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…
Denver’s Mizel Museum of Judaica occupies only a small gallery and a couple of offices in the recesses of the large BMH-BJ synagogue. Despite these modest facilities, however, the institution often presents highly provocative art shows that easily rise above the Mizel’s sectarian character. Ben-Zion: In Search of Oneself, which…
Objects of Personal Significance is a loosely organized theme show that handsomely fills the recently relocated and expanded Center for the Visual Arts on Wazee Street, the LoDo gallery of Metropolitan State College of Denver. The exhibit, which has a too-short five-week run, comprises a traveling section organized by Exhibits…
Denver’s collection of art cooperatives–notably, Spark, Pirate, Edge, Core and ILK–are a boon to contemporary art here. Most major cities don’t have anything close. The co-ops’ great cultural value is that they provide opportunities for emerging artists and established talents alike to display their latest work free of commercial constraints;…
The art scene in Denver does not shut down during the summer as it does in the big cities on the east and west coasts. Even here, though, there is a point when everyone seems to be taking a break–and that hiatus is currently on. The last of the summer…
In visual art, representations of the outside world have a formidable history–some 14,000 years’ worth. Which, of course, creates a problem for contemporary artists: How can they record external reality and still do something new? To meet this challenge, painters in recent years have advanced a variety of artistic strategies,…
People in the art world–artists, dealers and collectors alike–generally eschew dressing up. As renowned writer and art collector Gertrude Stein observed in the 1930s, if you don’t have much money, you either buy clothes, or you buy art. Stein kept her own counsel in this regard, collecting a world-class assortment…
Oh, the America of the 1950s. In the nostalgic mind’s eye, the era is all poodle-skirts and roller skates, malt shops furnished with chrome dinettes and jukeboxes filled with Elvis. It was a time when, according to the late career civil servant W. Averill Harriman, the whole country “drank Coca-Cola…
Sean Scully occupies a peculiar niche in the history of recent art. An unabashed modernist, he came of artistic age in the 1980s, an era dominated by an anti-modernist zeitgeist. The assault on modernism generally, and on abstract painting in particular, came from both the front and the rear. While…
You may want to wash your hands after taking in the trio of oddball (a polite but accurate term) conceptual exhibits that fill the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art this summer. While none are visually edifying, all three challenge conventional, and even unconventional, ideas about the nature of art and…
A cultural notion emanating from New York–as do so many–is that the art world closes down for the summer. While this may be true in that city, which wealthy collectors, gallery owners and artists alike abandon for the seashore during the dog days, out here in the hinterlands summer is…
Sally Perisho, the highly regarded director of Metropolitan State College’s Center for the Visual Arts, has been at the eye of a whirlwind the past few weeks. Last month her gallery moved from the corner of Wazee and 17th Streets in LoDo to a pair of storefronts next to the…
A new piece of public sculpture planned for the Denver Performing Arts Complex may yet displace the goofy entrance canopy at the Denver Art Museum as the most reviled object in the local art world. If the winning entry in a recent competition–Jonathan Borofsky’s as-yet-untitled monumental six-story-tall sculpture of conventionalized…
Contemporary art has fractured into innumerable directions and styles since the 1970s, but the situation has never been as wildly pluralistic as it is today. For proof of this diversity, see three current shows at two very different local venues. But catch them while you can–they’re all set to close…
On a recent sunny afternoon, Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp was standing under the museum’s still-controversial entrance canopy on Acoma Plaza. Not that the canopy provides any shade: Though workers began erecting it last fall, it’s still not finished. The stainless-steel panels intended to provide it with a roof…
As lower downtown’s sidewalks have become crowded with shoppers, tourists and sports fans, the trend among art galleries has been to move out or close up. That’s not just the story in LoDo, but on Broadway and throughout the central business district. The problem? Spiraling rents combined with sluggish art…
