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.
Now on view in the Hoag Gallery at Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center through August 15, Concrete Creativity: Historic Murals of the Pueblo Levee historicizes a public artwork that once held the Guinness World Record for the largest outdoor mural from 1995 to 2016. Slight but sufficient, the show functions primarily as promotion for the Pueblo Levee Mural Project’s conservation efforts while tapping into the potent sensation of local pride.
Contained within a small hallway gallery at Colorado State University’s Gregory Allicar Museum, Meticulous packs in a maximalist array of artworks spanning multiple media and multiple decades from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition demonstrates both the breadth of the collection and a shared commitment among the artists to detail, ornamentation, and visual intensity. From photographs of free-ranging tigers to a brightly beaded bicycle, the works create a sense of visual frenzy in a tight space, rewarding close looking.
The current exhibition at the Museum of Art in Fort Collins, titled A Celebration of Colorado: A Juried Exhibition of Northern Colorado Artists, features diverse artists from around Northern Colorado with a wide range of practices, mediums, and interests. What unites these works is their focus on our embodied experiences.
Set the Table: The Art of Nourishment, currently on view at the Dairy Arts Center, adopts this same motif, “exploring the dinner table as a central site of cultural, ecological, and artistic discourse.” The featured works unveil how food is tied to identity, history, environment, and social connection. They also portray the dinner table itself as both an object and a stage. Bringing together more than nine artists and collectives, Set the Table invites viewers to come break bread together. It asks us to consider the phrase “you are what you eat,” not as an individual judgment but as an opening inquiry to look at how food systems, social systems, and interpersonal systems affect us every time we take a seat.
Wearing, Wearing examines how labor—including that of garment workers, white collar workers, consumers in the attention economy, and artists—creates value in the fashion industry. Curated by Felicity Wong as part of Union Hall’s 2026 Rough Gems curatorial program, the exhibition prompts visitors to engage with the racial politics of the garment industry and its colonial histories. The show features collections, installations, mixed media artworks, sculptures, upcycled fashion collections, and videos by Sarah Darlene, Allegra Giddings, Elle Hong, Paloma Jimenez, Allison Sheldon, and Flora Wilds.
On view currently at Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art (CVA), Collective Nouns is a biennial exhibition showcasing art from the staff and faculty members who support the institution’s visual art program. Student shows, of course (and rightly so), make up a large part of the CVA’s exhibition schedule (an impressive one is on display concurrently in the 965 Project Gallery, showcasing art from the CVA’s Art and Action Lab alumni). But it’s easy to forget that the educators—who teach, guide, mentor, and help students exhibit their work—are accomplished contemporary artists in their own right.
Stepping into Juan Carlos Escobedo’s exhibition Curas: Males del Corazón / Remedies: Ailments of the Heart at the Art Students League of Denver (ASLD) is both whimsical and deeply reflective—a journey through the artist’s residency at ASLD that balances conceptual rigor with Escobedo's subjective experience. As a residency exhibition should, the work embraces experimentation, transforming the ASLD’s building—a late nineteenth century former school—into an immersive and collaborative environment for Escobedo’s ideas and historic architecture.
Los Seis de Boulder were involved in United Mexican American Students (UMAS), a group concurrently sitting-in at Temporary Building 1 that May to protest treatment by the university. Yet no one was charged with their deaths, and the FBI case files burned in a fire. Jasmine Baetz began a socially engaged and community-focused sculpture project, the memorial stands six feet tall on a barren patch outside Temporary Building 1—a deliberate and charged location.
In her solo exhibition Second Body—currently on view at Meow Wolf’s Galleri Gallery—New Zealand native and Denver-based artist Jodi Stuart draws inspiration from our complicated and expansive relationship with plastics, creating works that are not meant to solve the plastics problem necessarily, but rather give new life, forms, and purpose through upcycling and artmaking.
A library collapses linear timelines and provides a space where many stories can intermingle and unusual analogies begin to form. This is similar to how Kylee Covili and Jim Kearns approach their materials in their Reconstructing Perspectives exhibition at the Lyons Community Library. Using precise construction and unexpected patternmaking, the two artists work with materials embedded with stories of previous lives and create something new out of the collected parts.
In a collaborative effort to tell a more complex story of this collection and the institution, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center invited four guest curators—selected from a diverse set of community stakeholders—to reimagine its exhibition spaces. The historian Bill Bryans describes how such a collaborative practice enables public history, “doing history for and with the public,” often with “non-academic partners.”
The two concurrent exhibitions at Nick Ryan Gallery feature the work of New Englander artists Galen Cheney and Clark Derbes. Brief Transit showcases paintings by Cheney, a self-described “painter’s painter” from Massachusetts. In Time Travelers, Derbes, who lives in Vermont, displays a selection of polychromed wooden sculptures.
Libby Barbee’s solo show, one of Denver International Airport’s latest temporary exhibitions on display in the Airport Office Building, sits at the nexus of these considerations of art and place. Consisting of six collaged works from over the past 16 years, the show is a sharply focused exploration of Barbee’s career-long examination of our connection to our environment.
Dedication to creation requires long bouts of solitary contemplation, configuration, and general manual labor. Inevitably, the work also starts demanding external materials and inspiration to keep the unpredictable muse in motion. Susan Wick wrangles with this joyous tension in her Eyes On exhibition of works at the Denver Art Museum, which combines imagery of everyday home objects with glimpses of faraway lands, all curiously abstracted by a menagerie of enticing materials.
But originality and purity are not synonyms. And as Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick’s Dark Matter, Stacey Steers’ The Stars Fell From Long Ago, and Kim Dickey’s And All the Meadows Wide at Robischon Gallery attest, the subtleties between cherishing source material and overwhelming it can be the difference between breathing life into work or sucking the air out of it.
A continuation of Abecedarian Artists’ Books’ participation in the biennial Colorado Mo’Print, or Month of Printmaking, Printed Page V explores how books are an essential component of the legacy and continuing expansion of printmaking. Jurors Katherine Crowe, Special Collections Curator at the University of Denver, and Alicia Bailey, Director of Abecedarian Artists’ Books, have brought together thirty-eight works by thirty-two U.S. artists, unified by their use of traditional techniques ranging from letterpress to botanical printing.
At the Colorado Photographic Art Center (CPAC), the two current solo exhibitions of works by Leonard Suryajaya and Matthew Finley queer family photographs. Family photography has been and continues to be a tool of nationalism and imperialism as well as a mechanism of constructing and enforcing normative visions of the family as a happy, white, heterosexual, nuclear unit. Against these disciplinary and exclusionary histories, Suryajaya’s and Finley’s images use photography as a method for imagining and practicing kinship otherwise.
A chain reaction can lead to catastrophe or creation and the end result may sharply veer from the original intent. Each point of contact crackles towards a crescendo, but the connection remains precarious. Eleanor Sabin’s exhibition Soft Skills at Colorado State University’s Directions Gallery ponders and mournfully unravels this complexity of connection through a variety of contrasting materials.
Living up to its name, Shared Journey at the Museum of Friends in Walsenburg is a glimpse into a shared artistic life, poignantly marked by Jann Vail’s passing in April last year. Well-known in Huerfano County, the Vails’ work is visually distinct yet united by a sense of purpose and an undercurrent of resistance. Tom’s digital collages, monumental hand-cut wood paintings, and satirical sculptures lean toward surrealism and abstraction, while Jann’s whimsical menageries and repurposed figurines in cigar boxes create intimate, playful vignettes. Despite differences, both practices reflect attentiveness to power structures and the quiet poetry of defiance.
Tim McKay’s solo exhibition Time and Materials at Pirate: Contemporary Art invites viewers to engage in these meta considerations by playfully utilizing obscured labels that become legible with the use of blue lens glasses provided by the gallery. With this “opt-in” system, McKay makes the audience choose how they experience the show and how much information they are given about the art on display.
