Anticipating flight as I slipped through the door of the Firehouse Art Center in Longmont, Colorado, I half-expected to catch artist Jen Rose’s work in mid-air. Instead, I found myself happily sunk into a colorful, more subaquatic dreamworld. Flight of the Polychromatic Zooids, on view at Firehouse until February 7, is Rose’s solo, one-piece exhibition curated by Brandy Coons and inspired by marine colonies. Yet unlike the images of departure or frenzy conjured by the title’s noun “flight,” the Dallas, Texas-based artist’s sculptural installation settles the viewer, drawing them not up into the air, but down into the calming depths of the sea.

Sculptor and painter Julie Maren wants to know what we’re making of it all. Prompted in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s onslaught of socio-political upheaval has taught us about our fears, vices, loyalties, and internalized systems. In Covidia, a small but whimsical exhibition at Bricolage Gallery, on view inside Boulder’s Art Parts Creative Reuse Center until November 21, Maren explores another lesson of 2020: that is, our deeply human impulse to continue creating, no matter the crisis at hand.

Once spotted amidst the mess of brick on Walnut Street, the delight of Lane Meyer Projects’ newest window installation draws in a beleaguered mask-wearer like a moth to flame. A single print called Blue Smiles and a handful of hanging plexiglass “stickers” by the artist Shadow, from her project Shadows Gather, decorate the LMP PDA space as part of an ongoing window series curated by Brooke Tomiello and Rose van Mierlo. Blue Smiles recalls the bustling Denver nightlife of the “Before Times” and reminds viewers that even in the midst of global meltdown, there is still joy to be found in the city and in each other.