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.
Transformation at the Parker Arts, Culture & Events (PACE) Center invites fiber artists to repurpose materials ranging from tea bags to tablecloths, reducing the artists’ carbon footprints while interrogating quilting as a medium. The works featured by these 24 artists address themes ranging from women’s rights and gun violence to conservation and memory, showcasing the medium’s versatility and bringing attention to the labor of domesticity that so often goes ignored.
In early June, a pair of monumental exhibitions opened at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities and RedLine Contemporary Art Center. They feature a prolific array of artworks, nearly one hundred individual paintings and sculptures, spanning half a century, by Colorado artist Floyd D. Tunson. Considered a major survey of Tunson’s artistic output over the past five decades, the two exhibitions, collectively titled Ascent, were conceived by curators Wylene Carol, Daisy McGowan, and Collin Parson. They are designed to complement one another while maintaining their own autonomy. Though each exhibition contains a different collection of original artworks, they are curated so that both exhibitions contain examples of the artist’s historical practice. They can each independently impart to the viewer a comprehensive understanding of the landscape of Tunson’s career.
Denver has hosted three shows about Malinalli this year, and it’s been instructive to view them in conversation. But the final show to close—and perhaps the most visionary—is Malinalli on the Rocks at Museo de las Americas, curated by Maruca Salazar, the museum’s former executive director. In a deliberate move to amplify new aesthetics for Malinalli’s 500-year legacy as the “Mother of Mexico,” Salazar assembles eleven other Chicanx and Latinx artists for a regenerative exhibit that requires everyone to “choose sides.”
inVISIBLE | hyperVISIBLE came to the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder as we neared the end of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month and offers an incredible bounty of work from 16 different AAPI artists. The exhibition reaches beyond political and cultural bounds—a uniquely contemporary account of the lived experiences of a diverse demographic, with emotional depth and aesthetic playfulness in equal parts.
Now at Bitfactory Gallery in Denver, the exhibition Us is a celebration of queer joy, community, and identity. An annual exhibition (this year being its third), its intent is “to bring attention and awareness to marginalized groups of artists and [to demonstrate] the universal nature of art.” Showcasing members of the LGBTQIA+ community, works by artists Christopher La Fleur, James Mullane, Clint Ramstetter, and Louis Trujillo fill the gallery with primarily two-dimensional works—paintings, fiber art, and drawings.
Denver-based video artist Annette Isham asks viewers to rethink the romanticism of westward expansion with three augmented reality artworks entitled Venus: A Space to Hold. Through these works, visitors are presented with an alternative and experimental method for engaging with the art object, hosted within the Popwalk app, developed by David Chapman Lindsay, and set against the backdrop of The Yard and the surrounding Divine Redeemer neighborhood in Colorado Springs.
Stephen Shugart—a local Denver author-turned-artist who works in sculpture, installation, and painting—has a unique perspective on light. Using it as paint and poetry alongside natural and human-made objects, Shugart captures transcendent moments of reality to literally illuminate the dark. And while not all of his work features a bulb, the light in and behind Shugart’s visual oeuvre is a narrative foil to darkness, a mechanism for wonder, and a path to self-discovery.
In the exhibition Patterns of Consumption at the Littleton Museum, Kalliopi Monoyios converts cast aside objects, including single-use plastic, cords, and snack packaging, into new states of being as art materials, quilt-like wall hangings, sculptures, and three-dimensional framed works ranging from minimalist to maximalist styles that are nearly unrecognizable from their original forms.
Brenda Mallory’s exhibition The Folly of Dominion explores “making do” as both a resource for material usage and for engaging with the practice of frugality and resilience. It is on view in Colorado State University’s Lory Student Center Duhesa Gallery. Lenka Konopasek’s exhibition Transient Objects of Desire, in the Lory Student Center’s Curfman Gallery, focuses on the dichotomies flowing between tension and solace, beauty and destruction, and brute force and gentle intimacy.
The artwork of Jean Herman and Taylor Coble is currently on view at Sync Gallery, located at the heart of Denver’s creative district on Santa Fe Drive. The exhibition is titled Discoveries. While both artists use vastly different styles, it is hard not to see connections between the two in subject matter and spirit and their use of mixed media.
Susan Cooper’s installation Story Line, A Visual History from Poland to the USA, on view at the University of Denver’s Anderson Academic Commons, is a visual autobiography told through the depiction of buildings, ships, houses, and vehicles. It chronicles Cooper’s and her family’s journey from Poland to Los Angeles to Denver. Like Cooper’s storyline, the exhibition has travelled from Chmielnik, Poland to the University of California, Los Angeles and now is on display at the University of Denver.
The concrete and steel of SPACE Gallery in Denver sparkles in the sun as I am greeted and directed towards the works of the artists Philip Tarlow and Noelle Phares. You first encounter Philip Tarlow’s exhibit titled: i fly (petAow). The series of abstract collage works are inspired by two events: the jubilance Tarlow felt watching the 2020 Olympics and also a surgery around the same time he underwent to save his eyesight. Noelle Phares’ exhibition titled Hothouse speaks to the Anthropocene and the greenhouse gasses caused by human pollution. Phares is able to bring our attention to a very concerning topic without making us want to run out the door.
Featuring the work of nine contemporary Japanese artists—Hina Aoyama, Eriko Horiki, Kyoko Ibe, Yoshio Ikezaki, Kakuko Ishii, Yuko Kimura, Yuko Nishimura, Takaaki Tanaka, and Ayomi Yoshida—the exhibition Washi Transformed at the Longmont Museum unifies the artists’ diverse practices through an exploration of their shared use of the ancient medium of washi (和紙), handmade Japanese paper. The result is a show both distinctly focused and wonderfully abundant in unique expressions created through the artists’ contemporary aesthetic interventions.
This spring, Core New Art Space in Lakewood presents the exhibition Architecture of Form for its third year running. It’s a love letter to geometry for geometry’s sake. A viewer may rest their eyes on balanced arrangements of squares and rectangles, angular compositions in pleasing palettes, and repeating patterns and shapes. The exhibit statement boldly declares, “Geometry intrinsically rejects contemporary transient socio-political and cultural involvement as well as the interpretive bias of the viewer.”
At the Downtown Aurora Visual Arts (DAVA), Viviane Le Courtois has put together the current show In Between, a printmaking exhibition. It’s part of the Month of Printmaking (or Mo’Print, for short), and Le Courtois has curated an exhibition showcasing local Colorado artists from various backgrounds. Each artist is in some way “in between” two or more identities: gender, culture, language, religion, place, nationality, ability, or ethnicity. The artists not only examine and describe their own identity (or identities), but also question the validity of having to belong to one group over another.
Transcendent Glitch—the title for Art Gym Gallery’s fifth iteration of the Impressed national printmaking exhibit—sets an interesting tone for the show. Referring to an extraordinary error, it’s a surprising description for a juried exhibition featuring works of impressive technical skill from 27 different artists. Further, the term “glitch” connotes flaws in both the digital and electronic realms.
With the origins of abstraction dating back over a hundred years, I would never blame an artist who felt stuck or intimidated by the challenge of expanding upon abstraction during this 21st century. However, it is evident from Jennie Kiessling’s exhibition In the Garden, In the Distance made up of 83 artworks that she feels no such intimidation but is rather inspired. From January 14 to April 10, Kiessling brings her abstract works to the Loveland Museum in three series: In the Garden, In the Distance, The Disciplined Painting, and Your Hunger Betrays You.
It’s clear that great attention to detail and careful planning have been put into the exhibition Josef Hoffman’s Vienna at the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art in Denver. One of the key elements of the period and of the Vienna Secession in particular—the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk—is in its very definition. The German term describes “a total work of art,” with the “it” perhaps referring to an entire room, or even an entire building, like Hoffmann’s most recognizable architectural work, the Stoclet Palace (located in Brussels and constructed between 1905 and 1911).
In the first exhibition at east window SOUTH, emerging artist André Ramos-Woodard presents a straightforward and concise visual display of the ongoing struggle of African Americans at the hands of cops through photographic collages, ubiquitous images from social media, and a video projection. The fifteen photographic works of art and the video in African America: Contempt of Greasy Pigs make up the inaugural exhibition in the newly opened gallery east window SOUTH managed by Todd Herman.
