Curas: Males del Corazón / Remedies: Ailments of the Heart

Curas: Males del Corazón / Remedies: Ailments of the Heart

Dani/elle Cunningham
Review

Stepping into Juan Carlos Escobedo’s exhibition Curas: Males del Corazón / Remedies: Ailments of the Heart at the Art Students League of Denver (ASLD) is both whimsical and deeply reflective—a journey through the artist’s residency at ASLD that balances conceptual rigor with Escobedo's subjective experience. As a residency exhibition should, the work embraces experimentation, transforming the ASLD’s building—a late nineteenth century former school—into an immersive and collaborative environment for Escobedo’s ideas and historic architecture.

Los Seis de Boulder Community Sculpture Project

Los Seis de Boulder Community Sculpture Project

Madeleine Boyson
Review

Los Seis de Boulder were involved in United Mexican American Students (UMAS), a group concurrently sitting-in at Temporary Building 1 that May to protest treatment by the university. Yet no one was charged with their deaths, and the FBI case files burned in a fire. Jasmine Baetz began a socially engaged and community-focused sculpture project, the memorial stands six feet tall on a barren patch outside Temporary Building 1—a deliberate and charged location. 

Second Body

Second Body

Raymundo Muñoz
Review

In her solo exhibition Second Body—currently on view at Meow Wolf’s Galleri Gallery—New Zealand native and Denver-based artist Jodi Stuart draws inspiration from our complicated and expansive relationship with plastics, creating works that are not meant to solve the plastics problem necessarily, but rather give new life, forms, and purpose through upcycling and artmaking.

Reconstructing Perspectives

Reconstructing Perspectives

Paloma Jimenez
Review

A library collapses linear timelines and provides a space where many stories can intermingle and unusual analogies begin to form. This is similar to how Kylee Covili and Jim Kearns approach their materials in their Reconstructing Perspectives exhibition at the Lyons Community Library. Using precise construction and unexpected patternmaking, the two artists work with materials embedded with stories of previous lives and create something new out of the collected parts.

Gathering Place: Permanent Collection Reinstallation

Gathering Place: Permanent Collection Reinstallation

José Antonio Arellano
Review

In a collaborative effort to tell a more complex story of this collection and the institution, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center invited four guest curators—selected from a diverse set of community stakeholders—to reimagine its exhibition spaces. The historian Bill Bryans describes how such a collaborative practice enables public history, “doing history for and with the public,” often with “non-academic partners.”

Brief Transit | Time Travelers

Brief Transit | Time Travelers

Felicity Wong
Review

The two concurrent exhibitions at Nick Ryan Gallery feature the work of New Englander artists Galen Cheney and Clark Derbes. Brief Transit showcases paintings by Cheney, a self-described “painter’s painter” from Massachusetts. In Time Travelers, Derbes, who lives in Vermont, displays a selection of polychromed wooden sculptures. 

Libby Barbee

Libby Barbee

Maggie Sava
Review

Libby Barbee’s solo show, one of Denver International Airport’s latest temporary exhibitions on display in the Airport Office Building, sits at the nexus of these considerations of art and place. Consisting of six collaged works from over the past 16 years, the show is a sharply focused exploration of Barbee’s career-long examination of our connection to our environment.

Eyes On

Eyes On

Paloma Jimenez
Review

Dedication to creation requires long bouts of solitary contemplation, configuration, and general manual labor. Inevitably, the work also starts demanding external materials and inspiration to keep the unpredictable muse in motion. Susan Wick wrangles with this joyous tension in her Eyes On exhibition of works at the Denver Art Museum, which combines imagery of everyday home objects with glimpses of faraway lands, all curiously abstracted by a menagerie of enticing materials.

Printed Page V

Printed Page V

Maggie Sava
Review

A continuation of Abecedarian Artists’ Books’ participation in the biennial Colorado Mo’Print, or Month of Printmaking, Printed Page V explores how books are an essential component of the legacy and continuing expansion of printmaking. Jurors Katherine Crowe, Special Collections Curator at the University of Denver, and Alicia Bailey, Director of Abecedarian Artists’ Books, have brought together thirty-eight works by thirty-two U.S. artists, unified by their use of traditional techniques ranging from letterpress to botanical printing. 

Parting Gift: Fitting in America | An Impossibly Normal Life

Parting Gift: Fitting in America | An Impossibly Normal Life

Nina Peterson
Review

At the Colorado Photographic Art Center (CPAC), the two current solo exhibitions of works by Leonard Suryajaya and Matthew Finley queer family photographs. Family photography has been and continues to be a tool of nationalism and imperialism as well as a mechanism of constructing and enforcing normative visions of the family as a happy, white, heterosexual, nuclear unit. Against these disciplinary and exclusionary histories, Suryajaya’s and Finley’s images use photography as a method for imagining and practicing kinship otherwise. 

Soft Skills

Soft Skills

Paloma Jimenez
Review

A chain reaction can lead to catastrophe or creation and the end result may sharply veer from the original intent. Each point of contact crackles towards a crescendo, but the connection remains precarious. Eleanor Sabin’s exhibition Soft Skills at Colorado State University’s Directions Gallery ponders and mournfully unravels this complexity of connection through a variety of contrasting materials.  

Shared Journey

Shared Journey

Dani/elle Cunningham
Review

Living up to its name, Shared Journey at the Museum of Friends in Walsenburg is a glimpse into a shared artistic life, poignantly marked by Jann Vail’s passing in April last year. Well-known in Huerfano County, the Vails’ work is visually distinct yet united by a sense of purpose and an undercurrent of resistance. Tom’s digital collages, monumental hand-cut wood paintings, and satirical sculptures lean toward surrealism and abstraction, while Jann’s whimsical menageries and repurposed figurines in cigar boxes create intimate, playful vignettes. Despite differences, both practices reflect attentiveness to power structures and the quiet poetry of defiance.

Time and Materials

Time and Materials

Maggie Sava
Review

Tim McKay’s solo exhibition Time and Materials at Pirate: Contemporary Art invites viewers to engage in these meta considerations by playfully utilizing obscured labels that become legible with the use of blue lens glasses provided by the gallery. With this “opt-in” system, McKay makes the audience choose how they experience the show and how much information they are given about the art on display. 

Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women

Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women

Raymundo Muñoz
Review

On display at the Loveland Museum and overlapping with Colorado’s Month of Printmaking, is an exhibition by Massachusetts-based printmaker Julie Lapping Rivera. The show invites us to reacquaint ourselves with accomplished women in history that deserve a little more consideration. Inspired by the New York Times obituary series “Overlooked,” Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women consists of woodcut and collage portraits of an international selection of past female trailblazers: artists, writers, scientists, activists, and beyond. 

Chris Bristow

Chris Bristow

Jillian Blackwell
Artist Profile

When Chris Bristow makes a work of art, he makes it slowly, stitch by stitch, hand-embroidering surfaces that he later paints over. He makes it quickly, creating drawings in Procreate®, where he can try out different elements and colors, working with multiple layers. In many ways, his art pulls in opposing directions. It contains both a tongue-in-cheek irreverence, but also a yearning for slowness, both of which feel quintessentially millennial. 

Nourished

Nourished

Laura I. Miller
Review

In Nourished, her exhibition on display at the Denver Botanic Gardens, Jazz Holmes pays homage to the Creole food that has shaped her. But these paintings are not still lifes, and the relationship to food isn’t one of subject to object. Holmes’ work is vibrant, living, dynamic; it elevates the raw materials of Creole cuisine to co-creator alongside the people who harvest and prepare it. These paintings flip the idiom “you are what you eat” on its head, showing us that food is more than an object to be consumed—it’s a partner and a mirror, inseparable from the humans who nourish it and are nourished by it. 

The Genteel Revolutionary

The Genteel Revolutionary

Brandy Coons
Review

As the first African American woman to hold public office in Colorado, Dr. Rachel Bassette Noel worked to desegregate Denver Public Schools, insisting with a “soft-spoken grace” that education is a right. Dr. Ellamaria Foley-Ray’s “clay and cloth” quilts weave together her own connection to Dr. Noel, while emphasizing the importance of family, community, and faith. 

En La Memoria

En La Memoria

Kamden Hilliard
Review

Through March 27th, the O'Sullivan Gallery at Denver's Regis University is hosting Román Anaya and Louis Trujillo's En La Memoria—a series of self-portraits, sculpture, and paper flowers that confound traditional ideas of gender, illness, and the religious.

Que Viva Paco

Que Viva Paco

Paloma Jimenez
Review

Paco Sanchez Park, named after a vital member of the community who in 1954 brought Denver its first Spanish language radio station, buzzes with inviting energy. The park’s design honors his legacy, featuring a microphone shaped playground tower, music note footholds, a bridge adorned with tinkling chimes, and rolling hills reminiscent of sound waves. Joyous shouts from the playground and soccer field provide a lively soundtrack. In the middle of it all, the steel sculpture Que Viva Paco by Carlos Frésquez spins the story of Francisco “Paco” Sanchez’s legacy.

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