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.

Hail the Dark Lioness

Mar 8

Mar 8 Hail the Dark Lioness

Dani/elle Cunningham

Over the last few years, Center for Visual Art in Denver has presented several striking lens-based exhibitions, typically centered on the institution’s preferred themes of social justice and activism. This year’s offering is a black-and-white solo exhibition of photographic self-portraits by self-described visual activist Zanele Muholi (they/them). Presented in a range of sizes including floor to ceiling, Muholi’s subjects lock eyes with the viewer, reversing the art historical notion that subjects should mostly avoid the gaze, particularly when the subjects are women or people of color. Black subjects, such as the servant in Manet’s Olympia, have typically been placed in the background, resulting in their near erasure. This is not the case for Muholi’s works, in which the artist transforms themself into different characters placed confidently in the forefront.

Reflections and Ruminations

Mar 5

Mar 5 Reflections and Ruminations

The Robert Rauschenberg exhibit at the Museum of Outdoor Arts (MOA) in Englewood called Reflections and Ruminations showcases over 50 artworks, mostly from the later years of the artist’s career. Presenting a slightly nostalgic and sometimes sentimental version of Rauschenberg, the show focuses primarily on artwork he created in the 1990s and 2000s, when he seemed to be looking back at his own life. It’s the first major Rauschenberg solo exhibition in Colorado since 1981 and has taken five years to develop, organize, and curate. Perhaps because of this massive undertaking, the result is a show that requires a bit more sophisticated knowledge of Rauschenberg, or at least the desire to learn more about his life and career.

Feb 22

Feb 22 The Late Works

Madeleine Boyson

In The Late Works: Clyfford Still in Maryland, on view at the Clyfford Still Museum (CSM) now through March 21, 2021, curator Dean Sobel examines Clyfford Still’s rich and experimental period after his hallmark Abstract Expressionist era. Bookended by Still’s removal from New York to Maryland in 1961 and his death in 1980, six of the museum’s nine upper level galleries survey the artist’s his restless pursuit of artistic and individual truth in his last two decades. The exhibition’s approximately 40 paintings and 30 works on paper cohere into a brief but provoking treatise on the value of the artist’s prolific time in Maryland. Consequently, Sobel asserts that Still’s late works ought to be considered some of his best.

Colorado Abstracted

Feb 11

Feb 11 Colorado Abstracted

Through the end of the month, the Littleton Museum is highlighting five abstract artists who explore the unruly and stormy but transcendent power of nature. By referencing landscapes, skies, and natural forms through the lens of abstraction, these artists communicate states of mind and perception that go beyond the material world but are often inspired by nature. Surveying a range of processes and mediums such as acrylics, cold wax, printmaking, and resin, Patricia J. Finley, Annamarie Mead, Lydia Riegle, Janet Rundquist and Cyncie Winter channel modernist influences as well, the likes of Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Georgia O Keefe.

Posts & Smoke Drawings

Feb 3

Feb 3 Posts & Smoke Drawings

Mary Voelz Chandler

If you walk into the William Havu Gallery in Denver, and turn left, it is as if you were entering a magical forest. Patrick Marold’s Posts are created from wood or metal; they are neither overwhelming nor ethereal. They are perfectly right in the middle, so a viewer can relate to them, while admiring the beauty that Marold has contributed with unexpected flourishes. Dennis Lee Mitchell began his art pursuit in education and later while focusing on ceramics. But then he had an idea to make “Smoke Paintings,” in which smoke colors the paper he uses to create abstracted floral images. Their beauty is “painted” in a very different medium, which makes the works so unusual.

Flight of the Polychromatic Zooids

Jan 28

Jan 28 Flight of the Polychromatic Zooids

Madeleine Boyson

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.

Lumonics Mind Spa

Jan 20

Jan 20 Lumonics Mind Spa

Mary Grace Bernard

Lumonics Mind Spa: Light Intersection is bringing much-needed color and light to downtown Denver. The exhibition presents works by Dorothy Tanner (1923-2020) and Mel Tanner (1925-1993)—an artist couple who dedicated their life and art practice to the immersive experiences of visual art and to promoting the importance of physical, emotional, and spiritual awareness. While Lumonics Mind Spa has been on view in other art spaces around Denver, the show’s current iteration at Understudy forges an atmosphere not seen elsewhere.

Pioneer Project & Mothers and Daughters

Jan 11

Jan 11 Pioneer Project & Mothers and Daughters

Jillian Blackwell

Stepping off of a snowy street on a gray winter day, one is grateful for the two vibrant shows currently on view at Visions West Contemporary. Pioneer Project by Jennifer Nehrbass and Mothers and Daughters by Madeleine Bialke create intriguing and colorful worlds to enter into. Pioneer Project by Jennifer Nehrbass is a collection of landscape paintings, portraits of women, and small sculptures. Mothers and Daughters by Madeleine Bialke, is another world unto itself with contrasting complementary colors blue and orange.

Jan 4

Jan 4 Todd Edward Herman

Mary Grace Bernard

When looking at artist Todd Edward Herman’s artwork, such as his 2007 film Cabinet, viewers must face images of death, the realities of physically disabled people, and the lives of mentally disabled people, among other non-normative bodies and minds. Herman creates films and photographs that deal with themes of the body and transience, representational taboos and spectatorship, and the historic consequences of othering.

Four years ago, Herman moved from San Francisco, California to Boulder, Colorado to be closer to family. He lives with his two children and runs a small art space called “east window” in Boulder. His art practice includes thirty years of working and collaborating with writers, performers, filmmakers, and curators to promote and advocate for bodies that are largely invisible in the public sphere.

Helen & Alice at the Museum

Dec 22

Dec 22 Helen & Alice at the Museum

Dani/elle Cunningham

Known for weaving non-traditional materials, fiber artist Steven Frost pushes his material scope to extremes this year with a new monumental installation. This work is the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s (BMoCA’s) newest temporary commission for its InsideOut program, hangs over the external northwest corner of BMoCA’s building. The woven green-and-white plastic form is sourced from lawn chairs, evoking stereotypical, mid-century images of white American families, and perhaps even generating feelings of nostalgia for a “simpler time.”

Contrasting with this picturesque notion, the work rests against the red brick pattern of BMoCA’s facade to create a nauseating combination of color and geometry. And that’s the point. The clash of the artwork with the building underscores the queer identity of the women to whom Frost pays homage with the work’s title: his aunt, Helen, and her partner, Alice. For them, family life was far from simple.

Freedom of Speech

Dec 14

Dec 14 Freedom of Speech

Samantha Hunt-Durán

Freedom of Speech is a monumental triptych on the southeast side of the Denver Performing Arts Complex that features three images by Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur in collaboration with Eric Gottesman and Wyatt Gallery. It is on view until February 2021. These images are adaptations of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting by the same name and are part of a larger series of referential photographs that re-conceive Rockwell’s America via his Four Freedoms paintings.

Queer Gardens: Lost at Home

Dec 4

Dec 4 Queer Gardens: Lost at Home

Mary Grace Bernard

The Storeroom is a relatively new exhibition space located next to Vine Street Pub & Brewery on 17th Street in Denver. Opening less than two years ago, the installation space has already featured almost a dozen shows. For The Storeroom’s most recent exhibit, local artist Frankie Toan has transformed the one-hundred square foot gallery into the artist’s third installment of a series called Queer Gardens.

Dec 1

Dec 1 Ghost Forest

Jamie Sheffield

One of the most arresting things about Colorado-based artist Melanie Walker’s 2020 exhibit Ghost Forest—now showing at the Denver Botanic Gardens until Dec. 6—is its exacting use of space…and silence.

The photographs in Walker’s exhibition depict trees, branches, and leaves, all printed on various fabrics. Some are pressed and slight, others crumpled to create tactile creases. Yet each image is an eerie, mirror-counterpart to something else in our own world. The fold in a leaf reveals lips, the knobs or gashes on aspen tree bark become eyes peering out blankly. Nature, after all, is ancient and humans are just passersby, stealthily observed by lifeforms such as these.

Nov 24

Nov 24 Dear Future…

Jillian Blackwell

Dear Future… at University of Northern Colorado’s Campus Commons Gallery in Greeley exhibits the work of artists Jessica Houston, Ariel René Jackson, Jen Liu, and Sherwin Rio. Entering the dark and gloomy gallery space located off of a student commons area devoid of students due to a global pandemic, the space evokes an eerie and somber feeling, though perhaps not for the reasons originally intended.

Nov 17

Nov 17 Respond

Described as “an environment for artistic growth,” Artworks Loveland Center for Contemporary Art sits across from the railroad tracks in Loveland, CO in a repurposed industrial building with concrete floors. With the smoke looming overhead from nearby fires when I visited, the stark, apocalyptic aesthetic of 2020 seems ubiquitous and unescapable. Inspired by what she called “the beauty of survival,” curator Sarah LeBarre working with co-curator Sharon Carlisle decided to lean into the aesthetic of the moment. They assembled a show simply entitled Respond, which features 10 artists’ response to these unique and harrowing times.

Nov 13

Nov 13 Covidia

Madeleine Boyson

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.

A Yellow Rose Project

Nov 10

Nov 10 A Yellow Rose Project

Mary Voelz Chandler

When you walk into the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC) to see the current exhibition, the gallery radiates with sunshine and is filled with photographs that tell an intimate story as part of the centennial celebrating the 19th Amendment. A Yellow Rose Project: Photographs by 100+ Women in Response to the 19th Amendment, the exhibition at CPAC, takes a different tack while reflecting a wealth of information. Themes include the fight against inequality and gender rules, and the importance of women’s roles and history through the ages. The curators built on this title in reference to the Tennessee General Assembly, which was the final state to ratify the 19th Amendment, and the yellow rose that became an emblematic symbol during this hard-fought debate.

Nov 2

Nov 2 Land Lines

Courtney Lindly

Walker Fine Art’s latest exhibition Land Lines, showcasing work by six of their Denver gallery artists—Christopher Hassig, George Kozmon, Ellen Moershel, Heather Patterson, Ben Strawn, Christopher Warren—dives into the various aspects of and concepts surrounding cartography. The artists draw influences from the natural world via reinterpreting mechanisms of record keeping and maps, displaying the landscape of invented worlds, examining the history of Colorado, looking at Polynesian methods of mapping navigation, and more.

Oct 19

Oct 19 Phase Change

Jillian Blackwell

Phase Change, at the Curtis Center for the Arts in Greenwood Village, is the fruitful result of a collaborative effort between K Rhynus Cesark, Andrea Gordon, Annakatrin Kraus, Bruce Price, Sara Ransford, Chandler Romeo, Martha Russo, and Tina Suszynski—a group of ceramic artists who completed the “Artists Invite Artists” residency at Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, Montana. The title of the exhibition, Phase Change, nominally highlights the artists’ investigation of ceramic materiality, surfaces, and firing styles. However, the scope of their exploration is much more holistic, encompassing the treatment of the gallery space and the way the objects were made as well as how they interact with the viewer.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

Oct 13

Oct 13 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

Derrick Velasquez

Marsha Mack and Lindsay Smith Gustave are masters of expansion and collapse. Their exhibition Animal, Vegetable, Mineral at Leon Gallery in Denver sheds light on the microscopic, constituent cells of natural and unnatural objects and uses imagery that alludes to our contemporary experience of dwelling. The title of the exhibit comes from the 1950s British television show that asked archeological experts to identify ancient objects without any prior information.