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.
I hadn’t heard of sound artist Jim Green, who died in September, but like most Denverites, I’d experienced his work. He’s best known for producing sounds in airports, including Train Call, the jingles that precede announcements at Denver International Airport’s commuter rail line, and Talking Fountain at the Seattle airport, in which microchips play recordings of babbling brooks or a swimmer splashing as the fountain runs.
After an almost year-long hiatus (and recent successful fundraiser), Denver’s OG, self-supporting, artist-run art space Spark Gallery is back with the inaugural members’ exhibition This Is Spark. Spread over two shows, this annual, open-themed exhibition invites full and associate members (i.e. Tier 1 and 2; supporting members a.k.a. Tier 3 get their own show later in the year) to come together and display a few works of their own choosing.
Susan Tormoen’s latest exhibition at the Cottonwood Center for the Arts in Colorado Springs offers answers. Aptly titled Fun with Oil and Pastel, it showcases the sense of play that permeates her practice, with over half a dozen styles visible in the twenty or so landscapes on display.
In Niza Knoll Gallery’s current exhibition, Everything Papier Mâché, this stereotype remains intact—but like the compounded layers of paper required to make these artworks, there is plenty of depth and intrigue. Glue-eating is (hopefully) left behind, as the featured artists demonstrate how this accessible material can also be transformative, magical, and technically impressive.
To put it in overly simple terms: Annalee Schorr likes cubes. She is, in fact, “obsessed” with them, she says. She likes straight lines and deadlines. She uses grids, patterns, and repetition. She takes inspiration from quilts, Navajo textiles and tiles, and is deeply motivated by Sol LeWitt.
Currently on display at Lane Meyer Projects, In Service of the Wellspring features work by Keith Riley and MarSha Yi Robinson—artists who invite us to contemplate the seasons of change passing through the cities in which we live. The botanical designs in Robinson’s CfOlNoCwReErTsE series signal the promise of a flourishing spring set against the rigidity of concrete, architectural landscapes. Riley also explores constructed environments, making geometric forms and patterns malleable with his stylized graphite, crayon, and ink drawings.
The first installment of Tiger’s Leap: Fashion Past, Present, Future at Colorado State University’s Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising delves into the cyclical history of fashion trends within their broader social contexts. Historically informative with a wide array of garments on view, the exhibition unravels the illusion of aesthetic newness within culture.
Before crossing the curtain that separates the darkened room exhibiting Na Mira’s Hotel from the rest of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, I could hear a song playing from within the gallery. It sounded vaguely familiar, at the edge of my recognition and memory. Experiencing Hotel felt familiar and new, like watching a sci-fi movie from the 1980s—both outdated and prescient, anachronist and transformative. This impression was due in part to the video medium and Mira’s allusion to the postmodern building designed by John Portman, Jr.: the Bonaventure Hotel.
In Language Without Words, on view at the Denver Botanic Gardens (DBG) Freyer-Newman Center, Ash Eliza Williams’s stunning paintings and sculptures invite viewers to consider the varied nonverbal ways that nature uses to communicate. Both imaginative and scientifically grounded, Williams offers a surreal and animistic perspective that is visually wonderful, somewhat alien, and subtly spiritual.
At the Lincoln Center Art Gallery in Fort Collins, Barbara Baer and Amelia Furman are paired in the exhibition Biophilia for their shared affinity for nature and their use of multimedia, resulting in an energetic show that offers a range of experiences from fixed to immersive. Both artists replicate aspects of the natural world, emphasizing interconnected experiences while creating space for the emergence of new narratives. Through their distinct yet complementary approaches, Baer and Furman invite viewers to engage with the natural world and each other in thought-provoking ways, blending time, environment, and the human experience.
The Dairy Arts Center’s exhibition Black Futures in Art: The Space Between Us reimagines rigid boundaries as permeable gray areas and proposes differences among people as opportunities for collaboration. Guest curated by Adderly Grant-Lord, who also has paintings in the show, this group of Black artists and allies suggest moving forward into our collectively uncertain future without forgetting what’s behind, using past experiences, including traumas, to build strong communities. Focusing on the energy that thrives in creative spaces, this exhibition reminds viewers to use this energy as a catalyst for inclusive relationships and comfort within liminality.
The concurrent exhibitions delecTABLE: The Fine Art of Dining and Food-tography at the Art Students League of Denver (ASLD) serve up an abundant selection of punchy photographs and finely crafted ceramic tableware to remind us that enjoying a meal is one of Earth’s greatest delights. Natural cycles and organic shapes appear throughout, balanced by playful pops of colorful work.
Art of the State 2025 is an heroic triennial exhibition of contemporary work now on view through March 30, 2025. Filling Arvada Center’s galleries with an impressive breadth of media, styles, formats, textures, colors, locations, forms, and subjects are 148 artworks by 145 artists, whittled down from a staggering 2,503 submissions by 911 artists. Jurors spent over a month finalizing the checklist. And though only about six percent of submissions made it into the final exhibition, Art of the State 2025 provides one of the most exhaustive synopses of contemporary art in Colorado so far this decade.
The Intimate Infinite, the mid-career survey of artist Tomiko Jones’ work over the past two decades, is currently on display at Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art. In this sizable exhibition spanning nine separate bodies of work, Jones navigates slow and earnest photographic meditations through the skillful application of aesthetic attention and process.
There is a persistent and pernicious stereotype that artists working and living in areas outside of major metropolitan centers create art that is backwards, naive, retrograde, or of poor quality. Little-ton, Big-ideas: Honoring the Big Ideas of Women Artists, currently on view at Arapahoe Community College’s Colorado Gallery of the Arts, challenges this misconception. Sponsored by the Colorado Chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCACO), the exhibition features works by WCACO members and by women and women-identifying artists in Littleton who submitted work to an open call.
Creative Collective, the group show on view at the Tointon Gallery in Greeley, is really a measure of both: the ways the artists know their home in Colorado, and the ways that they show it love. The collection of 72 artworks was done by members of the Greeley Art Association, a local group that hosts regular meetups and workshops.
Code-X: Contemporary Chicanx Codices, currently on view at the Vicki Myhren Gallery, underscores the lasting influence and relevance of one of the oldest visual and cultural storytelling mediums. Featuring the work of fifteen codex makers, Code-X shows how artists push the form into a variety of new iterations while engaging in the age-old practices of recording histories, commentating on socio-political issues, exploring identity, and participating in collective world-building.
Sculptor Rian Kerrane has mounted a significant solo exhibition at the University of Colorado Denver's historic Emmanuel Art Gallery, a former chapel with a rich past of community and artistic activity. Environmental concerns and climate change are at the core of Housekeeping.
Peeking out behind the government gray walkways of the Wellington Webb Municipal Building, you’ll find Donald Lipski’s tool galaxy. The public art installation, simply titled Tools, spans the height of a sixty-foot limestone wall. Site-specificity reaches a pinnacle in this piece, as the building houses the offices, departments, and services that run the City and County of Denver.
Visual Reality: Redefining Artistic Experience through Technological Innovation, now on view at the Artworks Center for Contemporary Arts in Loveland, presents us with thoughtful, sometimes weighty, and sometimes wry examinations of the exhibition's theme by several of the Artworks Center’s members. It is their 2025 biennial exhibition.
