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Best Ode to Color

Learning to See Color

The idea for the ambitious group show Learning to See Color at the University of Denver's Vicki Myhren Gallery was sparked by a Josef Albers portfolio in DU's collection. Albers did the prints in the '70s as a retrospective of his fifty-years-long obsession with color. Free-associating from the images in the portfolio, co-curators Dan Jacobs (the Myhren director) and Jeffrey Keith (a noted Denver artist) went beyond just exploring color to examining how color illuminates the nature of art itself. They rounded up an array of works that showed how color can indicate mood, narrative, composition and other visual-art features. The show included many notable works by internationally famous artists, such as Andy Warhol and Helen Frankenthaler, and many pieces by Colorado artists, including Sushe Felix, Monroe Hodder and Kate Petley. The only down note had nothing to do with how well the organizers put together the exhibit or how interesting their many inclusions were, but rather with an anonymous crime: Collin Parson's "Night Sight/Night Site," a multi-part installation, was repeatedly vandalized and ultimately removed. In spite of this terrible hit, the show still held together as one of the season's top attractions.

Best Recasting of an Artist's Legacy

Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967-1980

Back in the '70s and '80s, painter Fritz Scholder was a hot property, riding the Southwestern craze of the time — but then, about twenty years ago, he fell out of favor. Recently, though, perceptions of his efforts have started to change, and a good indication was the wildly popular Super Indian: Fritz Scholder 1967-1980, a show that looked at the artist's highly idiosyncratic depictions of American Indians. In retrospect, these paintings revolutionized the public perceptions of Native American art and liberated American Indian artists from the limitations of their traditional practices. It could accurately be said that there is Native American art before Scholder and after Scholder — the changes he wrought were that big. Curated by John Lukavic, from the Denver Art Museum's Native Arts department, the show was anchored by the many Scholder pieces in the DAM's collection, including a trove of ten major works only recently donated by mega-collectors Kent and Vicki Logan. It was intriguing to notice that as Scholder's paintings have gotten older, they've started to look newer, and even seem contemporary right now.

Best Evidence of Clyfford Still's Eccentricity

Repeat/Recreate: Clyfford Still's "Replicas"

As director of the Clyfford Still Museum, Dean Sobel relentlessly comes up with new ways to present the artist's accomplishments — a most pressing assignment, considering that the CSM is exclusively given over to the exhibition of Still's pieces. To keep visitors interested, Sobel can't just present the same old chronology over and over again; luckily, he's been great at brainstorming new ways to showcase the enigmatic artist. The most recent example of this was Repeat/Recreate: Clyfford Still's "Replicas", mounted this past fall. Still was one of the pioneers of abstract expressionism, America's earliest claim to being an art powerhouse. The romantic idea of the style is that paintings of this type are the result of an artist staging a unique battle with paint on canvas. But Still didn't paint that way, and instead of his paintings being one-off encounters, he sometimes made multiple copies of the same painting. To pull off this fabulous show, Sobel and CSM consulting curator David Anfam gathered paintings and their copies from around the world, displaying them with their companions for the first time.

Best Celebration of the Absurd

Jokes of Nature

Put together by co-curators Donald Fodness and Geoffrey Shamos, Jokes of Nature was a large group show meant to explicate RedLine's theme last year, "Play It Forward." The curators chose pieces in which the grotesque plays some kind of role, and they included things that they felt encompassed the diabolical, scatological, pornographic, dreamlike, carnivalesque, uncanny and caricatured. You get the picture: The exhibit was all but a freak show. But to the credit of the curators, they kept the teenage gross-out stuff to a minimum — though it must have been hard to resist that temptation, considering their themes. Although artists from around the world were represented, the show was also chock-full of the work of current or former Colorado artists, such as Stephen Martonis, Gretchen Marie Schaefer, Xi Zhang, Laura Shill, Martha Russo, Amber Cobb and Kristen Hatgi Sink, among many others. Fodness is an artist who works with a funk vocabulary, while Shamos is a recently minted art historian; they made a great pair of opposites, and we're hopeful they'll team up again.

Best Celebration of the Rational

Joel Swanson: Polysemic

Although the Museum of Outdoor Arts is mostly about sculpture in public spots around metro Denver, it also maintains a set of indoor galleries at its headquarters in Englewood. This past winter, Joel Swanson: Polysemic was installed in these inside spaces, along with one additional outside piece: a billboard titled "Respectfully" that was erected in the MOA's Sculpture Alley, next to the building. "Respectfully" referred to the common closing salutation, which Swanson freed from its context and meaning — and that's what he did with everything inside, as well. The show opened with three installations presented as one; in each, Swanson had taken a source — product packaging in the first, Zapf Dingbat symbols in the second and envelopes in the third — and then stripped it down to its basic form, in the process changing its meaning. He's particularly fascinated with language, and a wallpaper installation and a suspension piece were both based on palindromes, words spelled the same way forward and backward. Don't be fooled by all this heady content, though: Swanson always ensures not only that his work is about ideas, but that it's beautiful, too, so you can just look at it without worrying about what it means.

Best Celebration of the Absurd and the Rational

Shawn Huckins: The American __tier

Looting the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century genre painting that depicts Western expansion in America, then crossing that reference with one that relates to Ed Ruscha's post-pop taste for text and irony, was the formula for the exhibit Shawn Huckins: The American __tier, presented last spring at Goodwin Fine Art. For this dazzling show, Denver painter Huckins created a body of very accomplished and witty conceptual-realist paintings, expertly copying famous historic paintings — like those by George Caleb Bingham — and defacing them, so to speak, with words spelled out in block letters running across the pictures. The words conveyed messages that were sourced from found tweets and text messages. Interestingly, Huckins masked off the parts of the image in which letters appeared before he started to paint, even though it appears as though the messages were tacked on afterward. The dialogue between the images and the words contrasts the quieter times of the past with the hectic pace of life today, but for Huckins, they also equate the way that people at that time, as now, faced an uncharted future.

Best Aesthetic Response to Football

Critical Focus: Monique Crine

Critical Focus: Monique Crine filled the lower-level gallery at MCA Denver with big, beautiful portraits of big, handsome guys. The paintings, all of which were specifically created for this exhibit, depicted recently retired professional football players who had been sidelined by injuries. The show was part of the Critical Focus series of exhibits at the MCA, which were meant to highlight the accomplishments of selected emerging artists; this one was put together by curator Nora Burnett Abrams. Crine’s paintings are so accurate in their depictions that at first they look like photos, so it comes as no surprise that she initially photographed the men, then used the resulting shots as preliminary studies for her finished paintings. The photographic quality of the paintings is reinforced by their utterly smooth surfaces, with Crine having expertly manipulated the thinned-out pigments. These portraits, many of them monumental in size, are part of an ongoing Crine series called Eden Prairie, examples of which are currently in a national traveling show.

Best Aesthetic Response to 4/20

Outpost

Colorado has a world-famous Wild West history that has provided the ideal setting for innumerable novels, movies, TV shows — and even art exhibits, such as last spring's Outpost, featuring recent work by New York artist Paul Jacobsen. Born in Colorado, Jacobsen maintains a studio in Rico, near Telluride. Ruminating on the state's past, Jacobsen concluded that legalized marijuana has put us right back on the frontier, at least metaphorically: Just as we were once at the edge of the wilderness, Colorado is now at the edge of a new era. Jacobsen set the mood for his show with installation elements that included a large archway made of repurposed wallboards weathered to a gorgeous gray. Similar wallboards are seen in the backgrounds of his photo-realist paintings, lyrically taking on the topic of legal weed via meticulously done renderings of marijuana leaves in floral arrangements. Area pot tycoons, take notice: These paintings would look great on the walls of your dispensary or office.

Best Show About Denver's Hippie Heritage

RetroActive: Founding Spark

In the '60s and '70s, Colorado was a jewel in the crown of hippiedom. Communes popped up, granola and grass were available — and then there was the regional capital, Boulder. Is it why we were the first state to fully legalize marijuana? Maybe — but one thing is certain: It launched Denver's alternative art scene, which is still going strong. In 1979, a bunch of Boulder bohemians rented a storefront in northwest Denver that became Spark Gallery, the city's first artist cooperative, and in the intervening decades, those kids with disheveled hair became veteran artists. RetroActive: Founding Spark recalled those early days; it was presented at Pirate: Contemporary Art (another early co-op that opened right after Spark) and mounted by Rule Gallery — precisely the kind of community-mindedness the hippies promoted. Among those included in the show were Clark Richert, Jerry Johnson, Richard Kallweit, Charles DiJulio, George Woodman, Andy Libertone, Paul Gillis and Margaret Neumann. Denver's vibrant contemporary-art world of today owes a big debt of gratitude to this groovy crowd.

Best Use of Concrete

The Essence

Last summer was Matt Scobey's season. Not only was his floor piece in Denver's Biennial of the Americas one of the genuine standouts in the event, but his solo at Leon Gallery, The Essence, was one of the strongest shows of the year. In it, Scobey played with art history in a set of chaste post-minimal boxes and a group of brutalist totems. Each type of work employed cast concrete as its principal medium. The boxes, titled "Vibe Transmitters," were placed on wooden stands of different heights. They had three separate parts: a transparent colored acrylic sheet through which light emitted was sandwiched between a concrete base and a concrete top. As good as these were, they were overshadowed by Scobey's even better non-objective totems, also in concrete. Some of them were made from casts of discarded items, like soda bottles or cut-up basketballs, but surely the best were those composed of purely geometric shapes, including pyramids, cones and solid rectangles. In these, Scobey consciously referred to Brancusi's "Bird in Space" and "Endless Column," and he clearly couldn't go wrong with that.

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