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.

All in Review

Action/Abstraction Redefined

Dec 7

Dec 7 Action/Abstraction Redefined

José Antonio Arellano

Action/Abstraction Redefined, on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, offers a visual lesson in art history. It is part of the ongoing reexamination of the stories we tell ourselves about our collective past. The show’s title asks us to reconsider how art historical terms, such as “Action Painting” and “Abstract Art” achieve traction and how institutions, including museums and galleries, help establish and distribute definitions. This exhibit features over 50 pieces, mostly paintings, by Native American modernist artists working from the 1940s through the 1970s. Many of the artists were associated with the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe.

Nov 29

Nov 29 Off the Shelf

Mary Grace Bernard

Books have a dynamism as cultural creations that defy space and time. With this in mind, curators Anna Bernhard and Johnny Plastini have organized an exhibition of artists that challenge our conceptual framework of the book and its contents. Off the Shelf: Contemporary Book Arts in Colorado, presented at Colorado State University’s Gregory Allicar Museum of Art in Fort Collins, celebrates artists’ fascination with books as art objects and in particular their conception of artist books. Artist books emerge when the mediums of binding, illustrating, painting, papermaking, printing, painting, sculpting, and writing are combined and made multiple.

Recurring Dreams

Nov 25

Nov 25 Recurring Dreams

In Recurring Dreams at Rule Gallery in Denver, Nathan Abels applies his cosmic curiosity towards the exploration of environmental narratives that stretch within and beyond human time. From the microscopic detail of a bone’s porous surface to the enormity of a melting ice cap, Abels offers an illuminating new perspective on the climate crisis.

A Wink is Just a Wink

Nov 14

Nov 14 A Wink is Just a Wink

Dani/elle Cunningham

In Amber Cobb’s new paintings and sculptures on display in the exhibition “A Wink is Just a Wink” at Meow Wolf Denver’s Galleri Gallery, the artist uses the grid as a tool of order and chaos, a seemingly conflicted notion that introduces in systems like linguistics and spatial dynamics and encourages viewers to explore spaces beyond boundaries.

The Everyday and Everyday Objects Recontextualized

Nov 8

Nov 8 The Everyday and Everyday Objects Recontextualized

Madeleine Boyson

The Everyday and Everyday Objects Recontextualized at fooLPRoof Contemporary Art Gallery is a soft offering that will cushion the discordant shift from summer into fall. Led by gallery owner and artist Laura Phelps Rogers and true to its title, the large group exhibition edifies the commonplace through a medley of color, contour, and craft. Grounded in a loose thematic interpretation of “the everyday” over any single aesthetic, the fooLPRoof show leaves the “recontextualizing” to the viewer and rewards those who stop in to look.

La inclusión de mi raza (The inclusion of my race)

Nov 1

Nov 1 La inclusión de mi raza (The inclusion of my race)

Laura I. Miller

Mexican artist Gabriel Rico is well known for his found-object-based sculptures, but this exhibit represents new aspects of his work with the use of AR and the large scale of the totems. Created from materials donated by Denver-based organizations, the totems tell the story of Denver’s complex culture through everyday and novel objects. The AR introduces a digital layer and strengthens the theme of inclusion.

Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms

Oct 18

Oct 18 Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms

Mary Grace Bernard

On September 15, 2022, the Vicki Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver (DU) opened its very first exhibition focused on notions of gender and structures of power from a distinctly Indigenous perspective. Guest curated by Daina Warren, who is a member of the Akamihk Montana First Nation in Maskwacis, Alberta, Transformative Power: Indigenous Feminisms features Indigenous, female, and Queer-identifying artists who “explore and critique a variety of themes, including Native politics, economics, land-based values, language loss, the body and sexuality, historical narratives and popular culture, as well as the cosmological and relational belief systems of First Peoples, among others.” The artists’ integration of intersectional identities—Indigenous, female, and/or Queer—with embodied cultural and historical traumas in performance works, photography, and videos makes visible these hidden identities and traumas while demanding that viewers pay attention to the political issues that render them invisible.

Tree – Saw - Paint / Reimagined / the texture of life and the beauty of the world / Nightfall, Fallen

Oct 14

Oct 14 Tree – Saw - Paint / Reimagined / the texture of life and the beauty of the world / Nightfall, Fallen

At Kreuser Gallery in Colorado Springs, 17-year-old Tanner Valant is showing several hyper-realistic drawings in colored pencil he learned how to make during the pandemic. And Sean O’Meallie’s show Tree - Saw - Paint feels like juicy and nutritious fun. Artist Karen Khoury uses texture to explore the struggles and challenges of life and community in her show the texture of life and beauty of the world at G44 Gallery. And in an exhibition titled Nightfall, Fallen, Meghan Wilbur displays a collection of landscape paintings with vibrant hues and breathtaking deep blues.

Temporary Concrete Lost to Time

Oct 3

Oct 3 Temporary Concrete Lost to Time

Mary Grace Bernard

Burns Park is a public sculpture park trapped between Colorado Avenue, Leetsdale Drive, and East Alameda Avenue in Denver. These days, it’s really nothing to look at. However, the site has an interesting history tied to Denver’s contemporary public art scene. In 1968, ten artists joined forces to hold the first ever Denver Sculpture Symposium at Burns Park to activate the park and invite community members to be part of the collective construction of large-scale artworks.

Adimensionalities

Sep 29

Sep 29 Adimensionalities

Madeleine Boyson

During his architectural master’s program at Gdańsk University of Technology, Polish artist Krzysztof Syruć learned that most artists create “the same painting” over and over again. Vexed by this notion, Syruć—who also goes by the graffiti name PROEMBRION, and who had already developed a compelling visual language in that medium—determined to uncover and construct new, anomalous forms. His pursuit of generative abstraction is now assembled in a stunning solo exhibition at Ryan Joseph Gallery titled Adimensionalities, on view through October 12.

Recombobulation

Sep 19

Sep 19 Recombobulation

A found object artwork is a portal—to an illuminated past, an invented future, and a more lucid present. Recombobulation at the Curtis Center for the Arts brings together eight artists—Sue Blosten, Leigh Cabell, Jimmy Descant, Mark Friday, Deborah Jang, Michelle Lamb, Kelton Osborn, and Floyd Tunson—who expertly transform the things of days gone by into open-ended material narratives.

Sep 15

Sep 15 Dark Archive

José Antonio Arellano

In elin o’Hara slavick’s solo exhibition Dark Archive at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS) Galleries of Contemporary Art (GOCA) Downtown, each colorful drawing corresponds to a site bombed by the U.S. The cyanotypes are made by the shadows of radiated objects that were hit by the atomic blast in Hiroshima—objects now preserved in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. slavick’s strategy is to create visually arresting work that draws us in while simultaneously pointing to something outside itself.

A Culture Preserved (in the Black Experience)

Sep 9

Sep 9 A Culture Preserved (in the Black Experience)

J. Benjamin Burney

The exhibition A Culture Preserved (in the Black Experience) at the Museum of Art Fort Collins features ten artists, four of whom are Colorado-based: Efilaf Art, Louise Cutler, Thomas Lockhart, and Jim Wider. With nationally-known artists Karen Drewry, Gerald Griffin, Deborah Shedrick, Joyce Owens, Charly Palmer, and Kevin Wak Williams as well, this exhibition displays the nuance and minutiae of the Black American experience through drawing, painting, and sculpture, and a number of perspectives.

geometric frustrations / Volumes

Sep 1

Sep 1 geometric frustrations / Volumes

Dani/elle Cunningham

The relationship between presence and trace dominates in two exhibitions by Boulder- and Limassol, Cyprus-based artist Marina Kassianidou. Trained in art and computer science, Kassianidou focuses on mark-making and surface and the ways in which drawing is a responsive combination of both. She also emphasizes the role of multistep, transformational processes by displaying each step of creation as artworks in their own right. In geometric frustrations at east window SOUTH in Boulder, Kassianidou illustrates the process of evolving trash into glorified art objects. The artist’s love of mark-making is apparent in her two-person exhibition Volumes at Lane Meyer Projects in Denver with Maia Ruth Lee.

PROCESS: Making Things on the Way to Making Other Things

Aug 23

Aug 23 PROCESS: Making Things on the Way to Making Other Things

Laura I. Miller

With Process: Making Things on the Way to Other Things, curator Rick Griffith offers the viewer a glimpse into the mind of the artist. The 17 works presented at the Art Students League of Denver, ranging from paintings to video to sculpture, reveal mistakes, leftovers, and happy accidents. They re-contextualize works meant for other purposes or address directly the mind behind the object. By showing us their “rubbish, or trash,” or works that aren’t “good enough to show others,” as Griffith says in his curator’s statement, the artists reveal their vulnerability and present us with works that are more relatable, and more human, than what many of us are accustomed to viewing.

The Contour of Feeling

Aug 15

Aug 15 The Contour of Feeling

Dani/elle Cunningham

Monstrous cedar sculptures as large as small trees characterize Ursula von Rydingsvard’s exhibition The Contour of Feeling at the Denver Botanic Gardens. The title reflects both the poetics of the sculptures and the tragic, triumphant poetry that could be made about the artist’s childhood. Along with her family, German-born Ukrainian and Polish artist Ursula von Rydingsvard spent her early years as a forced laborer under the Nazis. After World War II, the family traveled among displacement camps. These are experiences she sometimes references in her work, though minimally.

Zoid Room: The Black Dreamscape

Aug 9

Aug 9 Zoid Room: The Black Dreamscape

Appealing to our curiosity, dreams, and affirmations of resilience, J. Benjamin Burney’s exhibition Zoid Room: The Black Dreamscape is an immersive installation suffused with emotion that reorients our perceptions of the world. The exhibit is now on view at The Storeroom in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver through August 13.

Juried BFA Exhibition 2022

Aug 1

Aug 1 Juried BFA Exhibition 2022

For the art majors in the graduating class of 2022, it’s the end of a several years-long journey of artistic practice and scholarship at Colorado State University’s Department of Art and Art History. Student work by these graduates is currently assembled in the white cube Hatton Gallery in the Visual Arts Building on campus. Gallery Director Silvia Minguzzi describes the Juried BFA Exhibition 2022 and the pieces displayed as the “best” work of the class of 2022, as chosen by local artists Anthony Guntren, sculptor, and Kris Barz Mendonça, illustrator.

Clyfford Still, Art, and the Young Mind

Jul 25

Jul 25 Clyfford Still, Art, and the Young Mind

I’ve smiled and giggled along with children, aged six months to eight years, throughout my visit to Clyfford Still, Art, and the Young Mind. It is the first exhibit I have seen in collaboration with children. From exhibit videos and staff, I learned that teachers in preschools and grade school classrooms asked children which of the paintings they liked the most. Younger children’s faces lit up as they stretched their hands towards their favorite prints of Clyfford Still’s work. Older children stuck sticky notes above their favorite paintings and stated with total clarity, “Yes. I like this one.” These are just two examples of how children chose art for the exhibit.

Jul 22

Jul 22 Transformation

Laura I. Miller

Transformation at the Parker Arts, Culture & Events (PACE) Center invites fiber artists to repurpose materials ranging from tea bags to tablecloths, reducing the artists’ carbon footprints while interrogating quilting as a medium. The works featured by these 24 artists address themes ranging from women’s rights and gun violence to conservation and memory, showcasing the medium’s versatility and bringing attention to the labor of domesticity that so often goes ignored.