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.
Six LGBTQ+ youths aided Allyson McDuffie in executing artworks and producing CAMP: Queer Arts and Crafts & the Beauty of Imperfection over two months and forty hours of workshop time. The artist anticipated her looming exhibition deadline and need for hands—twelve of them—to help realize a “comical and poignant” evocation of American summer camps “with a queer twist.”
Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum rarely presents exhibitions at its headquarters—a warehouse repurposed into a haunting cavern, painted entirely black on the inside. You enter the structure through an old loading dock, nodding to its original purpose and lending resonance to this exhibition, which reflects on memory, preservation, and the passage of time. Mirroring the dark recesses of Black Cube’s institutional memory, the exhibition text describes the building as “a spatial form born to hold things, if only temporarily.” In this sense, the exhibition’s title, What We Hold On To, refers not only to what we possess, but also to what we have been denied, the forces preventing us from holding on, and the ways letting go can offer a form of release.
Featuring the work of 20 artists from across the country, Between Here and There has the hefty task to not only bring the audience in, but to keep them engaged while guiding them through the diverse work of each artist. Member shows can risk a lack of cohesion compared to those curated around specific themes or queries. The D’art Gallery team avoids this risk and skillfully navigates the broad scope of aesthetics presented by their members through their thoughtful hanging of the show, and by delivering immediate thematic clues to viewers.
If you haven’t been to the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center in Pueblo, Colorado, its beautiful architecture and strong variety of arts programming year round make it worth a visit. The exhibition currently on display in the Center’s Helen Thatcher White Regional Gallery is by letterpress printer and book artist Gail Watson. Comprised of recent and past foil stamped, two-dimensional works from three separate series, Sense of Place | Topophilia, Boom, and Electrons and Labyrinths, it deals with space and place in general and specific ways.
While each artist exhibits a similar interest in abstraction, Camille McMurry, Julie Rothschild, and Sara Goldenberg White employ parallel means for achieving disparate ends. But the result is a visually engaging exhibition that yields more questions than answers. For where Fiber Arts lacks a cohesive narrative or conviction, the works and the context in which they are displayed raise a debate about the nature of art and where and when we expect to see it.
Mutations at fooLPRoof Contemporary Art Gallery, mounted and hung for the first time, is the work of George Rivera's subconscious—an accumulation of life channeled through ink blot paintings based on his experiences with the Uitoto Tribe in South America. Standing among the paintings are the cast iron sculptures of Christopher Meyer in the exhibition How Soon We Forget.
K Contemporary in downtown Denver is currently hosting Daisy Patton's exhibition Before These Witnesses and Ya La'Ford's The Spectrum of Blue. Together, they offer dignity to what is often lost and model critical-minded, liberatory approaches to the appreciation and recovery of details.
Art Gym’s current exhibition tackles the details of this emotional, material, and bodily labor in Women’s Work is Never Done, featuring the art of Carrie Shiffrin, Charis Fleshner, and Jasmine Dillavou. In the Leyden Jar Gallery, towards the back of Art Gym’s work space, Kathryn Oberdorfer’s solo exhibition To See Takes Time favors looser lines and an abstract expressionist approach to composition.
Behind the beautiful and storied Buell Theatre is a big, modest-looking brick wall where you’ll find an unassuming stage door. It’s easy to miss if you’re driving towards the Auraria Campus or downtown Denver, but it’s a vital portal through which all the theatre’s actors and crew enter, symbolic of the compelling behind-the-scenes efforts that make viewing theatrical performances there so magical. As such, it’s a fitting location for Catalysts, a recently installed community artwork by Jann Haworth that celebrates the individuals working behind the scenes in organizations that are so integral to Denver’s arts and culture.
Drawing on Elizabethan style, Jesse Mathes’s body jewelry in Territorial Defense at Foothills Gallery’s Astor House explores themes of authority, protection, and gender that transform jewelry into a form of visual communication. Mathes’s adornments become conceptual and sculptural interventions, extending the body to amplify physical presence and assert spatial dominance, while establishing a dynamic interplay between viewer and object.
Jaime Carrejo’s work is grounded in considerations of individuals’ relationships to community within broad—and possibly even metaphysical—contexts. In the studio, he explores his personal relationships with a body of research. In the classroom, he focuses on cultivating relationships among faculty members and students, giving them the space to probe the questions that will allow them to achieve their goals. Within the wider community of Denver, the United States, and the world, Carrejo’s community-oriented practice poses a new question of relationship: what might it mean to belong to a larger whole?
The artist Olive Moya has developed a visual language of “noodles”—a term she uses to describe the undulating, colorful strands that wiggle and twist in her artworks. Moya’s solo exhibition Where You Are, And Where I Really Am at Bell Projects makes the case for a playful, iterative approach to enacting and understanding identity.
The current exhibitions at William Havu Gallery showcase a captivating trio of artists—Homare Ikeda, Naomi Scheck, and Cheryl Ann Thomas—each exploring the in-between spaces that are formed through distinct yet harmonious mediums.
At the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Mesa Lab in Boulder, the exhibition Exploring Water Through Art unfolds like a long thank-you note. Whether solid, liquid, or gas, water is everywhere here: as blessing, as memory, and as contested resource.
Curated by Hamidah Glasgow and featuring the work of Mona Bozorgi, Odette England, Melissa Grace Kreider, Marcy Palmer, Danielle SeeWalker, and Shuyuan Zhou, Beyond Resilience draws from current events, politics, personal narratives, and cultural experiences to create a multivocal dialogue about the manifestations of patriarchy and what it might mean to seek a different way of coexisting and caring for one another.
Creative Capitol: The Art of Teaching Artistry attests to how teaching and making art are tactics of social transformation and how teaching artists are agents of this change. The Colorado State Capitol—the site at which officials formulate and enact the laws that govern our ordinary lives—is an apt location for the works, which make clear the link between arts education and the politics of everyday life.
Meditative observation, of both physical and emotional terrains, unites the three concurrent exhibitions at Core Art Space. Kathy Mitchell-Garton and Elizabeth Ansley Delap contemplate belonging to timelines greater than oneself in the main gallery, while the annex space holds a collection of Jonathan Garbett’s liminal “clood” paintings. Each artist creates from a quieter channel of energy, probing at life’s more open-ended questions.
History is Painted by the Victors, currently on view at the Denver Art Museum until August 17, 2025, is artist Kent Monkman’s (Fisher River Cree Nation, born 1965) first major solo exhibition in the United States. Co-organized with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition focuses on Monkman’s deeply layered monumental paintings from the DAM’s extensive collection of the artist’s work alongside new works and loans from other institutions and private collections.
It is with these concerns in mind that I first encountered Mutual Terrain at RedLine Contemporary Art Center this summer. The Denver Month of Video (.MOV) exhibition is curated by Adán De La Garza and Jenna Maurice and presents works that analyze the natural environment not “as a passive backdrop but as an active, animate force.” As such, the exhibition questions Western tendencies to see land as disentangled from us, extractable by us, and profitable for us.
Maya Guatemala and Us: Divergent Convergences at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art (GAMA) in Fort Collins sets out to do just that, looking specifically at the legacy of colonization for the Maya peoples, the foreign interventions in the development of the Guatemalan nation, and how it continues to manifest in American politics and current events as the population of Guatemalan immigrants in the United States continues to grow.
