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
In her series Woven and Book of Miracles, on view in the exhibition Laws of Nature at the Denver Botanic Gardens’ Freyer-Newman Center until March 31, 2024, Tanya Marcuse lauds earth’s fertile excess in meticulous natures mortes, weaving life and death together in velvet-hued ritual. The artist has venerated nature’s transience since at least 2005, when she began photographing fruit trees and their offerings.
With fifty years in operation as one of only a few Colorado non-profits dedicated exclusively to weaving, the Northern Colorado Weavers Guild’s (NCWG) mission of sharing knowledge is apparent in the Northern Colorado Weavers Guild: Celebrating 50 Years exhibition at the Loveland Museum. Members display their considerable skills while demonstrating an array of traditional techniques and objects, from clothing and stuffed animals to contemporary wall hangings. NCWG further extends its educational mission by displaying the tools of its trade, including a drum carder that prepares fiber for spinning, a spinning wheel used to prepare fiber for weaving, a loom on which fiber is woven, and many other objects.
Currently on view at the Museum of Art Fort Collins, To See Inside: Art, Architecture, and Incarceration combines paintings by Colorado-based artist Sarah McKenzie and visual works, a sound art installation, and creative writing by incarcerated artists involved in the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative (DU PAI). The exhibition provides us with the opportunity to reflect on incarceration culture in the U.S. and the ideological structures that circumscribe it. Through representations in different forms—often created by the inmates themselves—of the prison space, its architecture, and built environment, we are able to grasp how they impact the minds and bodies of those they “contain.”
Hung Liu: Control and Freedom is on view at Vicki Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver until March 24. Hung Liu was prolific and often returned to concepts, using new lenses and mediums, over several decades. Collage, oil painting, photography, lithography, tapestry, and found-object assemblage, among others, all make appearances. The subjects of Liu’s artworks are drawn from the artist’s collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs, many being images of laborers, sex workers, refugees, and soldiers.
“My body is my home,” writes Boulder-based artist Tanja London in her statement for HOME: A Photographic Journey into Identity, Place, and Belonging, the current exhibition at Lafayette’s The Collective Community Arts Center. “I am embodied within a vast network of beings, places, and timelines. What goes around—comes around.” London’s words demonstrate how broad and encompassing the notion of “home” really is in this exhibition—it is objects, landscapes, people, memories, and more. Composed of photographs selected by the City of Lafayette’s Arts & Cultural Resources Department from an open call for art in which Colorado-based artists were invited to submit three works showing “‘who is home,’ ‘what is home,’ and ‘where is home,’” the show tackles the contrarian notions of home as both universal and specific; elastic and concrete.
In his latest exhibition at The History Colorado Center, Virgil Ortiz travels through time using the spiritually loaded medium of clay. Revolt 1680/2180: Runners + Gliders offers materially and politically rich insights into Puebloan history. In collaboration with the museum, the genre-bending artist challenges the public to reconsider history not just as a concrete timeline of events but as a porous exchange between people throughout the past, present, and future. Ortiz forges a path where ancestral stories and newly invented narratives can shape the course of lived realities.
As someone drawn to kitsch, I was immediately excited by the theme of Memento Mori Gallery and Tattoo’s current exhibition Draped in Velvet, which features artworks by eleven artists experimenting with velvet as material and as canvas. Through a sense of wit and its showcasing of technical dexterity, Draped in Velvet looks towards the wider possibilities available within velvet painting, challenging its characterization as cheap souvenir art while celebrating its distinctive aesthetic qualities.
February’s show at Surface Gallery in Old Colorado City demonstrates what is possible when women revive a breakaway legacy of modernism. The show, titled Five, groups together the painters Becca Day, Tara Kelley-Cruz, Valerie Lloyd, Jes Moran, and Diane Reeves.
Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines, a group show at East Window Gallery in Boulder, on view through February 28, considers the space in between these tropes. Curator and gallery owner Todd Edward Herman has gathered “a small selection of playful, critical, and tender images made by and about elder artists” to shift perceptions from “the ‘pornography of old age’ within consumer culture” towards lived experience. The resulting exhibition is heartfelt and substantive, even humorous, and successfully considers aging’s realities without devolving into pity or romanticization.
Migiwa Orimo’s quietly radical exhibition ]MARGINS[, at Mariani Gallery on the campus of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, maps out space for the overlooked aspects of life, revealing the poignant significance of untold narratives. She pieces together society’s marginalia to dismantle commonly perceived hierarchies of value. Orimo’s materials include fabric, thread, and paper, but she also uses the spaces between spoken words, fragments of ephemera, and forgotten histories to communicate unspeakable emotions.
Plinth Gallery owner and exhibition artist Jonathan Kaplan “leaves dogma to religion” rather than ceramics. Instead, he believes design possibilities are limitless and adapting to one’s environment is crucial to the creative process. This exhibition, The Crux of the Biscuit, is the artist’s first body of work since 2021 and showcases his decades of work as a bike builder and potter, as well as his training as a ceramicist. Kaplan has a true knack for bringing disparate parts into a whole that is not only cohesive but whimsical.
Since 1986, Emanuel Martinez’s mural titled Arte Mestiza has greeted visitors to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Last year, a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts enabled Martinez to restore and protect the work. Freely available to the public, this significant mural reminds us of the contributions of Spanish, Indigenous, Mexican, and Mexican Americans to the stories we tell about the histories of art.
Orisons perforates a now vacant central-pivot irrigation and former cattle field. The fallow plot is labeled “unfarmable” on the artwork website but it’s one of many parcels in North America’s highest, and the world’s largest, alpine valley that may produce crops in the right circumstances. The region’s endorheic (closed) basin is critical for retaining water and equilibrating via evaporation. Deep wells have so far sustained agriculture. But twenty-three years of climate change-induced aridification and megadrought worsened by over-pumped aquifers and invariant farming have left this region dry and sere. It is from this narrative that Humeau builds Orisons.
If you too have grown weary of the painters who play uninspired poker with Pantone color chips, then Frank Martinez’s collection of paintings at Space Gallery might shine some light onto your winter blues. Modern Love glows with a playful curiosity about life’s colorful offerings.
Every piece in Taiko Chandler’s exhibition Thoughtful Intuition at the Littleton Museum, from her paper sculptures to her monotypes, contains shapes and textures that conjure the sea and its creatures. Viewing these works, I felt as though I’d been pulled underwater into the artist’s world, one that’s teeming with longing and magic. But the unexpected gift of this exhibition is the care and detail with which the artist describes her process and the meaning behind her creations.
The Longmont Museum exhibition AgriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land pairs artists with local Boulder County farms to create artworks. The exhibition attempts to wield art to connect humanity to the land. This is a tricky tightrope to walk, with the perils of being too didactic or making art that is only illustrative and not substantive on either side. The work presented in AgriCULTURE does a good job walking that tightrope, melding formal elements, materials, and subject matter to create pleasing artworks that maintain a tie to the overarching theme. There is often tenderness apparent in the connection between artist and farmer, as one might hope to achieve when we work in community.
The University of Colorado Art Museum’s Faculty Exhibition: 2023 brings together works by twenty-three CU Boulder faculty members. The media represented in the show include ceramics, film, multimedia installations, painting, photography, and sculpture, among others. Each artist tells stories through their work about time and experience becoming tangible in their art making practice. It is through their stories that we see how students will begin to tell their own.
Located on the second floor of the historic McNichols Building in downtown Denver, Community Cloth, a contemporary exhibition of textile, fiber, and fashion design art curated by Shanna Shelby, invites viewers to engage with “tangible” and “tactile” art forms. As the introductory title card in the exhibition states: “While a sculptor creates in a very tactile manner, a viewer of the final artwork is not typically expected to handle the sculpture. Fiber art, on the other hand, is best experienced not only through sight but also through contact; fabric, rugs, clothing, and upholstery are meant to be touched as well as seen.”
Sama Alshaibi’s solo exhibition Silsila is currently on view at the Hatton Gallery at Colorado State University (CSU) and is presented in conjunction with the Center for Fine Art Photography and the CSU Center for Environmental Justice as part of the Environmental Justice Thru the Arts exhibition series. Part of her larger project also titled Silsila, Alshaibi creates photographs and videos of performances, explorations, and documentations of her journey through fifteen predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Maldives nation of islands in Southeast Asia between 2009 and 2016.
I want to invoke metaphors of geological time to describe the sense of temporality invoked by Martha Russo’s exhibition at the Ent Center for the Arts. Apart from the pandemic-related interruptions that delayed its possibility, the nature of the work itself is accumulative, labor and time-intensive. With this exhibition—titled caesura, on view until December 2— the Gallery of Contemporary Art (GOCA) proves itself as a site committed to advancing what could be possible in the arts in Colorado Springs.
![]MARGINS[](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5dade78ef3de04278ab5b4e8/1706556791874-RM7RABP1MHJ4GM9S100G/orimo_notes45+%281%29.jpg)
