DARIA Art Magazine

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.

Draped in Velvet

Feb 19

Feb 19 Draped in Velvet

As someone drawn to kitsch, I was immediately excited by the theme of Memento Mori Gallery and Tattoo’s current exhibition Draped in Velvet, which features artworks by eleven artists experimenting with velvet as material and as canvas. Through a sense of wit and its showcasing of technical dexterity, Draped in Velvet looks towards the wider possibilities available within velvet painting, challenging its characterization as cheap souvenir art while celebrating its distinctive aesthetic qualities.

Feb 15

Feb 15 Five

José Antonio Arellano

February’s show at Surface Gallery in Old Colorado City demonstrates what is possible when women revive a breakaway legacy of modernism. The show, titled Five, groups together the painters Becca Day, Tara Kelley-Cruz, Valerie Lloyd, Jes Moran, and Diane Reeves.

Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines

Feb 13

Feb 13 Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines

Madeleine Boyson

Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines, a group show at East Window Gallery in Boulder, on view through February 28, considers the space in between these tropes. Curator and gallery owner Todd Edward Herman has gathered “a small selection of playful, critical, and tender images made by and about elder artists” to shift perceptions from “the ‘pornography of old age’ within consumer culture” towards lived experience. The resulting exhibition is heartfelt and substantive, even humorous, and successfully considers aging’s realities without devolving into pity or romanticization.

Jan 29

Jan 29 ]MARGINS[

Migiwa Orimo’s quietly radical exhibition ]MARGINS[, at Mariani Gallery on the campus of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, maps out space for the overlooked aspects of life, revealing the poignant significance of untold narratives. She pieces together society’s marginalia to dismantle commonly perceived hierarchies of value. Orimo’s materials include fabric, thread, and paper, but she also uses the spaces between spoken words, fragments of ephemera, and forgotten histories to communicate unspeakable emotions.

Jan 24

Jan 24 Yazz Atmore

Raymundo Muñoz

Raymundo Muñoz profiles Denver artist Yazz Atmore—a.k.a. “Chatty Ancestors”—who creates collage-based works, murals, and installations inspired by her personal connection to the spirit world, ancestral wisdom, and the young people and community she engages with. Atmore’s vivid mixed-media collages combine analog and digital elements, based on portraits she cuts up, filling and surrounding them with natural forms such as plants and animals. These dynamic compositions suggest an otherworldly and often ebullient cast of human characters, each with their own story to tell.

The Crux of the Biscuit

Jan 16

Jan 16 The Crux of the Biscuit

Dani/elle Cunningham

Plinth Gallery owner and exhibition artist Jonathan Kaplan “leaves dogma to religion” rather than ceramics. Instead, he believes design possibilities are limitless and adapting to one’s environment is crucial to the creative process. This exhibition, The Crux of the Biscuit, is the artist’s first body of work since 2021 and showcases his decades of work as a bike builder and potter, as well as his training as a ceramicist. Kaplan has a true knack for bringing disparate parts into a whole that is not only cohesive but whimsical.

Jan 11

Jan 11 Arte Mestiza

José Antonio Arellano

Since 1986, Emanuel Martinez’s mural titled Arte Mestiza has greeted visitors to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Last year, a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts enabled Martinez to restore and protect the work. Freely available to the public, this significant mural reminds us of the contributions of Spanish, Indigenous, Mexican, and Mexican Americans to the stories we tell about the histories of art.

Jan 2

Jan 2 Orisons

Madeleine Boyson

Orisons perforates a now vacant central-pivot irrigation and former cattle field. The fallow plot is labeled “unfarmable” on the artwork website but it’s one of many parcels in North America’s highest, and the world’s largest, alpine valley that may produce crops in the right circumstances. The region’s endorheic (closed) basin is critical for retaining water and equilibrating via evaporation. Deep wells have so far sustained agriculture. But twenty-three years of climate change-induced aridification and megadrought worsened by over-pumped aquifers and invariant farming have left this region dry and sere. It is from this narrative that Humeau builds Orisons.

Dec 26

Dec 26 Modern Love

If you too have grown weary of the painters who play uninspired poker with Pantone color chips, then Frank Martinez’s collection of paintings at Space Gallery might shine some light onto your winter blues. Modern Love glows with a playful curiosity about life’s colorful offerings.

Thoughtful Intuition

Dec 21

Dec 21 Thoughtful Intuition

Laura I. Miller

Every piece in Taiko Chandler’s exhibition Thoughtful Intuition at the Littleton Museum, from her paper sculptures to her monotypes, contains shapes and textures that conjure the sea and its creatures. Viewing these works, I felt as though I’d been pulled underwater into the artist’s world, one that’s teeming with longing and magic. But the unexpected gift of this exhibition is the care and detail with which the artist describes her process and the meaning behind her creations.

agriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land

Dec 12

Dec 12 agriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land

Jillian Blackwell

The Longmont Museum exhibition AgriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land pairs artists with local Boulder County farms to create artworks. The exhibition attempts to wield art to connect humanity to the land. This is a tricky tightrope to walk, with the perils of being too didactic or making art that is only illustrative and not substantive on either side. The work presented in AgriCULTURE does a good job walking that tightrope, melding formal elements, materials, and subject matter to create pleasing artworks that maintain a tie to the overarching theme. There is often tenderness apparent in the connection between artist and farmer, as one might hope to achieve when we work in community.

Faculty Exhibition: 2023

Dec 7

Dec 7 Faculty Exhibition: 2023

The University of Colorado Art Museum’s Faculty Exhibition: 2023 brings together works by twenty-three CU Boulder faculty members. The media represented in the show include ceramics, film, multimedia installations, painting, photography, and sculpture, among others. Each artist tells stories through their work about time and experience becoming tangible in their art making practice. It is through their stories that we see how students will begin to tell their own.

Community Cloth | Culture Cloth

Nov 28

Nov 28 Community Cloth | Culture Cloth

Located on the second floor of the historic McNichols Building in downtown Denver, Community Cloth, a contemporary exhibition of textile, fiber, and fashion design art curated by Shanna Shelby, invites viewers to engage with “tangible” and “tactile” art forms. As the introductory title card in the exhibition states: “While a sculptor creates in a very tactile manner, a viewer of the final artwork is not typically expected to handle the sculpture. Fiber art, on the other hand, is best experienced not only through sight but also through contact; fabric, rugs, clothing, and upholstery are meant to be touched as well as seen.”

Nov 24

Nov 24 Silsila

Sama Alshaibi’s solo exhibition Silsila is currently on view at the Hatton Gallery at Colorado State University (CSU) and is presented in conjunction with the Center for Fine Art Photography and the CSU Center for Environmental Justice as part of the Environmental Justice Thru the Arts exhibition series. Part of her larger project also titled Silsila, Alshaibi creates photographs and videos of performances, explorations, and documentations of her journey through fifteen predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Maldives nation of islands in Southeast Asia between 2009 and 2016.

Nov 14

Nov 14 caesura

José Antonio Arellano

I want to invoke metaphors of geological time to describe the sense of temporality invoked by Martha Russo’s exhibition at the Ent Center for the Arts. Apart from the pandemic-related interruptions that delayed its possibility, the nature of the work itself is accumulative, labor and time-intensive. With this exhibition—titled caesura, on view until December 2— the Gallery of Contemporary Art (GOCA) proves itself as a site committed to advancing what could be possible in the arts in Colorado Springs.

A Mi Manera | Latitude 37°: Art of Southern Colorado | Colcha Embroidery of the San Luis Valley

Nov 7

Nov 7 A Mi Manera | Latitude 37°: Art of Southern Colorado | Colcha Embroidery of the San Luis Valley

Dani/elle Cunningham

The Arvada Center’s three newest exhibitions explore the history, traditions, and aesthetic of the San Luis Valley, affectionately known as the Valley. In the Main Gallery, Emilio Lobato’s retrospective A Mi Manera: A 40-Year Survey encompasses the Valley native’s innovation and numerous stylistic changes. Meanwhile, two group exhibitions, Latitude 37°: Art of Southern Colorado and Colcha Embroidery of the San Luis Valley, embody the region’s influence and relationship to colonialism and hybridity, respectively.

Reflections on Amache

Oct 31

Oct 31 Reflections on Amache

Mary Grace Bernard

Currently on view at the Parker Arts, Culture & Events Center until November 12, 2023 is a solo exhibition of work by Sarah Fukami entitled Reflections on Amache. From cut Plexiglas® to lithography, and personal documents to government archives, Fukami uses a variety of media to layer her family’s history and the immigrant experience as Japanese Americans living during World War II.

It’s a Wrap / IFeel Monsters / Giving Voice

Oct 26

Oct 26 It’s a Wrap / IFeel Monsters / Giving Voice

In collaboration with Nicole Banowetz, Access Gallery artists DILLPhoenix, Heather H., Jareth J. Charles, and Skylar K. have created an installation of soft sculptures brimming with textural delight and dynamic colors. Abstract fiber forms inspired by a variety of natural organisms activate the entire space from floor to ceiling. Alongside the installation titled It’s a Wrap, two community projects offer generative tactile experiences as outlets for people who have been affected by bullying.

Light Contrasting with Dark

Oct 12

Oct 12 Light Contrasting with Dark

Dani/elle Cunningham

Cabell has always worked with re-purposed materials in a subversion of human consumption and waste, while Bailey focuses on conservation education through photography. Though the artists work in markedly divergent mediums, these shared interests became connective points. With Light Contrasting with Dark, their second collaborative exhibition at the Artists on Santa Fe gallery in Denver, Bailey and Cabell have honed their artistic relationship, generating unexpectedly cohesive works that are as natural as their subject matter.

Colorado Women to Watch

Oct 10

Oct 10 Colorado Women to Watch

An open, curious approach to material and a long-term commitment to process emerge as the conceptual through-lines of Colorado Women to Watch, currently on view at MSU’s Center for Visual Art (CVA). Curated by CVA director Cecily Cullen, the exhibition brings together five well-established, female-identifying artists: Kim Dickey, Ana María Hernando, Maia Ruth Lee, Suchitra Mattai, and Senga Nengudi.