In 2021, the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder is now tackling the difficult issue of colonial settler violence and abuse, specifically against Native women, with Sing Our Rivers Red—an exhibition about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, #MMIW. At the History Colorado Center in Denver, Gregg Deal, a contemporary artist and member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe, picks up on this theme in his exhibit Merciless Indian Savages. In the wall text for this provocative exhibition, Deal poses the question, “What does it mean to communicate an Indigenous message when to do so effectively means speaking through filters of capitalism, nationalism, and mainstream American culture?”

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.

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.