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.
Amy Young (b. 1995) is a master weaver of binaries. Originally from Shawnee, Oklahoma, Young is a recent MFA graduate from Colorado State University living and working in Fort Collins, Colorado. As a bisexual, mixed-race woman growing up in the American Great Plains, Young’s identity in relation to her surroundings is a key component of her art practice. In this practice, she explores the boundaries of weaving and the complexities of gendered spaces and individual development.
While impressionism started out as an urban practice, many male artists of the late 19th century with the privilege and means of mobility moved into provincial locations to focus on the unique light and landscapes there. Claude Monet left Paris for Giverny where he concentrated on water lilies, among other things. Vincent Van Gogh moved to Saint Remy and Arles in the south of France, and Auvers-sur-Oise in the north, painting scenes in these areas and pioneering a hybrid style that drew on far East techniques.
One male artist, however, featured in the current exhibition at the Longmont Museum, George William Thornley, subverted this dynamic, seeking to be an imperceptible filter for art by using the repetitive facsimile process of lithography. Unlike Van Gogh’s unmistakable stamp on the wheat fields of the south of France, Thornley’s artistry is in being invisible.
Some people are made for cities; but are cities made for people? Between Us: The Downtown Denver Alleyways Project attempts to answer that question. Four local alleyways—five when the exhibition opened in 2018—are public venues for Carlos Frésquez, Kelly Monico, Joel Swanson, and Frankie Toan to create pieces that teeter between art and urban planning. The easy analogy for this open air exhibition is city-as-museum, but the apt analogy is city-as-curator. Downtown Denver does more than provide infrastructure to house the works—it shapes the viewer’s entire experience according to its own whims. The pieces will remain on view until Spring 2022.
As Jess T. Dugan (they/them/theirs) describes in their statement for the exhibition Inward—which they curated as part of the Critic and Artist Residency Series (C.A.R.S.) Online program hosted by CSU’s Gregory Allicar Museum of Art—introspective time spent unpacking the differences between intimacy and isolation has defined this last year. Dugan performs this personal process in a public manner by curating themselves as both an artist and a subject alongside other works in the Allicar Museum’s collection. The results expose how this past year’s mediated relationality has underscored the complexities of seeing and being seen.
In her solo exhibition titled Remind Me Tomorrow, Denver-based artist Sammy Lee celebrates cultural heritage, motherhood, and immigrant experiences. The exhibit is on view at the Emmanuel Art Gallery on the Auraria Campus through mid-July and with it the artist has the express purpose of encouraging peace in our communities—particularly in light of recent and historic violence against Asian Americans. Curated by Jeff Lambson, Remind Me Tomorrow features a selection of work created by Lee over the span of nearly a decade.
As you step inside the Denver Art Museum (DAM), Shantell Martin’s artwork currently greets you. Parts of Martin’s installation Words and Lines are sprinkled throughout the museum, but what you first encounter is a message from Martin that reads “do less be more” accompanied by flowing lines and birds. It’s a signature design for the artist, who has grown into her own fame in recent years.
Apron Chronicles: A Patchwork of American Recollections is culminating in Colorado after traveling throughout the United States for sixteen years. The exhibit is on view in the Ballantine Gallery on the main level of the History Colorado Center and stretches into the atrium. As you enter the space, pink neon reading “ties that bind us” welcomes you, bathing the area in a warm light and inviting the viewer to consider the exhibit through rose-colored glasses. The personal histories on display make a broad statement in fact, allowing viewers to connect with one, if not more, shared apron story.
We all have that friend—someone whose speech seems to pollute the atmosphere with self-absorption. We care about them, sure, but how can we gently point out their narcissism? The pseudo-spiritual millennial term for this behavior is “toxic,” referring to both unhealthy people and the relationships we have with them. But what about our relationship with our colonial past—could it be described as “toxic?”
In her current solo exhibition A Faint Light at Robischon Gallery, artist Deborah Dancy depicts a particular form of pastel-laced colonial toxicity through a visual metaphor of abstraction. Using Rococo-period figures, collages, found objects, and a color palette of putrid yellows and smoky charcoal, Dancy delves into toxic friends and our toxic past, gently pointing out both the literal and cultural pollution we create as individuals and collectively.
A generous, east-facing window at the edge of North Boulder displays a single, mighty print of an acrylic painting from Gregg Deal’s ongoing series The Others. The work will be up until May 27th. Visitors be advised, this gallery is purely one window— so when you’re hungry for more of the works in the series, view them on the artist’s website. Deal’s Indigenous, Pyramid Lake Paiute identity is central to his work and informs his de-colonial perspective as a muralist and painter, as well as a performance artist. Based on east window’s previous exhibitions and statements condemning colonialism and racism, it is clear that Deal’s work is offered here as a continuation of solidarity. In Deal’s own punk way, The Others points to an ongoing struggle for liberation from white- settler-colonialism and violence.
The 2021 Bachelor of Fine Arts exhibition, showing at the Emmanuel Art Gallery on the University of Colorado Denver’s Auraria campus, is the culmination of the BFA students’ hard work despite their tumultuous year. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and its ramifications—the switch to an online class format, social distancing, loss of loved ones, and mental and emotional trauma, to name a few—these students have persevered and emerged with innovative works of art. I was fortunate to view the first half of the exhibition, which was up from April 14 to April 29, 2021. The second half of the show goes up on May 4 through May 19, and if it is as impressive as the first, I certainly will not miss it.
Although quilts may be an underrated fine art form, it is their makers who have been overlooked for far too long. That is not the case in Beyond the Mirror at the Loveland Museum, a juried exhibition organized by the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA). As one of the leading authorities on art quilts, SAQA ensures that exhibitions of their members’ creations are seen all over the world. In this instance, 30 quilters (both local and international) share personal stories through their art quilts, revealing tidbits about themselves and, surprisingly, about the complicated history behind quilts being accepted as fine art.
Located in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of RiNo, Denver’s Plinth Gallery is an established outpost of the national contemporary ceramics conversation. The current exhibition, Winding Way, is a solo exhibition by Lauren Mabry. It is a visual feast and technical marvel for ceramic newcomers and seasoned ceramicists alike.
If an artist makes art and a pandemic keeps us all in our houses away from exhibition spaces, can the art still make an impact? Alejandra Abad has been answering that question in an innovative and resounding fashion. Since well before the pandemic, she has been making art for the people—art that explores and explodes the traditional boundaries of art world spaces. Her art derives meaning from its interaction with and amplification of the voices of underrepresented groups of people.
Abad is an MFA candidate in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder. Even at an early age, her interactions with others helped forge her identity as an artist.
Wood. Works at the Arvada Center is all about allure and diversity. It is accompanied by another exhibition in the Theatre Gallery—Carley Warren: Three Pieces—that focuses on new sculptures by a well-known artist who works in wood.
Wood. Works features 24 artists with works spread out on both gallery levels. It’s like a travelogue: big and small, serious and humorous (and even sly), and oiled wood or rough wood or painted wood. But all of the works approach how artists are attracted to this fairly humble and mainly renewable material. Beetle-kill pine, the sad scourge of Colorado, has provided a helping handful of material, while exotic hardwoods are quite more luxurious.
The quilts of the 15th Quilt Nihon Exhibition at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden are each their own elaborate world. From a distance, each quilt is a bold composition, while closer inspection reveals beautiful, meticulous detail. The exhibition comes from a competition sponsored by the Japanese Handicraft Instructors’ Association, which is supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. The quilts presented are winners of various prizes in two categories: traditional and contemporary. Across both categories, the quilts exhibit mastery of pattern, color, and scale.
“Viewpoints 9” is an “international, invitational, fiber art group.” For this show, each of the nine members of Viewpoints 9 submitted a single word to which the other members responded, creating a plethora of work.
Opening during the final month of a historically difficult year—a year that stretched patience thin and tested the tensile strength of American society—Senga Nengudi’s retrospective Topologies at the Denver Art Museum (DAM) traverses decades to adeptly meet the moment.
There is a timeless quality to Senga Nengudi’s work, some of which was created half a century ago but still rings true in the modern era. She was in fact an important player in the feminist performance art and the Black American avant-garde movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, and has continued her practice for over 50 years. Through her iconic, pendulous pantyhose sculptures, evocative performances, and collaborative happenings, Nengudi captures a numinous elegance paired with a distinctive rawness and in doing so comments on the conditions of Black female embodiment.
In their new exhibition histordomest-icity at the Center for the Arts Evergreen, Melissa Furness and Rian Kerrane place an anthropological lens on domesticity, elevating the refuse of everyday life, and exposing its strangeness. The works in this exhibition, some collaborative and some singular, address the erasure of women throughout history and recast domesticity as a rich, sharp-edged tapestry that’s rife with artistic expression.
Artists and professors of art at the University of Colorado Denver, Furness and Kerrane collaborated on nearly all of the works for this exhibition. With pieces such as Refuse and Unheavy, Furness created the paintings and Kerrane produced the metal sculptural elements, e.g. iron mop brushes and roses cast in bronze. The delicacy of the paintings and the rigidity of the metal contrast in a way that underscores the versatility of domesticity.
Dr. Virgil DiBiase, MD, is a full-time neurologist and part-time photographer based in rural Indiana. He has exhibited his black and white photographs nationally, including at the Rangefinder Gallery in Chicago, the Strimbu Gallery at Valparaiso University, the Workspace Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Providence Center for Photographic Arts, and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, just to name a few. His typical subject matter focuses on the people and spaces of rural Indiana. Photographic series such as My Indiana illustrate farm life, classic Americana, and the quotidian. For his project My husband won't tell me his first name, however, DiBiase chose to combine his medical profession with his photography practice. What emerged is a series of portraits and landscapes that exhibit what (dis)ability scholars Rosemarie Garland-Thompson and Tobin Siebers call the “visual rhetorics of disability” and “disability aesthetics”—two concepts that relate to viewers’ body and mind sensations when looking at photographs of (dis)abled bodies and minds.
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.
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.
