’s only building in North America. Most of Ponti’s buildings, designed from the 1930s until his death in 1979, are in Italy. How Ponti ended up doing a…
The era of the Dutch masters — many of whom have made their way into modern culture on the lids of cigar boxes — is one of those rare subjects in the art world that have generated interest not just from stodgy old art historians, but from everyone. And there’s…
Joseph Riché is a young Denver sculptor who’s been exhibiting his kinetic creations around town for the last several years. His innovative and imaginative work has, in turn, influenced a number of other young sculptors. So it makes a lot of sense to put together a group show that’s devoted…
Painter Santiago Pérez, who lived in Colorado Springs for several years as a member of the U.S. Air Force, is the subject of the multi-dimensional Return of the Wizard, an enormous solo show on display at the Carson-Masuoka Gallery. The impressive exhibit includes more than fifty paintings done over the…
There’s quite a bit worth seeing right now at Pirate (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058). In the main gallery and in the Treasure Chest, longtime co-op member Steve Alarid is the subject of an impressive two-part solo (see previous page). In the Associate’s Space is Gwen Laine: New Works, a show…
A few years ago, it seemed that the art world was aging — and aging fast. The problem wasn’t just Father Time; it was that few, if any, young people seemed to be interested in art. Even many of those associated with the alternative scene — presumably a bastion of…
Ocean Journey is scheduled to close next week, and I, for one, am sorry to see it happen. It’s not that I’m an aquarium enthusiast, it’s just that the building is so darned good. In fact, it is unquestionably one of the finest things to have been built around here…
Maybe it has to do with how complicated the world is, but for whatever reason, contemporary art — locally, nationally and internationally — has been getting increasingly stripped down. Of course, there’s nothing new about minimalism. Even the so-called original, the 1950s- and ’60s-era New York School variant, was hardly…
There’s a very nice show at Pirate right now called said and done. Installed in the main gallery, it is made up of four colored-pencil drawings and six oil paintings by Denver artist Wes Magyar, a contemporary realist. Magyar’s subject matter is the ordinary, if alienated, events in the lives…
If you’re like me, you’re getting pretty tired of all the brown grass, bare trees and snow that’s wearing out its welcome around here. Spring officially starts next week, but the signatures of winter are sure to be around for at least another month. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, then,…
