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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum rarely presents exhibitions at its headquarters—a warehouse repurposed into a haunting cavern, painted entirely black on the inside. You enter the structure through an old loading dock, nodding to its original purpose and lending resonance to this exhibition, which reflects on memory, preservation, and the passage of time. Mirroring the dark recesses of Black Cube’s institutional memory, the exhibition text describes the building as “a spatial form born to hold things, if only temporarily.” In this sense, the exhibition’s title, What We Hold On To, refers not only to what we possess, but also to what we have been denied, the forces preventing us from holding on, and the ways letting go can offer a form of release.
Featuring the work of 20 artists from across the country, Between Here and There has the hefty task to not only bring the audience in, but to keep them engaged while guiding them through the diverse work of each artist. Member shows can risk a lack of cohesion compared to those curated around specific themes or queries. The D’art Gallery team avoids this risk and skillfully navigates the broad scope of aesthetics presented by their members through their thoughtful hanging of the show, and by delivering immediate thematic clues to viewers.
If you haven’t been to the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center in Pueblo, Colorado, its beautiful architecture and strong variety of arts programming year round make it worth a visit. The exhibition currently on display in the Center’s Helen Thatcher White Regional Gallery is by letterpress printer and book artist Gail Watson. Comprised of recent and past foil stamped, two-dimensional works from three separate series, Sense of Place | Topophilia, Boom, and Electrons and Labyrinths, it deals with space and place in general and specific ways.
While each artist exhibits a similar interest in abstraction, Camille McMurry, Julie Rothschild, and Sara Goldenberg White employ parallel means for achieving disparate ends. But the result is a visually engaging exhibition that yields more questions than answers. For where Fiber Arts lacks a cohesive narrative or conviction, the works and the context in which they are displayed raise a debate about the nature of art and where and when we expect to see it.
Mutations at fooLPRoof Contemporary Art Gallery, mounted and hung for the first time, is the work of George Rivera's subconscious—an accumulation of life channeled through ink blot paintings based on his experiences with the Uitoto Tribe in South America. Standing among the paintings are the cast iron sculptures of Christopher Meyer in the exhibition How Soon We Forget.
K Contemporary in downtown Denver is currently hosting Daisy Patton's exhibition Before These Witnesses and Ya La'Ford's The Spectrum of Blue. Together, they offer dignity to what is often lost and model critical-minded, liberatory approaches to the appreciation and recovery of details.
Art Gym’s current exhibition tackles the details of this emotional, material, and bodily labor in Women’s Work is Never Done, featuring the art of Carrie Shiffrin, Charis Fleshner, and Jasmine Dillavou. In the Leyden Jar Gallery, towards the back of Art Gym’s work space, Kathryn Oberdorfer’s solo exhibition To See Takes Time favors looser lines and an abstract expressionist approach to composition.
