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
I belong in a museum: Colorado Women Artist Museum Members Exhibition, Part 1, currently on show in D’art Gallery East, is the museum’s third exhibition since its formation in August of 2023. Curated by Carrie MaKenna, Rebecca Gabriel, and Carlene Frances, the exhibition features work by over 20 artist members of the museum ranging in medium, style, and theme.
Two exhibitions dedicated to healing grief, trauma, and loss are currently on view at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC). The Presence of Absence by artist Inbal Abergil and The Silhouette Project: Newcomers by photographer Dona Laurita capture two of the consequences perpetrated by war.
The artist-run gallery NKollectiv is currently hosting its second annual encaustic invitational, which showcases the work of sixteen Colorado artists specializing in this ancient art form. Named Apis Opus, the exhibition cleverly combines the world of bees and art, highlighting beeswax as the primary medium in encaustic work. Encaustic is made by heating layers of beeswax mixed with pigment and applying it to different substrates.
Currently on view in the artist-run space of neü folk, Ways to Leave (Save) Earth is a group exhibition curated by Dani/elle Cunningham that invites viewers to ponder the bleak, multifaceted realities of current and future space travels. Like warp drives and wormholes, this strange and thoughtful exhibition is not without its conceptual and practical faults. However, its deep and personal Earthbound narratives do help shine a truthful, if unpleasant, light on what’s really going on above our heads.
Mychaelyn Michalec’s first major solo exhibition at K Contemporary showcases new directions and experiments in her fiber paintings. Trying to get all my birds to land in the yard is made up of shifting organic forms and allegorical, collaged compositions. With these new works, the artist examines the cultural and historical uses of avian symbolism to articulate womanhood, domestic life, and freedom.
Silver Park is a bit of magic nestled on a side street near downtown Pueblo. In the summer of 2020, the artist Bob Marsh began coating the façade of a disused stucco rowhouse in silver paint and silver-coated objects and sculptures.
As twilight descends upon Denver, Alexander Richard Wilson’s exhibition Nightwalks fills the walls of Dateline gallery with painted homages to a city in transition. Each canvas is a love letter and eulogy to the city’s changing façade, where the historic neon glow now flickers in the shadow of impending modernity.
Celestial inspiration encounters geometric precision in the Gio Ponti exhibition, Designer of a Thousand Talents, at the Denver Art Museum. Spanning a liminal, light-filled space between the more formal galleries in the redesigned Martin Building, the collection of architectural drafts and interior objects display a small but enticing sampling of Ponti’s prolific oeuvre. The Italian designer collaborated with master artisans throughout his career to elevate raw materials into imaginative, functional works.
If the Western art in the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art began and ended with Mitchell’s caucasian cowboys and cowgirls, it would be complicit in whitewashing Western art history, allowing these icons to remain unchallenged as the heroes of this imaginary, monolithic West. However, with contemporary displays like the Uncommon Collective, the museum makes space to critique and expand notions of the West, its history, and the future of its artistic production. In a similar spirit to the museum’s interest in a holistic view of the West, the Uncommon Collective pushes viewers to ponder what, if anything, unifies contemporary printmaking in Colorado.
While exploring a project on regional barbecue traditions as a follow-up to his book Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, curator and soul food scholar Adrian Miller became entranced by stories of local African Americans and the unique challenges they faced and overcame. While at a dinner party with friends and board members from the Museum of Boulder, he started cooking up an idea for an exhibit to showcase Colorado’s Black history. Now on display at the Museum of Boulder, operated by the Boulder Historical Society, Proclaiming Colorado’s Black History is the culmination of two years of research.
Charley Friedman’s Soundtracks for the Present Future is currently on view until April 7 at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art in Fort Collins. In the museum’s largest space, the Griffin Foundation Gallery, the artist floats dozens of acoustic guitars, mandolins, and basses, each attached to electrical wires that converge toward a laptop at the center of the room. The installation invites viewers to move amongst the “constellation” of instruments and embody the sounds and vibrations each one makes as it is automatically plucked by a robotic arm holding a singular guitar pick.
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.
