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.

Parting Gift: Fitting in America | An Impossibly Normal Life

Apr 7

Apr 7 Parting Gift: Fitting in America | An Impossibly Normal Life

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.

Mar 31

Mar 31 Soft Skills

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.

Mar 24

Mar 24 Shared Journey

Dani/elle Cunningham

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

Mar 17

Mar 17 Time and Materials

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

Mar 10

Mar 10 Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women

Raymundo Muñoz

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.

Mar 3

Mar 3 Chris Bristow

Jillian Blackwell

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.

Feb 24

Feb 24 Nourished

Laura I. Miller

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

Feb 17

Feb 17 The Genteel Revolutionary

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.

Feb 10

Feb 10 En La Memoria

Kamden Hilliard

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.

Feb 3

Feb 3 Que Viva Paco

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.

Deal, or, How I Became Radioactive

Jan 27

Jan 27 Deal, or, How I Became Radioactive

Madeleine Boyson

A green man once told a donkey that ogres were like onions, but he may as well have been talking about Emily Joyce’s work. The paintings in her third solo exhibition at David B. Smith Gallery are practically peelable, layered as they are with color, shape, symbolism, history and science, mock texture, mathematics, and source material. But unlike onions (which may cause tears), the art in Deal, or, How I Became Radioactive, now on view through February 21, has a friendly exhilaration that chatters off the walls. And best of all, Joyce’s work attests that the best art always knows the shape of its own container.

Jan 20

Jan 20 Tricia Waddell

Djamila Ricciardi

In Tricia Waddell’s studio, a vibrant menagerie of eight- to fourteen-inch-tall soft sculptures rest on various shelves and plinths. Each work has a powerful presence. Some appear amoeba-like with boldly patterned, multi-colored surfaces.

Jan 13

Jan 13 Ms. Destiny

Laura I. Miller

The exhibition takes the viewer on a journey through Colorado’s history, showcasing artifacts representing seven women who lived between 1831 and 1969. The banners and posters advertising Ms. Destiny borrow their style from superhero comics—the women, drawn with bold lines and colors, stand in active poses accentuated by the artifacts that represent them.

The Source Never Diminishes

Jan 8

Jan 8 The Source Never Diminishes

Dani/elle Cunningham

In her exhibition The Source Never Diminishes at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery of Contemporary Art, Nina Elder mounts a punk-inflected rebellion against artistic conventions. She also delves into the inky blackness of Victorian mourning aesthetics and shows a deep reverence for nature shaped by memory in her mixed-media sculptures—her first works in this medium.

Water, Water on the Wall, You’re the Fairest of Them All

Dec 30

Dec 30 Water, Water on the Wall, You’re the Fairest of Them All

José Antonio Arellano

As its title begins to indicate, this exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, curated by Nora Burnett Abrams, draws from Roni Horn’s decades-long exploration of the paradoxical identity of water. Paradoxical because what, after all, is more familiar yet literally ungraspable? What is more ubiquitous, yet so distressingly scarce?

MediaLive: Data Rich, Dirt Poor

Dec 23

Dec 23 MediaLive: Data Rich, Dirt Poor

The exhibition Data Rich, Dirt Poor at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) exudes a sense of exhaustion, serving a spectacle of ghostly screens alongside nondescript noises from multiple video channels in various rooms. The show is part of BMoCA’s MediaLive biennial, which originally began as a festival that brought artists together to discuss and explore the ever-evolving media arts landscape.

In Plain Sight: a celebration of Black cowboys

Dec 16

Dec 16 In Plain Sight: a celebration of Black cowboys

Kamden Hilliard

Joseph Graves Jr., a teacher and multidisciplinary artist, is currently showcasing a collection of his acrylic, oil, and watercolor paintings at Englewood's Seesaw Gallery. On view through January 11, the exhibition is titled In Plain Sight: a celebration of Black cowboys.

Rosas y Revelaciones: Homage to the Virgin of Guadalupe

Dec 11

Dec 11 Rosas y Revelaciones: Homage to the Virgin of Guadalupe

José Antonio Arellano

After moving to Oaxaca in the late 1990s, Linda Hanna began to learn about the region's remarkable diversity and complexity in textile artistry. For years, Hanna has commissioned artisans to recreate the image of Guadalupe on clothing traditional to their regions and tribes. She has built a collection that she plans to donate to her adopted country. Part of this collection is now on display at the Museo de las Americas in the exhibition Rosas y Revelaciones.

It Comes in Waves

Dec 2

Dec 2 It Comes in Waves

Raymundo Muñoz

On display at the People’s Building in Aurora, Colorado, It Comes in Waves is a group exhibition about Long COVID (abbreviated LC) in Colorado, curated by Denver-based artist Heather Schulte. Part of her Stitching the Situation COVID-themed community embroidery project, Schulte expanded on this idea by conducting numerous interviews with people suffering from LC, some of whom created artworks or poetry based on their struggles.

CAMP: Queer Arts and Crafts & the Beauty of Imperfection

Nov 25

Nov 25 CAMP: Queer Arts and Crafts & the Beauty of Imperfection

Madeleine Boyson

Six LGBTQ+ youths aided Allyson McDuffie in executing artworks and producing CAMP: Queer Arts and Crafts & the Beauty of Imperfection over two months and forty hours of workshop time. The artist anticipated her looming exhibition deadline and need for hands—twelve of them—to help realize a “comical and poignant” evocation of American summer camps “with a queer twist.”