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.

Black Futures in Art

Mar 18

Mar 18 Black Futures in Art

Dani/elle Cunningham

The Dairy Arts Center’s exhibition Black Futures in Art: The Space Between Us reimagines rigid boundaries as permeable gray areas and proposes differences among people as opportunities for collaboration. Guest curated by Adderly Grant-Lord, who also has paintings in the show, this group of Black artists and allies suggest moving forward into our collectively uncertain future without forgetting what’s behind, using past experiences, including traumas, to build strong communities. Focusing on the energy that thrives in creative spaces, this exhibition reminds viewers to use this energy as a catalyst for inclusive relationships and comfort within liminality.

delecTABLE / Food-tography

Mar 14

Mar 14 delecTABLE / Food-tography

The concurrent exhibitions delecTABLE: The Fine Art of Dining and Food-tography at the Art Students League of Denver (ASLD) serve up an abundant selection of punchy photographs and finely crafted ceramic tableware to remind us that enjoying a meal is one of Earth’s greatest delights. Natural cycles and organic shapes appear throughout, balanced by playful pops of colorful work.

Art of the State 2025

Mar 12

Mar 12 Art of the State 2025

Madeleine Boyson

Art of the State 2025 is an heroic triennial exhibition of contemporary work now on view through March 30, 2025. Filling Arvada Center’s galleries with an impressive breadth of media, styles, formats, textures, colors, locations, forms, and subjects are 148 artworks by 145 artists, whittled down from a staggering 2,503 submissions by 911 artists. Jurors spent over a month finalizing the checklist. And though only about six percent of submissions made it into the final exhibition, Art of the State 2025 provides one of the most exhaustive synopses of contemporary art in Colorado so far this decade.

The Intimate Infinite

Mar 4

Mar 4 The Intimate Infinite

The Intimate Infinite, the mid-career survey of artist Tomiko Jones’ work over the past two decades, is currently on display at Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art. In this sizable exhibition spanning nine separate bodies of work, Jones navigates slow and earnest photographic meditations through the skillful application of aesthetic attention and process.

Little-ton, Big-ideas

Feb 25

Feb 25 Little-ton, Big-ideas

There is a persistent and pernicious stereotype that artists working and living in areas outside of major metropolitan centers create art that is backwards, naive, retrograde, or of poor quality. Little-ton, Big-ideas: Honoring the Big Ideas of Women Artists, currently on view at Arapahoe Community College’s Colorado Gallery of the Arts, challenges this misconception. Sponsored by the Colorado Chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCACO), the exhibition features works by WCACO members and by women and women-identifying artists in Littleton who submitted work to an open call.

Creative Collective

Feb 18

Feb 18 Creative Collective

Parker Yamasaki

Creative Collective, the group show on view at the Tointon Gallery in Greeley, is really a measure of both: the ways the artists know their home in Colorado, and the ways that they show it love. The collection of 72 artworks was done by members of the Greeley Art Association, a local group that hosts regular meetups and workshops.

Code-X: Contemporary Chicanx Codices

Feb 11

Feb 11 Code-X: Contemporary Chicanx Codices

Code-X: Contemporary Chicanx Codices, currently on view at the Vicki Myhren Gallery, underscores the lasting influence and relevance of one of the oldest visual and cultural storytelling mediums. Featuring the work of fifteen codex makers, Code-X shows how artists push the form into a variety of new iterations while engaging in the age-old practices of recording histories, commentating on socio-political issues, exploring identity, and participating in collective world-building.

Feb 4

Feb 4 Housekeeping

Sculptor Rian Kerrane has mounted a significant solo exhibition at the University of Colorado Denver's historic Emmanuel Art Gallery, a former chapel with a rich past of community and artistic activity. Environmental concerns and climate change are at the core of Housekeeping.

Feb 3

Feb 3 Tools

Peeking out behind the government gray walkways of the Wellington Webb Municipal Building, you’ll find Donald Lipski’s tool galaxy. The public art installation, simply titled Tools, spans the height of a sixty-foot limestone wall. Site-specificity reaches a pinnacle in this piece, as the building houses the offices, departments, and services that run the City and County of Denver.

Visual Reality: Redefining Artistic Experience through Technological Innovation

Jan 28

Jan 28 Visual Reality: Redefining Artistic Experience through Technological Innovation

Stephen Shugart

Visual Reality: Redefining Artistic Experience through Technological Innovation, now on view at the Artworks Center for Contemporary Arts in Loveland, presents us with thoughtful, sometimes weighty, and sometimes wry examinations of the exhibition's theme by several of the Artworks Center’s members. It is their 2025 biennial exhibition.

Jan 21

Jan 21 JayCee Beyale

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.

Colorado Grasslands Interpreted Through Textiles

Jan 14

Jan 14 Colorado Grasslands Interpreted Through Textiles

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.

YOUR REFUSAL TO SEE

Jan 7

Jan 7 YOUR REFUSAL TO SEE

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.

Lay of the LAND: Interpretations of SCAPES

Dec 31

Dec 31 Lay of the LAND: Interpretations of SCAPES

Madeleine Boyson

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.

Vanity & Vice: American Art Deco

Dec 24

Dec 24 Vanity & Vice: American Art Deco

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.

Dec 17

Dec 17 Nepantla

José Antonio Arellano

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.

Sitting Together

Dec 12

Dec 12 Sitting Together

Parker Yamasaki

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.

Myths and Migrations

Dec 3

Dec 3 Myths and Migrations

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.

Portrait of Nature: Myriads of Gods / Duality / Rice | Ramen | Ruminations

Nov 26

Nov 26 Portrait of Nature: Myriads of Gods / Duality / Rice | Ramen | Ruminations

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.

3óóxoneeʼnohoʼóoóyóóʼ /Ho’honáá’e Tsé’amoo’ėse: Art of the Rocky Mountain Homelands of the Hinono’eino’ and Tsétsėhéstȧhese Nations

Nov 19

Nov 19 3óóxoneeʼnohoʼóoóyóóʼ /Ho’honáá’e Tsé’amoo’ėse: Art of the Rocky Mountain Homelands of the Hinono’eino’ and Tsétsėhéstȧhese Nations

Laura I. Miller

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?”