Nothing in history has saturated the world like American pop culture. For the past fifty years, American movies, television, graphics, and especially advertising have profoundly influenced the way the whole world looks. American fine arts have had a similar global influence. But interestingly, the popular media so commonly identified with…
A common perception within Denver’s alternative scene is that everyone has an equal right to participate–and that that’s what “open” or “outsider” shows are all about. I’ve even heard it said during a panel discussion linked to an Alternative Arts Alliance event that all art is valid–which, if it were…
The dead of winter is the last time one would expect to find an art show with most of the work exhibited outdoors. Surely only a lunatic–or, at the very least, an oddball–would schedule such an event in the coldest and darkest time of the year. However, that’s exactly what…
You’ll want to run through Shake, Rattle and Roll, the Colorado History Museum’s–excuse the expression–“exhibit” on the 1950s. And then you’ll want to run away as fast as you can. To say that this show is a total disaster barely hints at how bad it really is. I can’t recall…
The public made unprecedented expenditures on public art and public buildings last year in Denver. But you wouldn’t know it to look around. The biggest plum, both in terms of cost and lost opportunity, was Denver International Airport, born of the dreams of former mayor Federico Pena. The site plan…
How lucky Robin Rule must be. No sooner had she moved her namesake gallery from the Siberia of an off-street spot at the Icehouse in Lodo to her new location at Broadway and 1st Avenue, across the street from the Mayan Theater than her new neighborhood was heralded in Denver’s…
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…
