Between the First World War and the 1930s, the United States experienced an internal population shift unprecedented in its history. More than 1 million rural blacks left their sharecropper farms in the South and came north in search of factory jobs and better living conditions in the industrialized urban centers…
Abstract expressionism is the bane of the uninitiated. Paintings of this type have no discernable subject and typically look sloppy, covered with scribbles, drips and scratches. They’re the kind of thing people are talking about when they say “My kid could do that.” But to artists, the problem of creating…
A major event in the local art world of the 1980s was the “21 Year Show,” presented eleven years ago at the now-defunct Progresso Gallery. It displayed the works of a group of local artists 21 years after they came together at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Now comes…
In recent years, Loveland has acquired a national reputation as the place where romantics and cornballs send their Valentine’s Day cards to be canceled with a “Love-Land” postmark at the local post office (which, by the way, features some charming WPA murals by Russell Sherman). Perhaps it’s this saccharine sentimentality…
Few artists in this country have achieved the kind of fame that Georgia O’Keeffe has. Her life and work are, without exaggeration, the stuff of legend. But there’s been a downside to O’Keeffe’s celebrity. Some of her most famous paintings have become trivialized through excessive reproduction, especially in the form…
The black-and-white photos of Don Donaghy are often out of focus, overexposed and underlighted, so it’s no surprise to learn that Donaghy has never used a light meter. But as Photographs From the Street, a retrospective of Donaghy’s 1960s work now at the Grant Gallery, makes clear, a disregard for…
Kathy Andrews was named curator for the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities only about a year ago. But she’s already come through with a must-see show. A Gathering of Galleries/A Gathering of Artists is an exciting look at the art market in Denver. Andrews, who says she wanted…
Odd as it may seem, Denver hasn’t always been the art-making hub of Colorado. From the nineteenth century up to the 1970s, Colorado Springs was the home of our most important contemporary art scene. And it was there that a loosely affiliated group formed the state’s first true artist cooperatives–years…
In Denver, like everywhere else, there are two highly distinct and opposing camps when it comes to the fine arts. There are the artists associated with a number of contemporary movements, and there are those who embrace more traditional styles. The rivalry between the two is anything but friendly: Traditionalists…
The husband-and-wife team of Tracy and Sushe Felix emerged from the free-for-all that was 1980s art in Colorado. The Manitou Springs couple was associated with a hip, cartoonlike approach that was part and parcel of the neo-expressionism that dominated the period. But in the meantime, they’ve changed significantly, taking their…
The Mackey Gallery is as filled with color as a spring garden. But bright hues are about the only common ground shared by the two very different artists on display. Lynn Heitler’s work falls readily within the tradition of abstract expressionism. Her more or less instinctive formal relationships provide a…
Two respected Denver artists, Dan Ragland and Bill Stockman, offer more reasons to respect them, with new work displayed in separate exhibits at the Grant Gallery. Most of Ragland’s somber, mixed-media pieces started out as Polaroids. Although the original photo images remain fairly true, Ragland enlarges them to mural size…
It’s hard for those who love art to understand why some would seek it out only to destroy it. What is the motive of the vandal who slashes a painting or defaces a sculpture? Is he deranged? It’s different with architecture. No one would consider out-of-town hotel magnate Fred Kummer…
Our society has never afforded organized athletics the social status granted to those things ordinarily called culture: music, dance, theater, literature or the visual arts. But that distinction was unknown in the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, where team sports were taken as seriously as religion or science. That’s Mexican artist…
The power of still photography to inspire deep emotional response was well-demonstrated two weeks ago in Oklahoma City. Adrift in a sea of video, it was the perfectly framed image of a heroic firefighter cradling the body of a dying child that hit the nation in the heart. Photographers interested…
The much-talked-about head of the University of Denver’s sculpture department, Lawrence Argent, is paired with Arizona-based ceramic artist Dorothy Rissman in the current exhibit The Figure Re-examined at the Mackey Gallery. What we have here are essentially two single-artist shows, the unifying theme of which becomes evident only upon careful…
Denver artist Linde Schlumbohm can’t stop thinking about food–she’s virtually obsessed with the topic. In What’s Eating Eve?, her fourth annual exhibit at the Pirate co-op gallery, there are references to edibles everywhere: plants and animals, supermarket ads, fruits and vegetables. And there are corpulent women representing the many faces…
The inaugural show for Pismo Gallery’s new space in Cherry Creek is a splendid survey of recent work by Dale Chihuly, the prominent glass sculptor from Washington state. Chihuly is represented by many examples of his most characteristic work, groups of small blown-glass elements nested in large ones. By assembling…
In a sense, modern art came to the United States because of World War II. Hitler, like some of the more extreme right-wingers of our own time, hated modernism. Among his earliest targets were the artists and architects of the famous Bauhaus school, which was forcibly closed by the Nazis…
Renowned modern sculptor Starr Kempf was found dead April 7 at his Pine Grove Avenue studio in Colorado Springs. Police said Kempf, 77, appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Kempf was best known for his ambitious steel kinetic sculptures, which incorporated ready-made elements like ventilator turbines and…
Eric Zimmer, a relatively new member of the Edge Gallery co-op as well as a relative newcomer to Denver, currently fills Edge’s front gallery with an ambitious display of quirky paintings and paper pieces. The paintings are closely interrelated and mostly follow a similar program: Zimmer draws with ink on…
I’ll be as clear as glass. It is an act of barbarism to even raise the question of whether I. M. Pei’s Zeckendorf Plaza is worth preserving, let alone to threaten it with destruction, as St. Louis-based absentee landlord Fred Kummer has. The plaza ranks as one of the greatest…
