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.
The meandering lines and poetic washes of color in Marina Eckler’s work offer an entrance into her arena of paradoxical structures. Feelings of tender uncertainty coexist with confidently defined forms. Working across various media–including drawing, painting, interactive objects, and performance–she constructs a visual language that unearths all the humor and heartbreak in the gentle slope of a mark.
The most recent exhibition at Museo de las Americas features 13 international artists and two artist collectives who together “represent Colombia’s cultural diversity as well as its geographic differences.” It is truly an expansive survey that “emphasizes the interconnectedness of people and nature and the contradictions of that connection.” It is rare that artwork produced in one location can transcend time and geography to connect with local viewers on such a visceral, human level. Presented in collaboration with independent curator and native Colombian Alex Brahim, Museo de las Americas offers Colombia: The Corn, the River, and the Grave—a far-reaching exhibition that seeks to reconcile with the ghosts of a nation’s past and look towards the future with hard-won hope and empathy.
Eiko Otake’s oeuvre encompasses a wide range of practices. She has worked as an internationally recognized movement and media artist for nearly 50 years. I Invited Myself, vol. II at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (FAC) is in keeping with the multidisciplinary character of her work. In part, it is a survey of five decades of art. It is also a contemplation of space and time—indeed, the works on display rotate through a series of literal "seasons." Additionally, vol. II includes live performances that engage directly with the work on display and three symposiums with Colorado College that feature artists, curators, and scholars in dialogue with Otake and each other.
This year’s Colorado State University (CSU) Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Thesis Exhibition celebrates the culmination of artworks by three graduate students. Leila Malekadeli, MFA Graduate in Sculpture, Sam Hamilton, MFA Graduate in Painting, and Vicente Delgado, Graduate in Printmaking, completed three years of study in the Department of Art and Art History’s creative studio arts program. By fostering individual research, CSU’s MFA program encourages graduate students to focus on a specific medium and complete a strong body of work in their chosen field.
The juried Made in Colorado exhibition at the University of Colorado Denver's Emmanuel and Experience Galleries features artists currently living in the state and typically was held every two years. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition has been on hiatus since 2018, but the 45 artists now on display haven’t been idle. They’ve been busy painting, sculpting, sewing, photographing, videographing, building, and making. If the exhibition, held at CU Denver’s Emmanuel and Experience Galleries, is any indication of how we’ve evolved over the past five years, then it appears that we’re in the midst of an artistic renaissance. The exhibition thrums with vibrancy and awareness of the artist’s role in society.
Leo Franco’s The Castle and Brian Cavanaugh’s Blossom & Decay at Pirate Contemporary Art present two different approaches to constructing narratives out of a material-based logic. Franco favors a visual rhythm composed of elegantly finished wooden structures, while Cavanaugh intertwines organic matter through endless lengths of wire to grow a joyously provisional ecosystem.
Talent from Colorado and beyond shines in “Prismatic,” as does the breadth of the queer artist community. More than that though, this exhibition illustrates that art doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Life experiences lead to ideas and influence artistic styles, generating concepts to which the public can relate. Maybe minds won’t be made more inclusive or accepting by this exhibition, as it seems largely tailored to a queer or an already-receptive audience, but minds will certainly be strengthened in the idea that there is no such thing as identity, singular.
On view through July 2 at Lane Meyer Projects in Denver, High Strangeness features eight paintings by Littleton, Colorado-born and -based artist Mark Farrell that are gleefully sinister and ominously playful. Farrell’s works are ideal for the room in which they are featured. The exhibition evokes a corresponding impishness to RiNo’s PoN pOn art bar—through which visitors must walk to reach the project space—while indulging in macabre spectacles that parody cultural façades. But Farrell does more than blur the line between “classic horror and the suburban mundane,” producing multi-layered scenes that delight in the true comedic horror of living in the twenty-first century: life itself.
Green Box Arts opened James Turrell’s Green Mountain Falls Skyspace in the Red Butte Recreational Area near Pikes Peak this past year. Visiting the installation for the formal Sunset or Sunrise Shows feels like a pilgrimage, requiring an arduous journey to get to the building that houses the artwork, but viewing the sky at the final destination is well worth the trek.
Todd Herman’s exhibition Sanctuary at Mercury Framing in Boulder invites associations. He displays his photographs serially and they read like a film strip. Taking in the exhibit, your choice becomes one of narration—of how you will view these images as a story and decide what they mean. Ultimately, the meaning is continually shifting.
Ethan’s Jackson’s clerestory takes the camera obscura and, using mirrors and sunlight, evolves it into an immersive art experience where the outside is projected inside. The inside in this case is a wing of the Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales Library Branch on the first floor, in the Story Time Tower which is located behind the children’s section. Created as part of the City of Denver’s Public Art Program in 2016, clerestory integrates architecture and optical artwork to create a scene of nature on the vaulted ceiling of the tower.
Lasting Impressions and Onward and Upward: Shark’s Ink at the University of Colorado Art Museum in Boulder present prints from an array of artistic movements to tell the idiosyncratic story of the United States. The works on view collectively assert that printmaking, long used as an accessible means for a wider audience to view an artwork or a message, pulses with an inherent urgency rooted in the desire for communication.
At 3 Square Art (3SA) Gallery’s 4th annual juried Art in Black and White exhibition in Fort Collins, curator and gallery owner Kumiko S. McKee leans into this novelty, assembling 51 works by 29 Colorado artists and one Chinese artist. Working in vastly different media, these artists are a dynamic example of not only regional and international talent, but the boundlessness of a classic style.
Thomas Yi grew up around food in Littleton, just south of Denver. His parents—both Korean immigrants—owned an American-style diner where Yi spent his afternoons as a teen. Eventually he worked at that diner, before transferring his skills to various kitchen jobs in Denver. In 2016 he was admitted to CU Boulder to study film, but a BFA foundations class redirected him toward photography. His images reference both the food and the cinema that have influenced him, a wily mix of Wong Kar-wai and City Wok takeout.
Duality: Contemporary Works by Indigenous Artists at the Longmont Museum gathers together artists who navigate the societal and material complexities of existing in the United States as members of a group whose stories have largely been told through a colonial lens. In a protest against homogeneous, mainstream descriptions of Indigenous people, Gregg Deal, the curator and a participating artist, orchestrates an emotionally tangible exhibition featuring the works of JayCee Beyale, Julie Buffalohead, Gregg Deal, Nicholas Galanin, Jeffrey Gibson, April Holder, Chelsea Kaiah, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Natani Notah, Jamie Okuma, Virgil Ortiz, Danielle SeeWalker, and Steven Yazzie.
Over the course of many years, the Sangre de Cristo Arts & Conference Center in Pueblo has amassed hundreds of drawings, paintings, and prints by the American artist Gene Kloss. A selection of these works from the artist’s nearly 70-year artistic career are now on view in the Arts Center through May 23. While Kloss is mostly known for her depictions of New Mexican landscapes and Native peoples and culture, the exhibition contends that what is most remarkable about her work is her skill and innovation as a printmaker, no matter the subject. Yet the relationship between artist and subject always matter, and the questions that Kloss’s themes raise about representation may be the most intriguing aspect of the show.
Defining Our Voices: Evolving into the Artists We Want to Be at the new Davis Gallery on the University of Denver campus recognizes and celebrates the liminal space between the milestones we use to gauge success in the art world. Featuring eight University of Denver alumni who graduated in the last five years, the exhibition provides space for emerging artists to explore how their relationship to art has changed over time.
The traveling exhibition currently on view at the University of Denver’s Vicki Myhren Gallery is titled Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art. The exhibition presents forty artworks made over the last 35 years by an impressive bevy of artists, all of whom could be accurately described as young, gifted, and Black. Curated by Antwaun Sargent and Matt Wycoff, the “lovely precious dream” of this exhibit is to reflect and celebrate the diverse range of experiences within the Black cultural milieu while situating the collection as part of a larger, ongoing dialogue happening in the art world about power, representation, identity, and access.
Artmaking is the pursuit of expressing our inner life through metaphorical and material means. At the Arapahoe Community College Art Student and Alumni Invitational, on view now at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts on the Littleton campus, ten artists bring their ideas into being through drawing and painting, installation, metalwork, photography, sculpture, and textiles. The premise that materiality holds meaning is what connects them.
The exhibition celebrates the upcoming onset of spring by featuring works that visually depict nature—such as flowers, animals, water, and fire—from Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum’s permanent collection. Shown together are antique quilts from the Sharee and Murray Newman collection as well as art quilts from the Rooted in Tradition collection. [2] While Nature, Flora, Fauna, Earth speaks to enthusiasts of the textile-based art form, it raises questions about the relationship between traditional and art quilting: What do antique and modern quilts have in common?
