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.
The first installment of Tiger’s Leap: Fashion Past, Present, Future at Colorado State University’s Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising delves into the cyclical history of fashion trends within their broader social contexts. Historically informative with a wide array of garments on view, the exhibition unravels the illusion of aesthetic newness within culture.
Before crossing the curtain that separates the darkened room exhibiting Na Mira’s Hotel from the rest of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, I could hear a song playing from within the gallery. It sounded vaguely familiar, at the edge of my recognition and memory. Experiencing Hotel felt familiar and new, like watching a sci-fi movie from the 1980s—both outdated and prescient, anachronist and transformative. This impression was due in part to the video medium and Mira’s allusion to the postmodern building designed by John Portman, Jr.: the Bonaventure Hotel.
In Language Without Words, on view at the Denver Botanic Gardens (DBG) Freyer-Newman Center, Ash Eliza Williams’s stunning paintings and sculptures invite viewers to consider the varied nonverbal ways that nature uses to communicate. Both imaginative and scientifically grounded, Williams offers a surreal and animistic perspective that is visually wonderful, somewhat alien, and subtly spiritual.
At the Lincoln Center Art Gallery in Fort Collins, Barbara Baer and Amelia Furman are paired in the exhibition Biophilia for their shared affinity for nature and their use of multimedia, resulting in an energetic show that offers a range of experiences from fixed to immersive. Both artists replicate aspects of the natural world, emphasizing interconnected experiences while creating space for the emergence of new narratives. Through their distinct yet complementary approaches, Baer and Furman invite viewers to engage with the natural world and each other in thought-provoking ways, blending time, environment, and the human experience.
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.
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 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, 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.
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, 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, 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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
