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.
Defining Our Voices: Evolving into the Artists We Want to Be at the new Davis Gallery on the University of Denver campus recognizes and celebrates the liminal space between the milestones we use to gauge success in the art world. Featuring eight University of Denver alumni who graduated in the last five years, the exhibition provides space for emerging artists to explore how their relationship to art has changed over time.
The traveling exhibition currently on view at the University of Denver’s Vicki Myhren Gallery is titled Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art. The exhibition presents forty artworks made over the last 35 years by an impressive bevy of artists, all of whom could be accurately described as young, gifted, and Black. Curated by Antwaun Sargent and Matt Wycoff, the “lovely precious dream” of this exhibit is to reflect and celebrate the diverse range of experiences within the Black cultural milieu while situating the collection as part of a larger, ongoing dialogue happening in the art world about power, representation, identity, and access.
Artmaking is the pursuit of expressing our inner life through metaphorical and material means. At the Arapahoe Community College Art Student and Alumni Invitational, on view now at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts on the Littleton campus, ten artists bring their ideas into being through drawing and painting, installation, metalwork, photography, sculpture, and textiles. The premise that materiality holds meaning is what connects them.
The exhibition celebrates the upcoming onset of spring by featuring works that visually depict nature—such as flowers, animals, water, and fire—from Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum’s permanent collection. Shown together are antique quilts from the Sharee and Murray Newman collection as well as art quilts from the Rooted in Tradition collection. [2] While Nature, Flora, Fauna, Earth speaks to enthusiasts of the textile-based art form, it raises questions about the relationship between traditional and art quilting: What do antique and modern quilts have in common?
While many wax nostalgic about their favorite childhood foods or those specific to their culture, food plays a deeper, sometimes mystical role in Colorado artists’ work at History Colorado Center’s new exhibition Colorado’s Asian Food Culture: Rice & Resilience. The Japanese Arts Network and Asian Pacific Islander (API) community partnered with the museum for this exhibition, pairing Asian artists’ voices with testimonies from restaurateurs and other community members to highlight the wealth of Asian cuisine in the state and food’s ability to transmit generational knowledge.
Immortalized: Lens and Light at the Center for the Arts Evergreen celebrates glass and light as mediums for self-expression. Curator Sara Miller first approached the theme literally, selecting stained glass and mosaic pieces by Evergreen artists Trudy Chiddix, Maria Sheets, and Susan Wechsler. Expanding on the idea of glass by looking at the form of a lens, Miller added photographic works by Thomas Carr, Ron Johnson, Raj Manickam, Stephen Podrasky, Ward Russell, John Shelton, and Michael Trupiano—all members of the Colorado-based collective Photo Pensato.
Art has an entangled relationship with nature. As the philosopher Aristotle famously said, “Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.” This ancient ideal is critiqued and expounded upon in Entanglements, a new exhibition at Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art in Denver. As a lens-based exhibition featuring eleven artists, the show explores our connections to the natural world by illustrating the complex relationships humans have with nature and its resources. These works question humanity’s role in the natural world as caretakers, observers, and even destroyers.
To celebrate all photography has to offer, Denver-based artist Mark Sink launched the Month of Photography Denver (MOP) in 2004. The biennial festival was inspired by Houston’s FotoFest and brings exhibitions, portfolio reviews, artist talks, and more to Denver in March. “Really, it was a very grassroots effort, and Mark was amazing in building it himself with volunteers and limited funding,” says Samantha Johnston, executive director and curator for the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC), which now runs the festival. “Since the beginning, the festival has been all about bringing the community together around photography in Denver.”
With a seemingly endless supply of painter’s tape and vision in equal parts, Rob Hill has already made a big impression on the art scene in his new home in Denver, Colorado. Born in Los Angeles in 1986, Hill made Denver his home in 2020. Dedicated to an ever-evolving vision for himself and his art, Hill continues to build on his use of abstraction through various mediums, from painted canvas to public art to fashion. Whether working with paint, wood, metal, or fabric, his signature style utilizes clean-line triangles that he organically and repetitively layers in bold color palettes.
For a few weeks in February, Understudy invites visitors to experience Dancing in the Diaspora, a solo exhibition of new works by Denver-based artist Autumn T. Thomas. Best known as a woodworker, Thomas branches out and fills the arts and culture incubator space with a combination of mobile, wall-mounted, and free-standing sculptures that act together with LED screens and digital projections. Inspired by her recent artist residency in Suriname and her aim to reveal the hidden soul of her pieces, Thomas finds new connections with her ancestors and challenges her own practice through works that are moving in more ways than one.
Before & After is a solo exhibition by the Colorado Springs-based artist Rob Watt, currently on view at the Manitou Art Center’s Hagnauer Gallery. Composed of several thematic groupings of Watt’s small format cotton and silk embroidered artworks, the artist created most between 2019 and 2022, though the oldest is from 2009. Themes such as architecture, landscape, seasons, and history weave through this exhibit, fashioning a very interesting tapestry for the viewer.
The Beginning, in the land around me is an exhibition at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art in Fort Collins featuring the work of multimedia artist Kei Ito. It showcases five interconnected series that the artist completed between 2020 and 2023. These pieces explore Ito’s nuclear heritage as a third generation hibakusha—the name given to victims of atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II.
Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver has been excavating misunderstood but important distinctions in Southern material and sonic culture since she worked at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Her groundbreaking exhibition Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse is currently on view at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) through February 5th.
Ends + Beginnings centers on the general “relationship of terminus and origin” that each artist chooses to explore in their own particular way. Though disparate in terms of media used and themes presented, these works are very much in conversation with one another. Taken as a whole within the spare, well-appointed gallery space, it quickly becomes clear that while each contribution to this exhibition seeks to answer some version of the question “what does it mean to end and begin again?,” the responses vary widely in tone, ranging from barroom contemplations to elegiac reflections. Indeed, the work remains united in a sense of collective uncertainty that leaves ample space for possibility, reformulation, and empowerment.
For well over a decade, Joel Swanson has explored how language and technology structure our lives. His work has appeared in the Denver-land area, not to mention the Venice Biennale. As part of the entrepreneur Nicholas Pardon’s New Collection, a project-based arts initiative, artists Amber Cobb and Mario Zoots prompted Swanson to create the pieces that make up the current exhibition. The Distance Between Words is on view at Pardon’s private gallery The Vault.
The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) has kicked off their fall season with three exciting new exhibitions: Kevin Hoth and George Perez: Plane of Action, Kristopher Wright: Just As I Am, and Erin Hyunhee Kang: A Home In Between. These shows are all connected by the artists’ impulse to push the potential of photography as form and medium through distinctive methods and processes. The result is a wonderfully multifaceted program in which the simultaneous harmony and particularities within the three exhibitions expand photography practices and create a cathartic interplay between themes of transforming the mundane, destruction, (re)construction, memory, healing, and hope.
Everyone is invited to Juntae TeeJay Hwang’s Sweaty Wedding at Union Hall. Lined up against the walls, sweating under hot spotlights, confidently crafted ceramic forms emit the austerity and discomfort of ancient vessels in contemporary drag. Their probing gazes remind us that we are as much a part of the exhibit as the artwork.
“Vessel” at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder is a substantial show encompassing the work of 19 contemporary artists. It allows the works themselves to assert the meaning of the show’s namesake, without the need for hefty historical analysis. The focus lies on what each artist offers up with “vessels” featuring their own distinctive layers of contextuality, referentiality, and significance.
The Like Like exhibition is on display until February 3 at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design’s Rotunda Gallery. Curators Gretchen Marie Schaefer and Louise Martorano have brought together the works of 19 artists who’ve occupied TANK Studios spaces in Denver over the past few years. Rather than shared themes, Schaefer and Martorano have curated people (i.e. souls) instead of the objects they’ve created.
Action/Abstraction Redefined, on view at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, offers a visual lesson in art history. It is part of the ongoing reexamination of the stories we tell ourselves about our collective past. The show’s title asks us to reconsider how art historical terms, such as “Action Painting” and “Abstract Art” achieve traction and how institutions, including museums and galleries, help establish and distribute definitions. This exhibit features over 50 pieces, mostly paintings, by Native American modernist artists working from the 1940s through the 1970s. Many of the artists were associated with the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe.
