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.
Walking into the white cube space of the fooLPRoof gallery—originally a 1930s warehouse in the increasingly-trendy RiNo neighborhood, attached to an equally trendy bar—the high ceilings make the physical space optimal for the various media on display. From large-scale installation to traditional sculptures atop plinths and canvas paintings mounted on the walls, the individual components that make up the current Deep Space show are varied in both media and orientation.
If art is alchemy, then Margaret Kasahara is an alchemist. Using common items like toothpicks, buttons, and her own hair, the multi-disciplinary artist elevates these objects through her art processes, transforming them from common to sacred. And she takes her wizardry a step further, sometimes seemingly stopping time through her transformations while also reminding viewers of time’s unstoppable passage.
If you’d like to see something different when you imagine the desert, Cherish Marquez offers us a counter narrative in her solo exhibition at Union Hall in Denver called Voices of the Desert. Marquez uses imagery, animation, natural materials, virtual objects, and tactile experiences in this exhibit to capture the quiet, humble wisdom that you can find in the desert. The artwork offers a slow look at a cast of non-human characters symbolic of desert life who share glimpses into an unseen mystic consciousness.
Deborah Roberts’ latest exhibition, I’m, is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver until January 30th, 2022. Using a combination of acrylic paint, collaged found faces, and ink, her works carry worlds of meaning. “I want us to see ourselves as a heroic people,” she says. I’m speaks directly to the humanity of being, specifically being Black. Through I’m, Roberts not only brings new, meaningful representations of Black children into a cultural conversation, but further implores viewers to witness cultural expectations of Blackness, through the eyes of a child.
Encompassing 25 individual works and one large installation, Sinners, Saints & Fools—the exhibition currently illuminating the main gallery space of Valkarie Gallery—is the largest solo show of artist Maria Valentina Sheets’s stained glass art to date. The impressive display demonstrates her deep knowledge and appreciation for the material and the traditions of the genre. However, it also captures her impulse to experiment and expand the potential of the medium. Through a combination of complex portraiture and contemporary parables with not so simple answers, Sheets works to bridge the divide between the binaries of timely and timeless and worldly and unworldly, all while renegotiating social and cultural consecration.
Ana María Hernando’s exhibition Fervor at the Denver Botanic Gardens is a well-balanced, harmonious display of embroideries and sculpture. Hernando also fills the two gallery spaces of the exhibit with sound. In one room, bird calls echo against the hard walls and collide mid-air with the abstract embroideries that dangle from the ceiling. In the next room, Hernando’s own voice swells, reciting her own poem accompanied by dissonant orchestral music.
A luminous, violet-hued skull greets viewers as they enter Tim Whiten’s exhibition Tools of Conveyance—a retrospective of work from the last 40 years—at the University of Colorado Art Museum in Boulder. Kate Petley’s Staring into the Fire prods us toward different sorts of awareness. Her striking abstract prints and paintings challenge our understanding of surface, depth, color, and representation.
To contemplate the impact and ideologies behind fashion locally, the Avenir Museum in Fort Collins is well worth visiting. In the exhibit Where Is Every Body? Mannequins and Mounts—a nod to body types, the sense of absence created by social distancing, and the ubiquity of clothing on bodies across the globe—the history of the mannequin is tied into the history of art. A traveling exhibition titled Wandering Spirit: African Wax Prints charts the history of African wax print fabrics through their unlikely origin in Indonesia, to the textile mass production factories of the Netherlands, to where they have received commercial success in West Africa, the exhibition tells a story of global trade, colonization, and commerce through the medium of fashion and textiles.
The Fantasy Show is a group exhibition of eleven participants, on view through December 17. Six “Design and Build Emerging Artists” join five 2021 Artists in Residence in a curious blend of styles and materials under a generalized “fantasy” theme. By inviting viewers to reignite their relationship with play, The Fantasy Show asserts that great art depends upon good make believe. Moreover, the works demonstrate that art is a playground to indulge the senses, a medium to contact our inner children, and a carte blanche to imagine the world we want, even as we try to escape the one we don’t.
The show currently on view in the Central and South El Pomar Galleries at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is Ronny Quevedo’s solo exhibition at the line. It includes works on paper and muslin, as well as a site-specific installation. As the Curator of Contemporary Art Katja Rivera explains in an accompanying pamphlet, the exhibition is a celebration of Quevedo’s recent artistic practice. His works weave together layered histories from across the Americas, speak to the formation of diasporic identities, and use materials and processes connected with immigration both past and present. As a result, Quevedo blurs geographic, historical, and temporal boundaries to highlight the complex narratives of the movement(s) associated with historically marginalized peoples. Before the exhibition opened, I had the pleasure of meeting Quevedo and Rivera and viewing the galleries during installation.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020, Niza Knoll of Denver’s Niza Knoll Gallery had just asked mixed-media artist Jennifer Ghormley if she’d be interested in producing an immersive show. Fast forward to September 2021 when CATALYST—an immersive art exhibit created by five local artists: Ghormley, Victoria Eubanks, Kendra Fleischman, Judy Gardner, and Bonnie Ferrill Roman—has transformed the Niza Knoll Gallery into a playful, multi-sensory experience that combines art and technology.
In the artworks of the late Roland Bernier—featured in “In Other Words,” one of two recently-premiered, text-based exhibitions at The Arvada Center for the Arts—the meaning of words and linear narratives retreat and recede. The visual aesthetic of the text takes precedent, disassociating it from its practical purpose where words serve as metaphor. The accompanying exhibition, “Word Play,” is comprised of work from 15 additional contemporary Colorado artists. It demonstrates the great expanse of possibilities within text-based art, while further emphasizing the conscious restraint that Bernier employed.
As the title implies, Narkita Gold’s first professional body of work focuses on Denver’s Black community, primarily female. The artist pairs colorful photographic portraits with interviews in order to prioritize individual experiences while also highlighting the sometimes overlooked fact that Black people have always lived in Denver. Though there are a few well-known faces in the row of images, most of the women featured are ordinary Denverites. They are relatable, yet Gold elevates them to near-celebrity status by using a style of portraiture with an aristocratic presentation, revealing only the top half of the subject’s body and focusing on their face. Black in Denver is currently on view at History Colorado.
Movable Medley, the current exhibition at Art Students League of Denver (ASLD), challenges our understanding of books as merely functional vehicles for text. Made up of 29 artworks by 26 artists, the exhibit encourages visitors to deliberate over how the artists unravel and reimagine the mechanics of storytelling, the concept of books as objects, and the interwoven nature of literary and visual art.
Dateline (founded circa 2014) is one of the few artist-run spaces to survive the gentrification that has transformed Denver’s legendary DIY turf north of downtown into the “arts district” we now know as RiNo. Inside the small gallery, grow-light purple radiates from the floor-to-ceiling plant shelving and a couple of cats sunbathe near the door. This is an ironically well-suited environment for the artwork currently on display: sixteen identically-sized (16 x 16 inch) satin-finish photo prints, mounted without frames, which are hung side by side and equidistant along the gallery’s three white walls. This body of work is Estevan Ruiz’s solo exhibition, aptly titled, TISSUES. There are no titles for the individual photos. The exhibit text simply refers to them as “a curated selection of found photographs.”
Located in the Art District on Santa Fe Drive in Denver, Spark Gallery has presented diverse and dynamic art exhibitions driven by their cooperative members since 1979. Currently on view in the main gallery are the abstract works of Kathryn Oberdorfer and Madeleine Dodge and in the north gallery Patricia Miller exhibits realist photomontage and digital paintings as well two sculptural pieces. While Oberdorfer, Dodge, and Miller produce work using a myriad of approaches, in these shows each artist focuses on how to reconcile the difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the world we currently inhabit, through art-making.
It isn’t often that an exhibition of so many artists (nine, to be exact) is able to cohesively address a theme as broad as “armor”—but the current show at the Center for Visual Art in Denver does just that. The CVA gallery space is adorned with bold pieces, organized by artist, which explore the ways each individual (or duo) conceptualizes bodily protection, or the failure of such protection in the face of an array of threats. This thread is strong throughout, though exactly which threats the artists address varies widely, resulting in a stunning, thought-provoking, impactful show.
Walking through the Dikeou Collection’s Mid-Career Smear with director Hayley Richardson and artist Devon Dikeou this spring in Denver felt like an initiation into a particular artist’s aesthetic, worldview, and process. The exhibit is also like a portal by which we can travel in-between (and often experience all at the same time) what usually separates the present and the past, the personal and the public, the art and process of its creation, and even the artist and the viewer and/or collector, historian, and consumer of art.
If your pandemic life is missing a bit of adventure, pack yourself some sunscreen, a water bottle, and maybe some snacks, and embark on Lakewood’s sculpture scavenger hunt. LandMark is an outdoor art exhibition installed across various parks in Lakewood and Arvada. Each piece is presented with a QR code, which the viewer can scan to listen to a short explanation from the artist. The works speak to their specific location—the pedestrian green spaces of Lakewood—but also to the global implications of how humans interact with the natural world. Some seek to draw attention to the beauty of natural forms, like Nicole Banowetz’s Respire. Others are a more direct critique of humans’ involvement in climate change, like Tiffany Matheson’s Caught. With ten sculptures dispersed over seven parks, the exhibition can easily fly under the radar. However, as with inspection of the natural world, if one takes the time to stop and investigate, LandMark holds much to discover.
Michael Warren Contemporary is making up for lost time for their gallery artists, featuring a series of short exhibitions where the artists can display their works for about three weeks. This current exhibition, which includes sculpture, paintings, and ceramics, allows each of the three artists to balance each other. The works together—by Nancy Lovendahl, Andrew Roberts-Gray, and Sara Ransford—impart a vision that is clean and clear. And all three artists live in the Roaring Fork Valley to the west of Denver, surrounded by breathtaking landscapes and inspiration.
