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.

All in Review

Bachelor of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition

May 7

May 7 Bachelor of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition

The 2021 Bachelor of Fine Arts exhibition, showing at the Emmanuel Art Gallery on the University of Colorado Denver’s Auraria campus, is the culmination of the BFA students’ hard work despite their tumultuous year. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and its ramifications—the switch to an online class format, social distancing, loss of loved ones, and mental and emotional trauma, to name a few—these students have persevered and emerged with innovative works of art. I was fortunate to view the first half of the exhibition, which was up from April 14 to April 29, 2021. The second half of the show goes up on May 4 through May 19, and if it is as impressive as the first, I certainly will not miss it.

Beyond the Mirror

Apr 30

Apr 30 Beyond the Mirror

Although quilts may be an underrated fine art form, it is their makers who have been overlooked for far too long. That is not the case in Beyond the Mirror at the Loveland Museum, a juried exhibition organized by the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA). As one of the leading authorities on art quilts, SAQA ensures that exhibitions of their members’ creations are seen all over the world. In this instance, 30 quilters (both local and international) share personal stories through their art quilts, revealing tidbits about themselves and, surprisingly, about the complicated history behind quilts being accepted as fine art.

Apr 21

Apr 21 Winding Way

Located in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of RiNo, Denver’s Plinth Gallery is an established outpost of the national contemporary ceramics conversation. The current exhibition, Winding Way, is a solo exhibition by Lauren Mabry. It is a visual feast and technical marvel for ceramic newcomers and seasoned ceramicists alike.

Wood. Works & Three Pieces

Apr 13

Apr 13 Wood. Works & Three Pieces

Mary Voelz Chandler

Wood. Works at the Arvada Center is all about allure and diversity. It is accompanied by another exhibition in the Theatre Gallery—Carley Warren: Three Pieces—that focuses on new sculptures by a well-known artist who works in wood.

Wood. Works features 24 artists with works spread out on both gallery levels. It’s like a travelogue: big and small, serious and humorous (and even sly), and oiled wood or rough wood or painted wood. But all of the works approach how artists are attracted to this fairly humble and mainly renewable material. Beetle-kill pine, the sad scourge of Colorado, has provided a helping handful of material, while exotic hardwoods are quite more luxurious.

The 15th Quilt Nihon Exhibition & Viewpoints 9

Apr 6

Apr 6 The 15th Quilt Nihon Exhibition & Viewpoints 9

Jillian Blackwell

The quilts of the 15th Quilt Nihon Exhibition at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden are each their own elaborate world. From a distance, each quilt is a bold composition, while closer inspection reveals beautiful, meticulous detail. The exhibition comes from a competition sponsored by the Japanese Handicraft Instructors’ Association, which is supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. The quilts presented are winners of various prizes in two categories: traditional and contemporary. Across both categories, the quilts exhibit mastery of pattern, color, and scale.

“Viewpoints 9” is an “international, invitational, fiber art group.” For this show, each of the nine members of Viewpoints 9 submitted a single word to which the other members responded, creating a plethora of work.

Mar 31

Mar 31 Topologies

Opening during the final month of a historically difficult year—a year that stretched patience thin and tested the tensile strength of American society—Senga Nengudi’s retrospective Topologies at the Denver Art Museum (DAM) traverses decades to adeptly meet the moment.

There is a timeless quality to Senga Nengudi’s work, some of which was created half a century ago but still rings true in the modern era. She was in fact an important player in the feminist performance art and the Black American avant-garde movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, and has continued her practice for over 50 years. Through her iconic, pendulous pantyhose sculptures, evocative performances, and collaborative happenings, Nengudi captures a numinous elegance paired with a distinctive rawness and in doing so comments on the conditions of Black female embodiment.

histordomest-icity

Mar 25

Mar 25 histordomest-icity

Laura I. Miller

In their new exhibition histordomest-icity at the Center for the Arts Evergreen, Melissa Furness and Rian Kerrane place an anthropological lens on domesticity, elevating the refuse of everyday life, and exposing its strangeness. The works in this exhibition, some collaborative and some singular, address the erasure of women throughout history and recast domesticity as a rich, sharp-edged tapestry that’s rife with artistic expression.

Artists and professors of art at the University of Colorado Denver, Furness and Kerrane collaborated on nearly all of the works for this exhibition. With pieces such as Refuse and Unheavy, Furness created the paintings and Kerrane produced the metal sculptural elements, e.g. iron mop brushes and roses cast in bronze. The delicacy of the paintings and the rigidity of the metal contrast in a way that underscores the versatility of domesticity.

My Husband Won't Tell Me His First Name

Mar 22

Mar 22 My Husband Won't Tell Me His First Name

Mary Grace Bernard

Dr. Virgil DiBiase, MD, is a full-time neurologist and part-time photographer based in rural Indiana. He has exhibited his black and white photographs nationally, including at the Rangefinder Gallery in Chicago, the Strimbu Gallery at Valparaiso University, the Workspace Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Providence Center for Photographic Arts, and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, just to name a few. His typical subject matter focuses on the people and spaces of rural Indiana. Photographic series such as My Indiana illustrate farm life, classic Americana, and the quotidian. For his project My husband won't tell me his first name, however, DiBiase chose to combine his medical profession with his photography practice. What emerged is a series of portraits and landscapes that exhibit what (dis)ability scholars Rosemarie Garland-Thompson and Tobin Siebers call the “visual rhetorics of disability” and “disability aesthetics”—two concepts that relate to viewers’ body and mind sensations when looking at photographs of (dis)abled bodies and minds.

Hail the Dark Lioness

Mar 8

Mar 8 Hail the Dark Lioness

Dani/elle Cunningham

Over the last few years, Center for Visual Art in Denver has presented several striking lens-based exhibitions, typically centered on the institution’s preferred themes of social justice and activism. This year’s offering is a black-and-white solo exhibition of photographic self-portraits by self-described visual activist Zanele Muholi (they/them). Presented in a range of sizes including floor to ceiling, Muholi’s subjects lock eyes with the viewer, reversing the art historical notion that subjects should mostly avoid the gaze, particularly when the subjects are women or people of color. Black subjects, such as the servant in Manet’s Olympia, have typically been placed in the background, resulting in their near erasure. This is not the case for Muholi’s works, in which the artist transforms themself into different characters placed confidently in the forefront.

Reflections and Ruminations

Mar 5

Mar 5 Reflections and Ruminations

The Robert Rauschenberg exhibit at the Museum of Outdoor Arts (MOA) in Englewood called Reflections and Ruminations showcases over 50 artworks, mostly from the later years of the artist’s career. Presenting a slightly nostalgic and sometimes sentimental version of Rauschenberg, the show focuses primarily on artwork he created in the 1990s and 2000s, when he seemed to be looking back at his own life. It’s the first major Rauschenberg solo exhibition in Colorado since 1981 and has taken five years to develop, organize, and curate. Perhaps because of this massive undertaking, the result is a show that requires a bit more sophisticated knowledge of Rauschenberg, or at least the desire to learn more about his life and career.

Feb 22

Feb 22 The Late Works

Madeleine Boyson

In The Late Works: Clyfford Still in Maryland, on view at the Clyfford Still Museum (CSM) now through March 21, 2021, curator Dean Sobel examines Clyfford Still’s rich and experimental period after his hallmark Abstract Expressionist era. Bookended by Still’s removal from New York to Maryland in 1961 and his death in 1980, six of the museum’s nine upper level galleries survey the artist’s his restless pursuit of artistic and individual truth in his last two decades. The exhibition’s approximately 40 paintings and 30 works on paper cohere into a brief but provoking treatise on the value of the artist’s prolific time in Maryland. Consequently, Sobel asserts that Still’s late works ought to be considered some of his best.

Colorado Abstracted

Feb 11

Feb 11 Colorado Abstracted

Through the end of the month, the Littleton Museum is highlighting five abstract artists who explore the unruly and stormy but transcendent power of nature. By referencing landscapes, skies, and natural forms through the lens of abstraction, these artists communicate states of mind and perception that go beyond the material world but are often inspired by nature. Surveying a range of processes and mediums such as acrylics, cold wax, printmaking, and resin, Patricia J. Finley, Annamarie Mead, Lydia Riegle, Janet Rundquist and Cyncie Winter channel modernist influences as well, the likes of Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Georgia O Keefe.

Posts & Smoke Drawings

Feb 3

Feb 3 Posts & Smoke Drawings

Mary Voelz Chandler

If you walk into the William Havu Gallery in Denver, and turn left, it is as if you were entering a magical forest. Patrick Marold’s Posts are created from wood or metal; they are neither overwhelming nor ethereal. They are perfectly right in the middle, so a viewer can relate to them, while admiring the beauty that Marold has contributed with unexpected flourishes. Dennis Lee Mitchell began his art pursuit in education and later while focusing on ceramics. But then he had an idea to make “Smoke Paintings,” in which smoke colors the paper he uses to create abstracted floral images. Their beauty is “painted” in a very different medium, which makes the works so unusual.

Flight of the Polychromatic Zooids

Jan 28

Jan 28 Flight of the Polychromatic Zooids

Madeleine Boyson

Anticipating flight as I slipped through the door of the Firehouse Art Center in Longmont, Colorado, I half-expected to catch artist Jen Rose’s work in mid-air. Instead, I found myself happily sunk into a colorful, more subaquatic dreamworld. Flight of the Polychromatic Zooids, on view at Firehouse until February 7, is Rose’s solo, one-piece exhibition curated by Brandy Coons and inspired by marine colonies. Yet unlike the images of departure or frenzy conjured by the title’s noun “flight,” the Dallas, Texas-based artist’s sculptural installation settles the viewer, drawing them not up into the air, but down into the calming depths of the sea.

Lumonics Mind Spa

Jan 20

Jan 20 Lumonics Mind Spa

Mary Grace Bernard

Lumonics Mind Spa: Light Intersection is bringing much-needed color and light to downtown Denver. The exhibition presents works by Dorothy Tanner (1923-2020) and Mel Tanner (1925-1993)—an artist couple who dedicated their life and art practice to the immersive experiences of visual art and to promoting the importance of physical, emotional, and spiritual awareness. While Lumonics Mind Spa has been on view in other art spaces around Denver, the show’s current iteration at Understudy forges an atmosphere not seen elsewhere.

Pioneer Project & Mothers and Daughters

Jan 11

Jan 11 Pioneer Project & Mothers and Daughters

Jillian Blackwell

Stepping off of a snowy street on a gray winter day, one is grateful for the two vibrant shows currently on view at Visions West Contemporary. Pioneer Project by Jennifer Nehrbass and Mothers and Daughters by Madeleine Bialke create intriguing and colorful worlds to enter into. Pioneer Project by Jennifer Nehrbass is a collection of landscape paintings, portraits of women, and small sculptures. Mothers and Daughters by Madeleine Bialke, is another world unto itself with contrasting complementary colors blue and orange.

Helen & Alice at the Museum

Dec 22

Dec 22 Helen & Alice at the Museum

Dani/elle Cunningham

Known for weaving non-traditional materials, fiber artist Steven Frost pushes his material scope to extremes this year with a new monumental installation. This work is the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s (BMoCA’s) newest temporary commission for its InsideOut program, hangs over the external northwest corner of BMoCA’s building. The woven green-and-white plastic form is sourced from lawn chairs, evoking stereotypical, mid-century images of white American families, and perhaps even generating feelings of nostalgia for a “simpler time.”

Contrasting with this picturesque notion, the work rests against the red brick pattern of BMoCA’s facade to create a nauseating combination of color and geometry. And that’s the point. The clash of the artwork with the building underscores the queer identity of the women to whom Frost pays homage with the work’s title: his aunt, Helen, and her partner, Alice. For them, family life was far from simple.

Freedom of Speech

Dec 14

Dec 14 Freedom of Speech

Samantha Hunt-Durán

Freedom of Speech is a monumental triptych on the southeast side of the Denver Performing Arts Complex that features three images by Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur in collaboration with Eric Gottesman and Wyatt Gallery. It is on view until February 2021. These images are adaptations of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting by the same name and are part of a larger series of referential photographs that re-conceive Rockwell’s America via his Four Freedoms paintings.

Queer Gardens: Lost at Home

Dec 4

Dec 4 Queer Gardens: Lost at Home

Mary Grace Bernard

The Storeroom is a relatively new exhibition space located next to Vine Street Pub & Brewery on 17th Street in Denver. Opening less than two years ago, the installation space has already featured almost a dozen shows. For The Storeroom’s most recent exhibit, local artist Frankie Toan has transformed the one-hundred square foot gallery into the artist’s third installment of a series called Queer Gardens.

Dec 1

Dec 1 Ghost Forest

Jamie Sheffield

One of the most arresting things about Colorado-based artist Melanie Walker’s 2020 exhibit Ghost Forest—now showing at the Denver Botanic Gardens until Dec. 6—is its exacting use of space…and silence.

The photographs in Walker’s exhibition depict trees, branches, and leaves, all printed on various fabrics. Some are pressed and slight, others crumpled to create tactile creases. Yet each image is an eerie, mirror-counterpart to something else in our own world. The fold in a leaf reveals lips, the knobs or gashes on aspen tree bark become eyes peering out blankly. Nature, after all, is ancient and humans are just passersby, stealthily observed by lifeforms such as these.