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.
History is Painted by the Victors, currently on view at the Denver Art Museum until August 17, 2025, is artist Kent Monkman’s (Fisher River Cree Nation, born 1965) first major solo exhibition in the United States. Co-organized with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition focuses on Monkman’s deeply layered monumental paintings from the DAM’s extensive collection of the artist’s work alongside new works and loans from other institutions and private collections.
It is with these concerns in mind that I first encountered Mutual Terrain at RedLine Contemporary Art Center this summer. The Denver Month of Video (.MOV) exhibition is curated by Adán De La Garza and Jenna Maurice and presents works that analyze the natural environment not “as a passive backdrop but as an active, animate force.” As such, the exhibition questions Western tendencies to see land as disentangled from us, extractable by us, and profitable for us.
Maya Guatemala and Us: Divergent Convergences at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art (GAMA) in Fort Collins sets out to do just that, looking specifically at the legacy of colonization for the Maya peoples, the foreign interventions in the development of the Guatemalan nation, and how it continues to manifest in American politics and current events as the population of Guatemalan immigrants in the United States continues to grow.
On display at the Littleton Museum, Port de Banana is a solo exhibition by Lio-Bravo Bumbakini—a Boulder/Brooklyn-based artist with Congolese blood and a Belgian upbringing—that weaves together a complex, visually and emotionally powerful, yet disjointed narrative about his deep cultural heritage. The earnest artist really reaches for the stars in this exhibition, pulling from historical events, folkloric mythologies, archetypes, and symbols, all expressed in his bold and energetic visual style.
Despite my excitement, I expected an impersonal cacophony to greet me at the doors of RECESS at The Collective Community Arts Center in Lafayette, on view through July 13, 2025. Looking back at the line-up, I should have known better.
That doesn’t preclude the Adams County Government Center from hosting moments of beauty, the unique task of the Gallery at Taza Coffee House in the central lobby, where until August 26 you’ll find the oil-painted panels that make up Jenna Annunziato’s exhibition What we hold dear. Which objects do we imbue with special meaning? How do we treat them differently? What happens when they inevitably crack and crumble? Do they lose their value? What about their meaning?
Glass Expressions: Diverse Visions in a Transparent Medium at the Center for the Arts Evergreen welcomes us into this season of the Sun’s fiery reign with a group of glass artists who sculpt with fantastical flexibility. Fire has a recent track record of mass destruction, but it is also vital for the sustenance of life and can be used to manipulate glass to dazzling creative effect. Glass Expressions reflects, refracts, and reimagines the mercurial energy of growth, both psychological and physical.
Installed concurrently at Michael Warren Contemporary, Andrew Roberts-Gray’s Singularity and Collin Parson’s Reflectivity create a dialogue between two Colorado-based artists who examine the relationship between art, technology, and perception in different media: Andrew Roberts-Gray in painting and Collin Parson in installation and sculpture. Experienced together, the works in the gallery implicate viewers in the fraught discourses surrounding contemporary technologies such as social media and artificial intelligence.
On view through July 26, Oracle at Union Hall in Denver presents fourteen works by Yazz Atmore, Faatma Be Oné, Linda Bishara, Rebecca Peebles, Sarah Tenney, and Harriet Woodman. Fiber and bead art braid with ceramics, digital collage, mixed media, and ephemera to invite “a receptive state of mind” and integrate viewers with themselves and the unseen, which are sometimes the same thing.
I hadn’t heard of sound artist Jim Green, who died in September, but like most Denverites, I’d experienced his work. He’s best known for producing sounds in airports, including Train Call, the jingles that precede announcements at Denver International Airport’s commuter rail line, and Talking Fountain at the Seattle airport, in which microchips play recordings of babbling brooks or a swimmer splashing as the fountain runs.
After an almost year-long hiatus (and recent successful fundraiser), Denver’s OG, self-supporting, artist-run art space Spark Gallery is back with the inaugural members’ exhibition This Is Spark. Spread over two shows, this annual, open-themed exhibition invites full and associate members (i.e. Tier 1 and 2; supporting members a.k.a. Tier 3 get their own show later in the year) to come together and display a few works of their own choosing.
Susan Tormoen’s latest exhibition at the Cottonwood Center for the Arts in Colorado Springs offers answers. Aptly titled Fun with Oil and Pastel, it showcases the sense of play that permeates her practice, with over half a dozen styles visible in the twenty or so landscapes on display.
In Niza Knoll Gallery’s current exhibition, Everything Papier Mâché, this stereotype remains intact—but like the compounded layers of paper required to make these artworks, there is plenty of depth and intrigue. Glue-eating is (hopefully) left behind, as the featured artists demonstrate how this accessible material can also be transformative, magical, and technically impressive.
To put it in overly simple terms: Annalee Schorr likes cubes. She is, in fact, “obsessed” with them, she says. She likes straight lines and deadlines. She uses grids, patterns, and repetition. She takes inspiration from quilts, Navajo textiles and tiles, and is deeply motivated by Sol LeWitt.
Currently on display at Lane Meyer Projects, In Service of the Wellspring features work by Keith Riley and MarSha Yi Robinson—artists who invite us to contemplate the seasons of change passing through the cities in which we live. The botanical designs in Robinson’s CfOlNoCwReErTsE series signal the promise of a flourishing spring set against the rigidity of concrete, architectural landscapes. Riley also explores constructed environments, making geometric forms and patterns malleable with his stylized graphite, crayon, and ink drawings.
The first installment of Tiger’s Leap: Fashion Past, Present, Future at Colorado State University’s Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising delves into the cyclical history of fashion trends within their broader social contexts. Historically informative with a wide array of garments on view, the exhibition unravels the illusion of aesthetic newness within culture.
Before crossing the curtain that separates the darkened room exhibiting Na Mira’s Hotel from the rest of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, I could hear a song playing from within the gallery. It sounded vaguely familiar, at the edge of my recognition and memory. Experiencing Hotel felt familiar and new, like watching a sci-fi movie from the 1980s—both outdated and prescient, anachronist and transformative. This impression was due in part to the video medium and Mira’s allusion to the postmodern building designed by John Portman, Jr.: the Bonaventure Hotel.
In Language Without Words, on view at the Denver Botanic Gardens (DBG) Freyer-Newman Center, Ash Eliza Williams’s stunning paintings and sculptures invite viewers to consider the varied nonverbal ways that nature uses to communicate. Both imaginative and scientifically grounded, Williams offers a surreal and animistic perspective that is visually wonderful, somewhat alien, and subtly spiritual.
At the Lincoln Center Art Gallery in Fort Collins, Barbara Baer and Amelia Furman are paired in the exhibition Biophilia for their shared affinity for nature and their use of multimedia, resulting in an energetic show that offers a range of experiences from fixed to immersive. Both artists replicate aspects of the natural world, emphasizing interconnected experiences while creating space for the emergence of new narratives. Through their distinct yet complementary approaches, Baer and Furman invite viewers to engage with the natural world and each other in thought-provoking ways, blending time, environment, and the human experience.
The Dairy Arts Center’s exhibition Black Futures in Art: The Space Between Us reimagines rigid boundaries as permeable gray areas and proposes differences among people as opportunities for collaboration. Guest curated by Adderly Grant-Lord, who also has paintings in the show, this group of Black artists and allies suggest moving forward into our collectively uncertain future without forgetting what’s behind, using past experiences, including traumas, to build strong communities. Focusing on the energy that thrives in creative spaces, this exhibition reminds viewers to use this energy as a catalyst for inclusive relationships and comfort within liminality.
