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.

Samantha Johnston | Month of Photography Denver

Mar 1

Mar 1 Samantha Johnston | Month of Photography Denver

Laura I. Miller

To celebrate all photography has to offer, Denver-based artist Mark Sink launched the Month of Photography Denver (MOP) in 2004. The biennial festival was inspired by Houston’s FotoFest and brings exhibitions, portfolio reviews, artist talks, and more to Denver in March. “Really, it was a very grassroots effort, and Mark was amazing in building it himself with volunteers and limited funding,” says Samantha Johnston, executive director and curator for the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC), which now runs the festival. “Since the beginning, the festival has been all about bringing the community together around photography in Denver.”

Feb 24

Feb 24 Rob Hill

With a seemingly endless supply of painter’s tape and vision in equal parts, Rob Hill has already made a big impression on the art scene in his new home in Denver, Colorado. Born in Los Angeles in 1986, Hill made Denver his home in 2020. Dedicated to an ever-evolving vision for himself and his art, Hill continues to build on his use of abstraction through various mediums, from painted canvas to public art to fashion. Whether working with paint, wood, metal, or fabric, his signature style utilizes clean-line triangles that he organically and repetitively layers in bold color palettes.

Dancing in the Diaspora

Feb 14

Feb 14 Dancing in the Diaspora

Raymundo Muñoz

For a few weeks in February, Understudy invites visitors to experience Dancing in the Diaspora, a solo exhibition of new works by Denver-based artist Autumn T. Thomas. Best known as a woodworker, Thomas branches out and fills the arts and culture incubator space with a combination of mobile, wall-mounted, and free-standing sculptures that act together with LED screens and digital projections. Inspired by her recent artist residency in Suriname and her aim to reveal the hidden soul of her pieces, Thomas finds new connections with her ancestors and challenges her own practice through works that are moving in more ways than one.

Feb 10

Feb 10 Before & After

Before & After is a solo exhibition by the Colorado Springs-based artist Rob Watt, currently on view at the Manitou Art Center’s Hagnauer Gallery. Composed of several thematic groupings of Watt’s small format cotton and silk embroidered artworks, the artist created most between 2019 and 2022, though the oldest is from 2009. Themes such as architecture, landscape, seasons, and history weave through this exhibit, fashioning a very interesting tapestry for the viewer.

The Beginning, in the land around me

Feb 1

Feb 1 The Beginning, in the land around me

The Beginning, in the land around me is an exhibition at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art in Fort Collins featuring the work of multimedia artist Kei Ito. It showcases five interconnected series that the artist completed between 2020 and 2023. These pieces explore Ito’s nuclear heritage as a third generation hibakusha—the name given to victims of atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II.

Jan 27

Jan 27 Dirty South

Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver has been excavating misunderstood but important distinctions in Southern material and sonic culture since she worked at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Her groundbreaking exhibition Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse is currently on view at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) through February 5th.

Ends + Beginnings

Jan 17

Jan 17 Ends + Beginnings

Djamila Ricciardi

Ends + Beginnings centers on the general “relationship of terminus and origin” that each artist chooses to explore in their own particular way. Though disparate in terms of media used and themes presented, these works are very much in conversation with one another. Taken as a whole within the spare, well-appointed gallery space, it quickly becomes clear that while each contribution to this exhibition seeks to answer some version of the question “what does it mean to end and begin again?,” the responses vary widely in tone, ranging from barroom contemplations to elegiac reflections. Indeed, the work remains united in a sense of collective uncertainty that leaves ample space for possibility, reformulation, and empowerment.

The Distance Between Words

Jan 12

Jan 12 The Distance Between Words

José Antonio Arellano

For well over a decade, Joel Swanson has explored how language and technology structure our lives. His work has appeared in the Denver-land area, not to mention the Venice Biennale. As part of the entrepreneur Nicholas Pardon’s New Collection, a project-based arts initiative, artists Amber Cobb and Mario Zoots prompted Swanson to create the pieces that make up the current exhibition. The Distance Between Words is on view at Pardon’s private gallery The Vault.

Plane of Action / Just As I Am / A Home In Between

Jan 3

Jan 3 Plane of Action / Just As I Am / A Home In Between

The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) has kicked off their fall season with three exciting new exhibitions: Kevin Hoth and George Perez: Plane of Action, Kristopher Wright: Just As I Am, and Erin Hyunhee Kang: A Home In Between. These shows are all connected by the artists’ impulse to push the potential of photography as form and medium through distinctive methods and processes. The result is a wonderfully multifaceted program in which the simultaneous harmony and particularities within the three exhibitions expand photography practices and create a cathartic interplay between themes of transforming the mundane, destruction, (re)construction, memory, healing, and hope.

Dec 29

Dec 29 Sweaty Wedding

Everyone is invited to Juntae TeeJay Hwang’s Sweaty Wedding at Union Hall. Lined up against the walls, sweating under hot spotlights, confidently crafted ceramic forms emit the austerity and discomfort of ancient vessels in contemporary drag. Their probing gazes remind us that we are as much a part of the exhibit as the artwork.

Dec 22

Dec 22 Vessel

“Vessel” at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder is a substantial show encompassing the work of 19 contemporary artists. It allows the works themselves to assert the meaning of the show’s namesake, without the need for hefty historical analysis. The focus lies on what each artist offers up with “vessels” featuring their own distinctive layers of contextuality, referentiality, and significance.

Dec 13

Dec 13 Like Like

Laura I. Miller

The Like Like exhibition is on display until February 3 at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design’s Rotunda Gallery. Curators Gretchen Marie Schaefer and Louise Martorano have brought together the works of 19 artists who’ve occupied TANK Studios spaces in Denver over the past few years. Rather than shared themes, Schaefer and Martorano have curated people (i.e. souls) instead of the objects they’ve created.

Action/Abstraction Redefined

Dec 7

Dec 7 Action/Abstraction Redefined

José Antonio Arellano

Action/Abstraction Redefined, on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, offers a visual lesson in art history. It is part of the ongoing reexamination of the stories we tell ourselves about our collective past. The show’s title asks us to reconsider how art historical terms, such as “Action Painting” and “Abstract Art” achieve traction and how institutions, including museums and galleries, help establish and distribute definitions. This exhibit features over 50 pieces, mostly paintings, by Native American modernist artists working from the 1940s through the 1970s. Many of the artists were associated with the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe.

Nov 29

Nov 29 Off the Shelf

Mary Grace Bernard

Books have a dynamism as cultural creations that defy space and time. With this in mind, curators Anna Bernhard and Johnny Plastini have organized an exhibition of artists that challenge our conceptual framework of the book and its contents. Off the Shelf: Contemporary Book Arts in Colorado, presented at Colorado State University’s Gregory Allicar Museum of Art in Fort Collins, celebrates artists’ fascination with books as art objects and in particular their conception of artist books. Artist books emerge when the mediums of binding, illustrating, painting, papermaking, printing, painting, sculpting, and writing are combined and made multiple.

Recurring Dreams

Nov 25

Nov 25 Recurring Dreams

In Recurring Dreams at Rule Gallery in Denver, Nathan Abels applies his cosmic curiosity towards the exploration of environmental narratives that stretch within and beyond human time. From the microscopic detail of a bone’s porous surface to the enormity of a melting ice cap, Abels offers an illuminating new perspective on the climate crisis.

A Wink is Just a Wink

Nov 14

Nov 14 A Wink is Just a Wink

Dani/elle Cunningham

In Amber Cobb’s new paintings and sculptures on display in the exhibition “A Wink is Just a Wink” at Meow Wolf Denver’s Galleri Gallery, the artist uses the grid as a tool of order and chaos, a seemingly conflicted notion that introduces in systems like linguistics and spatial dynamics and encourages viewers to explore spaces beyond boundaries.

The Everyday and Everyday Objects Recontextualized

Nov 8

Nov 8 The Everyday and Everyday Objects Recontextualized

Madeleine Boyson

The Everyday and Everyday Objects Recontextualized at fooLPRoof Contemporary Art Gallery is a soft offering that will cushion the discordant shift from summer into fall. Led by gallery owner and artist Laura Phelps Rogers and true to its title, the large group exhibition edifies the commonplace through a medley of color, contour, and craft. Grounded in a loose thematic interpretation of “the everyday” over any single aesthetic, the fooLPRoof show leaves the “recontextualizing” to the viewer and rewards those who stop in to look.

La inclusión de mi raza (The inclusion of my race)

Nov 1

Nov 1 La inclusión de mi raza (The inclusion of my race)

Laura I. Miller

Mexican artist Gabriel Rico is well known for his found-object-based sculptures, but this exhibit represents new aspects of his work with the use of AR and the large scale of the totems. Created from materials donated by Denver-based organizations, the totems tell the story of Denver’s complex culture through everyday and novel objects. The AR introduces a digital layer and strengthens the theme of inclusion.

Oct 28

Oct 28 Paloma Jimenez

Jillian Blackwell

What do keys, buttons, peanuts, rocks, and chewing gum have in common? You might find them on the roadside, and you might find them in the work of artist Paloma Jimenez. Jimenez is an artist who takes in the world, processes it, and reflects it back to us. She has been recreating bits of the world since she was a child growing up in Denver, “making small shoebox houses or miniature food out of polymer clay.”

Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms

Oct 18

Oct 18 Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms

Mary Grace Bernard

On September 15, 2022, the Vicki Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver (DU) opened its very first exhibition focused on notions of gender and structures of power from a distinctly Indigenous perspective. Guest curated by Daina Warren, who is a member of the Akamihk Montana First Nation in Maskwacis, Alberta, Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms features Indigenous, female, and Queer-identifying artists who “explore and critique a variety of themes, including Native politics, economics, land-based values, language loss, the body and sexuality, historical narratives and popular culture, as well as the cosmological and relational belief systems of First Peoples, among others.” The artists’ integration of intersectional identities—Indigenous, female, and/or Queer—with embodied cultural and historical traumas in performance works, photography, and videos makes visible these hidden identities and traumas while demanding that viewers pay attention to the political issues that render them invisible.