DARIA Art Magazine

Welcome to DARIA: Denver Art Review, Inquiry, and Analysis, a publication devoted to art writing and criticism focused on the Denver-area visual art scene. DARIA seeks to promote diverse voices and artists while fostering critical dialogue around art.

Designer of a Thousand Talents

Apr 16

Apr 16 Designer of a Thousand Talents

Celestial inspiration encounters geometric precision in the Gio Ponti exhibition, Designer of a Thousand Talents, at the Denver Art Museum. Spanning a liminal, light-filled space between the more formal galleries in the redesigned Martin Building, the collection of architectural drafts and interior objects display a small but enticing sampling of Ponti’s prolific oeuvre. The Italian designer collaborated with master artisans throughout his career to elevate raw materials into imaginative, functional works.

Uncommon Collective: Colorado Printmakers

Apr 9

Apr 9 Uncommon Collective: Colorado Printmakers

If the Western art in the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art began and ended with Mitchell’s caucasian cowboys and cowgirls, it would be complicit in whitewashing Western art history, allowing these icons to remain unchallenged as the heroes of this imaginary, monolithic West. However, with contemporary displays like the Uncommon Collective, the museum makes space to critique and expand notions of the West, its history, and the future of its artistic production. In a similar spirit to the museum’s interest in a holistic view of the West, the Uncommon Collective pushes viewers to ponder what, if anything, unifies contemporary printmaking in Colorado.

Proclaiming Colorado’s Black History

Apr 2

Apr 2 Proclaiming Colorado’s Black History

While exploring a project on regional barbecue traditions as a follow-up to his book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, curator and soul food scholar Adrian Miller became entranced by stories of local African Americans and the unique challenges they faced and overcame. While at a dinner party with friends and board members from the Museum of Boulder, he started cooking up an idea for an exhibit to showcase Colorado’s Black history. Now on display at the Museum of Boulder, operated by the Boulder Historical Society, Proclaiming Colorado’s Black History is the culmination of two years of research.

Soundtracks for the Present Future

Mar 26

Mar 26 Soundtracks for the Present Future

Mary Grace Bernard

Charley Friedman’s Soundtracks for the Present Future is currently on view until April 7 at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art in Fort Collins. In the museum’s largest space, the Griffin Foundation Gallery, the artist floats dozens of acoustic guitars, mandolins, and basses, each attached to electrical wires that converge toward a laptop at the center of the room. The installation invites viewers to move amongst the “constellation” of instruments and embody the sounds and vibrations each one makes as it is automatically plucked by a robotic arm holding a singular guitar pick.

Mar 21

Mar 21 Laws of Nature

Madeleine Boyson

In her series Woven and Book of Miracles, on view in the exhibition Laws of Nature at the Denver Botanic Gardens’ Freyer-Newman Center until March 31, 2024, Tanya Marcuse lauds earth’s fertile excess in meticulous natures mortes, weaving life and death together in velvet-hued ritual. The artist has venerated nature’s transience since at least 2005, when she began photographing fruit trees and their offerings.

Celebrating 50 Years

Mar 19

Mar 19 Celebrating 50 Years

Danielle Cunningham

With fifty years in operation as one of only a few Colorado non-profits dedicated exclusively to weaving, the Northern Colorado Weavers Guild’s (NCWG) mission of sharing knowledge is apparent in the Northern Colorado Weavers Guild: Celebrating 50 Years exhibition at the Loveland Museum. Members display their considerable skills while demonstrating an array of traditional techniques and objects, from clothing and stuffed animals to contemporary wall hangings. NCWG further extends its educational mission by displaying the tools of its trade, including a drum carder that prepares fiber for spinning, a spinning wheel used to prepare fiber for weaving, a loom on which fiber is woven, and many other objects.

To See Inside: Art, Architecture, and Incarceration

Mar 13

Mar 13 To See Inside: Art, Architecture, and Incarceration

Aitor Lajarin-Encina

Currently on view at the Museum of Art Fort Collins, To See Inside: Art, Architecture, and Incarceration combines paintings by Colorado-based artist Sarah McKenzie and visual works, a sound art installation, and creative writing by incarcerated artists involved in the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative (DU PAI). The exhibition provides us with the opportunity to reflect on incarceration culture in the U.S. and the ideological structures that circumscribe it. Through representations in different forms—often created by the inmates themselves—of the prison space, its architecture, and built environment, we are able to grasp how they impact the minds and bodies of those they “contain.”

Control and Freedom

Mar 12

Mar 12 Control and Freedom

Hung Liu: Control and Freedom is on view at Vicki Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver until March 24. Hung Liu was prolific and often returned to concepts, using new lenses and mediums, over several decades. Collage, oil painting, photography, lithography, tapestry, and found-object assemblage, among others, all make appearances. The subjects of Liu’s artworks are drawn from the artist’s collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs, many being images of laborers, sex workers, refugees, and soldiers.

HOME: A Photographic Journey into Identity, Place, and Belonging

Mar 5

Mar 5 HOME: A Photographic Journey into Identity, Place, and Belonging

“My body is my home,” writes Boulder-based artist Tanja London in her statement for HOME: A Photographic Journey into Identity, Place, and Belonging, the current exhibition at Lafayette’s The Collective Community Arts Center. “I am embodied within a vast network of beings, places, and timelines. What goes around—comes around.” London’s words demonstrate how broad and encompassing the notion of “home” really is in this exhibition—it is objects, landscapes, people, memories, and more. Composed of photographs selected by the City of Lafayette’s Arts & Cultural Resources Department from an open call for art in which Colorado-based artists were invited to submit three works showing “‘who is home,’ ‘what is home,’ and ‘where is home,’” the show tackles the contrarian notions of home as both universal and specific; elastic and concrete.

Month of Printmaking 2024

Feb 27

Feb 27 Month of Printmaking 2024

Laura I. Miller

This March in Denver, the Month of Printmaking, or Mo’Print, will celebrate all things printmaking with over eighty events and sixty exhibitions dedicated to educating the community and showcasing artists across Colorado. Laura Miller speaks with the co-chairs for the event, Jennifer Ghormley and Emily Moyer, to learn more about Mo’Print, and how the event makes printmaking more accessible for aspiring artists and collectors.

Revolt 1680/2180: Runners + Gliders

Feb 21

Feb 21 Revolt 1680/2180: Runners + Gliders

In his latest exhibition at The History Colorado Center, Virgil Ortiz travels through time using the spiritually loaded medium of clay. Revolt 1680/2180: Runners + Gliders offers materially and politically rich insights into Puebloan history. In collaboration with the museum, the genre-bending artist challenges the public to reconsider history not just as a concrete timeline of events but as a porous exchange between people throughout the past, present, and future. Ortiz forges a path where ancestral stories and newly invented narratives can shape the course of lived realities.

Draped in Velvet

Feb 19

Feb 19 Draped in Velvet

As someone drawn to kitsch, I was immediately excited by the theme of Memento Mori Gallery and Tattoo’s current exhibition Draped in Velvet, which features artworks by eleven artists experimenting with velvet as material and as canvas. Through a sense of wit and its showcasing of technical dexterity, Draped in Velvet looks towards the wider possibilities available within velvet painting, challenging its characterization as cheap souvenir art while celebrating its distinctive aesthetic qualities.

Feb 15

Feb 15 Five

José Antonio Arellano

February’s show at Surface Gallery in Old Colorado City demonstrates what is possible when women revive a breakaway legacy of modernism. The show, titled Five, groups together the painters Becca Day, Tara Kelley-Cruz, Valerie Lloyd, Jes Moran, and Diane Reeves.

Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines

Feb 13

Feb 13 Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines

Madeleine Boyson

Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines, a group show at East Window Gallery in Boulder, on view through February 28, considers the space in between these tropes. Curator and gallery owner Todd Edward Herman has gathered “a small selection of playful, critical, and tender images made by and about elder artists” to shift perceptions from “the ‘pornography of old age’ within consumer culture” towards lived experience. The resulting exhibition is heartfelt and substantive, even humorous, and successfully considers aging’s realities without devolving into pity or romanticization.

Jan 29

Jan 29 ]MARGINS[

Migiwa Orimo’s quietly radical exhibition ]MARGINS[, at Mariani Gallery on the campus of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, maps out space for the overlooked aspects of life, revealing the poignant significance of untold narratives. She pieces together society’s marginalia to dismantle commonly perceived hierarchies of value. Orimo’s materials include fabric, thread, and paper, but she also uses the spaces between spoken words, fragments of ephemera, and forgotten histories to communicate unspeakable emotions.

Jan 24

Jan 24 Yazz Atmore

Raymundo Muñoz

Raymundo Muñoz profiles Denver artist Yazz Atmore—a.k.a. “Chatty Ancestors”—who creates collage-based works, murals, and installations inspired by her personal connection to the spirit world, ancestral wisdom, and the young people and community she engages with. Atmore’s vivid mixed-media collages combine analog and digital elements, based on portraits she cuts up, filling and surrounding them with natural forms such as plants and animals. These dynamic compositions suggest an otherworldly and often ebullient cast of human characters, each with their own story to tell.

The Crux of the Biscuit

Jan 16

Jan 16 The Crux of the Biscuit

Danielle Cunningham

Plinth Gallery owner and exhibition artist Jonathan Kaplan “leaves dogma to religion” rather than ceramics. Instead, he believes design possibilities are limitless and adapting to one’s environment is crucial to the creative process. This exhibition, The Crux of the Biscuit, is the artist’s first body of work since 2021 and showcases his decades of work as a bike builder and potter, as well as his training as a ceramicist. Kaplan has a true knack for bringing disparate parts into a whole that is not only cohesive but whimsical.

Jan 11

Jan 11 Arte Mestiza

José Antonio Arellano

Since 1986, Emanuel Martinez’s mural titled Arte Mestiza has greeted visitors to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Last year, a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts enabled Martinez to restore and protect the work. Freely available to the public, this significant mural reminds us of the contributions of Spanish, Indigenous, Mexican, and Mexican Americans to the stories we tell about the histories of art.

Jan 2

Jan 2 Orisons

Madeleine Boyson

Orisons perforates a now vacant central-pivot irrigation and former cattle field. The fallow plot is labeled “unfarmable” on the artwork website but it’s one of many parcels in North America’s highest, and the world’s largest, alpine valley that may produce crops in the right circumstances. The region’s endorheic (closed) basin is critical for retaining water and equilibrating via evaporation. Deep wells have so far sustained agriculture. But twenty-three years of climate change-induced aridification and megadrought worsened by over-pumped aquifers and invariant farming have left this region dry and sere. It is from this narrative that Humeau builds Orisons.

Dec 26

Dec 26 Modern Love

If you too have grown weary of the painters who play uninspired poker with Pantone color chips, then Frank Martinez’s collection of paintings at Space Gallery might shine some light onto your winter blues. Modern Love glows with a playful curiosity about life’s colorful offerings.