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.

Deal, or, How I Became Radioactive

Deal, or, How I Became Radioactive

Madeleine Boyson
Review

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.

Tricia Waddell

Tricia Waddell

Djamila Ricciardi
Artist Profile

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.

Ms. Destiny

Ms. Destiny

Laura I. Miller
Review

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

The Source Never Diminishes

Dani/elle Cunningham
Review

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.

MediaLive: Data Rich, Dirt Poor

MediaLive: Data Rich, Dirt Poor

Felicity Wong
Review

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. 

Rosas y Revelaciones: Homage to the Virgin of Guadalupe

Rosas y Revelaciones: Homage to the Virgin of Guadalupe

José Antonio Arellano
Review

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

It Comes in Waves

Raymundo Muñoz
Review

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

CAMP: Queer Arts and Crafts & the Beauty of Imperfection

Madeleine Boyson
Review

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.”

What We Hold On To

What We Hold On To

Dani/elle Cunningham
Review

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.

Between Here and There

Between Here and There

Maggie Sava
Review

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. 

Gail Watson

Gail Watson

Raymundo Muñoz
Review

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.

Fiber Arts

Fiber Arts

Madeleine Boyson
Review

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.

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