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.
If there is a unifying message to be gleaned from A Hand in Nature, a show dizzying in its thematic and material scope, it is this: try as we might to control it, the natural world has a life of its own. The pandemic forced us into this realization four years ago when a coronavirus tore open every fissure in our social fabric, but while COVID exposed us to the dark side of nonhuman agency, Gala Porras-Kim opens our eyes to its poetry.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the “first guitar heroine of rock & roll,” in the words of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. [1] But for all her undeniable contributions to American music history, Tharpe is still not quite widely known. “I couldn’t believe more people weren’t familiar with her,” says Chloé Duplessis. “I resolved then to begin researching her life, with the intention of telling the story of this American music pioneer and founder of rock-n-roll.”
The exhibition Resist at the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising in Fort Collins centers on the artistry of shaped resist dyeing—a technique in which the cloth is manipulated through folding, tying, twisting, and binding—where textiles become canvases for artisans to imprint their movements and memories. The garments on display represent cultures across space and time, from India to Guatemala, starting in the late nineteenth century to present day.
The latest exhibition at SeeSaw Gallery, “Oscillations,” features four artists who unravel their connections to place and demonstrate the interplay between instinct and honed technical skills. While each brings a unique perspective to the show, curator Hayley Schneider expertly weaves together a cohesive and harmonious collection featuring Leslie Fitzsimmons, Jamie Gray, Ilan Gutin, and Autumn T. Thomas. The result is an atmosphere of serenity that ignites introspection, contemplation about the artmaking process, and commentary on the relationship between artists and their materials.
Hương Ngô’s Ungrafting at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center focuses on the politics of visibility in the context of French colonial knowledge production in Vietnam. The exhibition examines how power shapes what is seen and what is made to be unseen.
The We CU: A Visual Celebration of Black Womanhood, Presence, and Connectedness exhibition, presented by The Museum for Black Girls, unfolds as an extensive and profound exploration of the influence of Black women on the concept of “home.” Curators Charlie Billingsly and Von Ross have masterfully assembled an installation that captivates visually while also inspiring deep reflection. Through the show, they urge visitors to contemplate the substantial, yet frequently underestimated, contributions of Black women in shaping both familial and cultural frameworks.
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.
Twisted forms, heavy with their own weight, aspirationally stretch and strain towards sweaty pastel gradients in Sarah Bowling’s current exhibition at Rule Gallery. Titled Quicksand, the expressively saggy sculptures and textured paintings grapple with the quiet ache of transformation.
Amidst the corporate sterilization of pastel tints in the past decade, Quicksand comes as a refreshing reminder of color’s more transcendental potential. Bowling’s neon pastel palette resembles the luminous transitional time of a California sunrise. She balances the more buoyant creamsicle cloudscapes with psychologically heavy plaster voids.
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.
Albert Chong is perhaps the most acclaimed photography, installation, and sculpture artist in Colorado who you’ve never heard of. His long and illustrious career includes pieces that he hopes, as his artist statement proclaims, “[give] expression to [his] human visual intuition, [operating] at levels inhospitable to verbal or literary expression.”
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.
