Earthly Delights

Color, Line and Form: Abstraction in Metal, at Boulder’s Dairy Center for the Arts, is a duet featuring the sculptures of William Vielehr and Doug Wilson. Both have been creating abstract-expressionist sculpture for the last thirty years, but since their studios are in Boulder, they are less well-known in Denver…

Art Beat

The Carol Keller Gallery is extending Dan Ragland: Recent Work through December 18, so there’s still a couple of days to catch this intriguing photography show. Ragland, who lives and works in Denver, specializes in edgy and disturbing pictures, even when his subject is a vase filled with flowers. But…

Disappearing Legacy

I’m going to posit a radical claim, one that flies in the face of standard beliefs. I think Denver was a more sophisticated town twenty or thirty years ago than it is today. And though the city is more crowded and there are a lot more big-box retailers and chain…

Art Beat

Using Your Faculties is a three-part exhibition series at the Emmanuel Gallery that features the work of the art instructors at Auraria’s three institutions of higher learning. Part two of the series, which showcases talent from the University of Colorado at Denver, is on display now and runs through December…

Funkadelic

It’s sort of funny. LoDo’s Robischon Gallery, one of the city’s most straight-laced contemporary outlets (it sells the work of Robert Motherwell, for heaven’s sake), often shows some of the oddest and most raucous exhibits around town. That’s surely the case with the holiday offering Robert Hudson: Ceramics, Sculpture, Drawings,…

Art Beat

Studio 1818, a boutique-style gallery in LoDo, features art glass, ceramics and jewelry in addition to paintings, sculptures and custom framing. The art exhibits are installed mostly in the back room, which is also where the frame samples are displayed — but the shows usually spill out into the front…

Out West

More by happenstance than by design, three of Colorado’s most important cultural institutions — The Denver Art Museum, the Denver Public Library and the Colorado History Museum — are all lined up, one after another, along the south side of the Civic Center. It wasn’t always so. The DAM got…

Art Beat

Through the weekend at the Spark Gallery is Elaine Ricklin & Jennifer Parisi: Recent Work, which sounds like a collaborative show but is, in fact, two solo presentations. In the front gallery, Ricklin has lined the three walls with individually framed Polaroid XS-70 photos, which are either landscapes or still-life…

Opposites Attract

In the year or so that it has been open, Ron Judish Fine Arts in LoDo has established itself as a key player in the contemporary art world in Denver. Its well-thought-out shows always feature an eclectic mix of the work of top local talents and nationally celebrated artists, and…

Art Beat

Guiry’s, which just opened a new, 25,000-square-foot store in the Ballpark neighborhood near Coors Field, is celebrating a century in business this year. “At first it was a wall-cleaning business,” says Dick Guiry, president of the company and grandson of founder Joseph Guiry. “Then they got into selling mirrors and…

Mature Audiences

The Denver Art Museum is riding high on the success of the traveling Impressionism exhibition, which pushed overall attendance to record levels — nearly 100,000 visitors in October alone — and following its $62.5 million capital improvement bond, which was overwhelmingly approved by voters last week. The money, which will…

Art Beat

You’ve got about ten days left to catch Master Drawings: 700 Years of Inspiration at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show, which includes approximately 150 pieces, highlights a selection of drawings from the collection of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. The exhibit has been intelligently installed in…

Venus and Mars

Bill Havu has put together a wild amusement park ride of a show called Women & Allegory at his prestigious William Havu Gallery in the Golden Triangle. The exhibit, which lasts through the weekend, features a quartet of artists who deal with both feminist and feminine imagery. The work, according…

Art Beat

For the last few years, the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts has hosted exhibits downtown in the lobby of Republic Plaza — a feat that isn’t easy to pull off, since the lobby itself is a work of art. Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the lobby is in…

Un-Conventional

Voters will have a chance to decide on two proposals during Tuesday’s election that should be of great interest to the art world. The first is a no-brainer. Who would begrudge the Denver Art Museum a lousy $62.5 million — about the price of one good Van Gogh — to…

Art Beat

It’s easy to think of Elizabeth Schlosser Fine Art in Cherry Creek as a purveyor of paintings and sculpture from the region’s past, since a typical exhibit at the boutique style gallery showcases the work of deceased artists who were active in the early to mid-twentieth century. But Schlosser also…

Scenic Overlook

All this week, the Community College of Denver on the Auraria campus has been hosting a national conference on photography titled “Photography and the Creative Process.” Free and open to the public, the conference was organized by renowned local photographer Ron Wohlauer, who has taught photography at CCD since 1975…

Art Beat

The Edge Gallery is featuring three interesting solo shows right now, and that doesn’t happen very often. In the front space, Carlos Frésquez continues his exploration of personal and ethnic identity in Tiempotrippin en El Meso-Moderno World. Frésquez’s longtime interest is in the three cultures in which local Hispanics live:…

A Good Impression

The hippest of the hipsters on the art scene have been doing lots of pooh-poohing and naysaying about the blockbuster Impressionism: Paintings Collected by European Museums, which is now playing at the Denver Art Museum. Essentially, these cool-eratti believe that impressionism is too pedestrian for them — and that the…

Art Beat

The O’Sullivan Arts Center, located on the campus of Regis University, is an oft-overlooked exhibition venue that always has something worth seeing. Right now in the large and handsome gallery is a duet in which painter Amy Metier has been paired with sculptor Richard Stephenson. The exhibit, called See Saw,…

East Coast, West Coast

The Robischon Gallery has launched its fall and winter schedule with Manuel Neri, an important exhibit that focuses on the latest creations by the world-famous California artist. Neri has become a household name around here; this is the third time in recent years that Robischon has presented a solo turn…

Art Beat

Collide, which closes tomorrow at the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria campus, is an elegantly presented and intelligently put-together presentation of some Asian-American artists who work in the region. The show was organized by participants Ken Iwamasa and Polly Chang and beautifully installed by Mark Masuoka, Emmanuel’s director. In addition…