Best Museum Exhibit (Since March 2006) 2007 | RADAR | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Museum Exhibit (Since March 2006)

RADAR

Courtesy Denver Art Museum
The blockbuster RADAR: Selections From the Collection of Kent & Vicki Logan represents a conflation of art-related events. It's the largest of the three special exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum presented to coincide with the opening of the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building. It showcases the collection put together by Vail collectors Vicki and Kent Logan, who are among the DAM's largest donors ever, and it's the retirement swan song of Dianne Vanderlip, founding curator of the Modern and Contemporary department. But beyond all this interesting background, the show includes major works by some of the biggest names in international art, among them Takashi Murakami, Damien Hirst, Kiki Smith, George Condo and Fred Tomaselli. RADAR will stay on Denver's cultural screens through July 15.

Best Fond Farewell

Retirement of Dianne Vanderlip

It was 29 years ago that Dianne Vanderlip came to the Denver Art Museum to start a contemporary art department. In the intervening decades some contemporary aged into modern, so Vanderlip's charge expanded to overseeing what is now the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. As early as last summer, it was an open secret that she would be leaving, but Vanderlip officially retired in January. During her reign, she was omnipotent in Denver's contemporary art scene, and even though she was criticized for not doing enough for local art, she purchased hundreds of pieces by Colorado artists for the museum's collection. Her replacement, Christoph Heinrich, will never have the power she wielded, because the Denver art world is so much bigger now -- in no small part because of what Vanderlip wrought.

Best Gallery Show -- Solo

COLIN LIVINGSTON

Last fall, Ivar Zeile's + Gallery mounted the imaginative COLIN LIVINGSTON: Palettes, Patterns, Logos and Slogans, in which potential collectors were invited to come up with their own compositions by selecting from a menu of -- you guessed it -- palettes, patterns, logos and slogans. Livingston offered several hypothetical combinations at the show, giving patrons ideas on how to help him create one of his signature post-pop paintings. By offering these made-to-order works, Livingston posed questions about the nature of art-making, art collecting and, in the process, art itself.

Best Gallery Show -- Group

Directions in Abstraction

Co-ops typically present solos by their members, featuring group shows only when a time slot accidentally opens up. Such an unexpected opportunity presented itself last spring, and Edge member Mark Brasuell came up with Directions in Abstraction off the top of his head. He included his own work and that of four others -- Dale Chisman, Clark Richert, Bruce Price and Karen McClanahan -- to explore new approaches in abstraction. Brasuell and Chisman focused on abstract expressionism while Richert looked at geometric abstraction, and his former students, Price and McClanahan, did post-minimalism. Though each person was represented by a single piece, it was a good start to a survey of the best abstraction being done here.

Best Debut

Yoshitomo Saito

Yoshitomo Saito moved to Denver just last summer, and he's already had a solo at one of the city's top galleries. That's quite a feat, but 108 Blue Cranes was unbelievably ambitious and stunningly serene. The exhibition was something of a retrospective, covering the past twenty years that the Tokyo-born artist has spent in America. Saito's subjects -- wood, cardboard and canvas -- are so simple that they make his pieces look minimalist, but they're actually quite realistic. Saito is a great new addition to the scene and can be considered one of the city's best artists.

Best Old West Show

Colorado & the West

Every summer, David Cook Fine Art presents a handsome historic survey of art from the region. It's always one of the finest exhibits of the year, and Colorado & the West was no exception. Then again, since Cook snags first-rate material from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it would be hard not to come up with something great. This year, many of the paintings and prints in the show were associated with the long-gone Broadmoor Academy in Colorado Springs, and they came from a variety of sources, including a large private collection the gallery acquired. This is how the West is won.

Best Old Modern Show

Colorado Modernism: 1930-1970

Colorado artists began embracing abstraction in the 1930s, and by the late '40s and early '50s, it had become a full-blown regional movement. Unfortunately, much of the work has been mostly forgotten. Aiming to correct this oversight, painter and volunteer art historian Tracy Felix put together Colorado Modernism, a handsome and well-thought-out show. It was filled with gorgeous mid-century-modern paintings by the likes of Vance Kirkland, Charles Bunnell, Mary Chenoweth and Al Wynne, along with solos devoted to photographer Jim Milmoe and sculptor Bob Mangold. A trip to Golden to see this tremendous show was the best mini-vacation you could have taken last summer.

Best Show About Former Hippies

The Armory Group

In 1966, Boulder was attracting some of the nation's first hippies, many of whom were enrolling in fine-art classes at the University of Colorado. Student studios were then in the Armory, and a group coalesced there, including members Dale Chisman, Clark Richert, John De Andrea, Margaret Neumann and George Woodman. Those hippie-artists went on to write many chapters in Colorado's aesthetic history, including founding Drop City, the artist commune near Trinidad; launching CrissCross, which published a magazine; and opening two co-ops, Boulder's Edge Gallery and Spark Gallery in Denver. The Armory Group was one of the season's best shows, and all Singer director Simon Zalkind had to do was to bring the old crowd back together.

Best Recent-History Show

Decades of Influence

By far the most ambitious undertaking of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver in its ten-year history, Decades of Influence was Cydney Payton's attempt at summing up Colorado art from the past two decades. With a topic this vast, she used not only the museum itself, but also the Center for Visual Art, the Carol Keller Project Space and the Gates Sculpture Triangle. And even then, she was forced to do a superb followup called Extended Remix to feature artists she missed in the first round. Though some of Payton's choices were controversial, there were at least seventy of the state's best artists in the Decades/Remix combination. A very good show, indeed.

Best Artful Family Reunion

Vavra Triptych

No one has done more to promote Colorado's historic artists than Hugh Grant, director of the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art. But Grant only rarely mounts shows at the museum, which is one of the reasons that Vavra Triptych was so special. Grant brought out work by husband and wife Frank and Kathleen Vavra along with that of their daughter, Diana. Frank studied in France before 1920, and his early work is pure impressionism, but he would later go to abstraction; Kathleen was a regionalist in the '30s and a modernist later, as was Diana, who started her career in the '50s. This Kirkland exhibit was one of the best family reunions imaginable.

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