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 knew I would make the pilgrimage to the Museum of Art in Fort Collins when I heard that Tony Ortega had curated an exhibition there. Comprising the work of thirty-six artists from Colorado and New Mexico, the exhibition invites its viewers to consider the continued relevance of the Nahuatl term “Nepantla,” which Gloria Anzaldúa helped circulate in 2002.
There’s a reason that we reach for furniture when hard news is coming. The standing body is precarious, wrapped in air and prone to crumbling. The seated body, though, is supported. It can take more. This is what Brady Smith’s new show Sitting Together at Kin Studio feels like: support.
William Villalongo: Myths and Migrations, organized by Grinnell College Museum of Art and currently on view at the CU Art Museum in Boulder, includes collages, video, sound, and sculptural works made during the past two decades. The exhibition challenges a white, male, colonialist gaze central to EuroAmerican histories of art. Interrogating the technologies and techniques that structure and facilitate this gaze, including scientific tools such as the telescope and microscope as well as art making itself, William Villalongo uses collage and (re)framing to emphasize the presence and agency of Black being across time and throughout artistic movements and styles.
Three exhibitions of artwork by Japanese and Japanese American artists are currently on view at the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center in Pueblo, bringing international artists to Colorado and lending visibility to Colorado-based makers. These shows display a range of media—antique photographic methods, sculptural collages, and vibrant oil paintings—while also presenting the nuances of contemporary Japanese identity.
The exhibition at CSU’s Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, 3óóxoneeʼnohoʼóoóyóóʼ /Ho’honáá’e Tsé’amoo’ėse: Art of the Rocky Mountain Homelands of the Hinono’eino’ and Tsétsėhéstȧhese Nations, shares Friday’s story, along with many other Indigenous artists, and asks the viewer to consider the question: “What can we do to return the resources of the land-grant university—knowledge, research, resources, and land—to Indigenous Nations?”
The United States government has proven time and again that it values economic power over human and environmental health. Each passing decade reveals more scorched earth, resources depleted for temporary gains, and tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed in war. Each week another hidden agenda comes to light too late. They enact these histories on a loop—new actors, same destructive decisions. A Thousand Beautiful Lies, organized by The Center for Fine Art Photography at the Center for Creativity in Fort Collins, grapples with this reality in the context of the Atomic Age and the nuclear contamination that still continues to plague communities to this day.
Addressing the hard reality of climate change, an inspiring, youth-led, group exhibition titled Seeds of Hope is on display at Downtown Aurora Visual Arts through November 18. Combining works from over sixty youths (ages 6 - 18) with works by adult artists Kelly Cox, Anna Kaye, Regan Rosburg, and Eileen Roscina, this multifaceted, interactive, educational, and science-focused exhibition tackles the complex theme with a dizzying array of art and information.
At the University of Northern Colorado’s Campus Commons Gallery, Caminos Por Andar: Latinx Futurism and Expanded Realities presents anti-colonial visions of the future. In this exhibition, a cyborgean creature composed of human detritus and dirt emerges, white settlers are recast as extraterrestrials, and the Madonna and Child become residents of a modern-day border town. Many of the artworks employ a familiar futuristic aesthetic—sharp angles, ambient light, and an emphasis on technology—while others are subtle, reminding viewers that the future isn’t always a Star Trekian utopia, nor is it singular.
RemainReal Fine Art has a fall show devoted to the art form of tarot cards. Beyond the Deck is open through October 26 and invites audiences to reimagine tarot “through the eyes of Colorado’s most visionary artists.” Each of the twenty-two works in this feature exhibition interprets a different Major Arcana card from The Fool (0) to The World (XXI) and reflects the internal (cards I to VII), external (VIII through XIV), and mystical (XV to XXI) powers at play in the human experience.
A walk through Nick Ryan Gallery’s current exhibition, Shapespeak, evokes an abstracted American landscape filled with deserted strip malls, fragmented urban life, and flickering nocturnal visions. Ky Anderson, Emilio Lobato, Andy Ryan, and Courtney Sennish each utilize their own combination of highly specific colors and textures to illuminate the layered complexity of humans’ relationship to our environment, both built and natural.
For more than twenty years, Zip37 was an artist-run gallery at 37th Avenue and Navajo Street in Denver and was part of what was then the Navajo Street Art District. Though that art district has declined, Zip37 and its many recognizable artists are celebrated in a new exhibition at Kanon Collective in Lakewood’s 40 West Arts District, where many Navajo Street galleries relocated.
Colorado has a wizard, and his name is Lonnie Hanzon. The artist and storyteller has bewitched audiences via storefronts and interactive experiences since 1980, and he now dons his sorcerer’s cap to revamp Cabinet of Curiosities and Impossibilities at the Museum of Outdoor Art’s (MOA) Greenwood Village headquarters, alchemizing fable into history and oddity into treasure.
The same way a dancer works hard to appear soft, Elnaz Javani’s works in Oddments, on view at the Mariani Gallery until October 10, exude a quiet sense of power. On display are ten hanging pieces made over the past two years and a set of animal-like figures constructed in 2020.
Understudy Art Incubation Space has a unique, fishbowl-like design, with floor-to-ceiling windows that invite passersby to either observe art from the outside or physically experience it inside. Enhanced by the gallery’s compact layout, Tricia Waddell’s immersive solo exhibition, We Will Be Strange, emphasizes phenomenology, a philosophy that focuses on how the body shapes perception.
Guest curator Valerie Hellstein had her work cut out for her with the exhibition Dialogue and Defiance. The exhibition tries to qualify Clyfford Still’s notorious “defiance” of the artworld by emphasizing the “dialogue” between him and his contemporaries—those who came to be called the Abstract Expressionists. Still, though, would no more have admitted to having been in dialogue with his peers than he would have wanted an art critic to review his paintings.
This year’s All Colorado Show is 2024 Fiber Art Colorado, juried by Cecily Cullen, the Director and Curator of Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art. Bringing together 75 artworks by 49 artists from across the state — some of whom are members of the guild — the show quite literally fills the entire exhibition space, spanning three rooms with weavings, sculptural pieces, clothing, and more.
The artists in the group exhibition X.v, celebrating the tenth anniversary of Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver, have tapped into an elemental energy to create works of spirited material exploration. Grounded in process-led practices, they traverse the range of physical realities, from scorched paper to powder coated steel.
The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) is currently hosting the exhibition Tracking Time, which will be on view until September 2, 2024. This show presents the works of two artists—Chelsea Kaiah and Noelle Phares—who address the pressing ecological issues surrounding the Colorado River.
Rounding out the summer, three exhibitions at Blo Back Gallery in Pueblo explore different perspectives from Colorado-based artists Christine Rose Curry, Kim Sewell, and Adam Toksöz. Together, these exhibitions reflect the dynamic and diverse artistic voices Colorado has to offer, each contributing to a broader dialogue on modern issues and personal expression.
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.
