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.
For JayCee Beyale, taking up space is a means of creating representation, building community, and giving back. As a Diné (Navajo) artist, Beyale bases much of his art practice on his cultural roots, while also looking towards and uplifting other Indigenous cultures and peoples.
The current exhibition at the NoBo Art District’s Bus Stop Gallery features responses to the anthropogenic threats that the Colorado and nearby grasslands continuously face. In 2019, for example, approximately 2.6 million acres of grassland in the northern Great Plains, home to species of ferret, bison, and birds not found anywhere else, were plowed up to make space for row-crop production. Colorado Grasslands Interpreted Through Textiles by the Handweavers Guild of Boulder reckons with the death of American grasslands through the material resourcefulness central to the textile arts practices on display, allowing viewers to reflect on the relationship between human populations and the natural ecosystems we inhabit.
Anna Tsouhlarakis’s text installation YOUR REFUSAL TO SEE: A Native Guide Project at East Window directly confronts the internalized racism of the people she’s encountered in Boulder. Her exhibition reveals that beneath all the liberal policies and personas lies a willful ignorance of Indigenous identities and histories, as well as an intentional upholding of white supremacy. Bold blocks of text glow on the wall like punchy billboards signaling for a collectively informed awakening.
And now in Lay of the LAND: Interpretations of SCAPES, on view at Madden Museum of Art through June 27, 2025, student curators from the University of Denver question and praise that other foundation—landscape—illustrating that it is less a distinct artistic genre than it is a sum of all the others.
In its selection of objects and its own design, the exhibition Vanity & Vice at the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art presents the simplicity and curvilinear geometry characteristic of Art Deco, an art style popular during the 1920s and ‘30s. Curated by Becca Goodrum, Kirkland’s Curatorial Associate, the exhibition uses gender as a lens to view the trappings of social life in the United States during Prohibition.
I knew I would make the pilgrimage to the Museum of Art in Fort Collins when I heard that Tony Ortega had curated an exhibition there. Comprising the work of thirty-six artists from Colorado and New Mexico, the exhibition invites its viewers to consider the continued relevance of the Nahuatl term “Nepantla,” which Gloria Anzaldúa helped circulate in 2002.
There’s a reason that we reach for furniture when hard news is coming. The standing body is precarious, wrapped in air and prone to crumbling. The seated body, though, is supported. It can take more. This is what Brady Smith’s new show Sitting Together at Kin Studio feels like: support.
William Villalongo: Myths and Migrations, organized by Grinnell College Museum of Art and currently on view at the CU Art Museum in Boulder, includes collages, video, sound, and sculptural works made during the past two decades. The exhibition challenges a white, male, colonialist gaze central to EuroAmerican histories of art. Interrogating the technologies and techniques that structure and facilitate this gaze, including scientific tools such as the telescope and microscope as well as art making itself, William Villalongo uses collage and (re)framing to emphasize the presence and agency of Black being across time and throughout artistic movements and styles.
Three exhibitions of artwork by Japanese and Japanese American artists are currently on view at the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center in Pueblo, bringing international artists to Colorado and lending visibility to Colorado-based makers. These shows display a range of media—antique photographic methods, sculptural collages, and vibrant oil paintings—while also presenting the nuances of contemporary Japanese identity.
The exhibition at CSU’s Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, 3óóxoneeʼnohoʼóoóyóóʼ /Ho’honáá’e Tsé’amoo’ėse: Art of the Rocky Mountain Homelands of the Hinono’eino’ and Tsétsėhéstȧhese Nations, shares Friday’s story, along with many other Indigenous artists, and asks the viewer to consider the question: “What can we do to return the resources of the land-grant university—knowledge, research, resources, and land—to Indigenous Nations?”
The United States government has proven time and again that it values economic power over human and environmental health. Each passing decade reveals more scorched earth, resources depleted for temporary gains, and tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed in war. Each week another hidden agenda comes to light too late. They enact these histories on a loop—new actors, same destructive decisions. A Thousand Beautiful Lies, organized by The Center for Fine Art Photography at the Center for Creativity in Fort Collins, grapples with this reality in the context of the Atomic Age and the nuclear contamination that still continues to plague communities to this day.
Addressing the hard reality of climate change, an inspiring, youth-led, group exhibition titled Seeds of Hope is on display at Downtown Aurora Visual Arts through November 18. Combining works from over sixty youths (ages 6 - 18) with works by adult artists Kelly Cox, Anna Kaye, Regan Rosburg, and Eileen Roscina, this multifaceted, interactive, educational, and science-focused exhibition tackles the complex theme with a dizzying array of art and information.
At the University of Northern Colorado’s Campus Commons Gallery, Caminos Por Andar: Latinx Futurism and Expanded Realities presents anti-colonial visions of the future. In this exhibition, a cyborgean creature composed of human detritus and dirt emerges, white settlers are recast as extraterrestrials, and the Madonna and Child become residents of a modern-day border town. Many of the artworks employ a familiar futuristic aesthetic—sharp angles, ambient light, and an emphasis on technology—while others are subtle, reminding viewers that the future isn’t always a Star Trekian utopia, nor is it singular.
RemainReal Fine Art has a fall show devoted to the art form of tarot cards. Beyond the Deck is open through October 26 and invites audiences to reimagine tarot “through the eyes of Colorado’s most visionary artists.” Each of the twenty-two works in this feature exhibition interprets a different Major Arcana card from The Fool (0) to The World (XXI) and reflects the internal (cards I to VII), external (VIII through XIV), and mystical (XV to XXI) powers at play in the human experience.
A walk through Nick Ryan Gallery’s current exhibition, Shapespeak, evokes an abstracted American landscape filled with deserted strip malls, fragmented urban life, and flickering nocturnal visions. Ky Anderson, Emilio Lobato, Andy Ryan, and Courtney Sennish each utilize their own combination of highly specific colors and textures to illuminate the layered complexity of humans’ relationship to our environment, both built and natural.
For more than twenty years, Zip37 was an artist-run gallery at 37th Avenue and Navajo Street in Denver and was part of what was then the Navajo Street Art District. Though that art district has declined, Zip37 and its many recognizable artists are celebrated in a new exhibition at Kanon Collective in Lakewood’s 40 West Arts District, where many Navajo Street galleries relocated.
Colorado has a wizard, and his name is Lonnie Hanzon. The artist and storyteller has bewitched audiences via storefronts and interactive experiences since 1980, and he now dons his sorcerer’s cap to revamp Cabinet of Curiosities and Impossibilities at the Museum of Outdoor Art’s (MOA) Greenwood Village headquarters, alchemizing fable into history and oddity into treasure.
The same way a dancer works hard to appear soft, Elnaz Javani’s works in Oddments, on view at the Mariani Gallery until October 10, exude a quiet sense of power. On display are ten hanging pieces made over the past two years and a set of animal-like figures constructed in 2020.
Understudy Art Incubation Space has a unique, fishbowl-like design, with floor-to-ceiling windows that invite passersby to either observe art from the outside or physically experience it inside. Enhanced by the gallery’s compact layout, Tricia Waddell’s immersive solo exhibition, We Will Be Strange, emphasizes phenomenology, a philosophy that focuses on how the body shapes perception.
The word that seems most apt to describe Deborah Jang’s sculptural works is “lyrical”—each piece is built from a motley assortment of disparate objects which, once together, find balance and rhythm. According to Jang, her constructions are a study in radical inclusion.
