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 exhibition Data Rich, Dirt Poor at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) exudes a sense of exhaustion, serving a spectacle of ghostly screens alongside nondescript noises from multiple video channels in various rooms. The show is part of BMoCA’s MediaLive biennial, which originally began as a festival that brought artists together to discuss and explore the ever-evolving media arts landscape.
Joseph Graves Jr., a teacher and multidisciplinary artist, is currently showcasing a collection of his acrylic, oil, and watercolor paintings at Englewood's Seesaw Gallery. On view through January 11, the exhibition is titled In Plain Sight: a celebration of Black cowboys.
After moving to Oaxaca in the late 1990s, Linda Hanna began to learn about the region's remarkable diversity and complexity in textile artistry. For years, Hanna has commissioned artisans to recreate the image of Guadalupe on clothing traditional to their regions and tribes. She has built a collection that she plans to donate to her adopted country. Part of this collection is now on display at the Museo de las Americas in the exhibition Rosas y Revelaciones.
On display at the People’s Building in Aurora, Colorado, It Comes in Waves is a group exhibition about Long COVID (abbreviated LC) in Colorado, curated by Denver-based artist Heather Schulte. Part of her Stitching the Situation COVID-themed community embroidery project, Schulte expanded on this idea by conducting numerous interviews with people suffering from LC, some of whom created artworks or poetry based on their struggles.
Six LGBTQ+ youths aided Allyson McDuffie in executing artworks and producing CAMP: Queer Arts and Crafts & the Beauty of Imperfection over two months and forty hours of workshop time. The artist anticipated her looming exhibition deadline and need for hands—twelve of them—to help realize a “comical and poignant” evocation of American summer camps “with a queer twist.”
Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum rarely presents exhibitions at its headquarters—a warehouse repurposed into a haunting cavern, painted entirely black on the inside. You enter the structure through an old loading dock, nodding to its original purpose and lending resonance to this exhibition, which reflects on memory, preservation, and the passage of time. Mirroring the dark recesses of Black Cube’s institutional memory, the exhibition text describes the building as “a spatial form born to hold things, if only temporarily.” In this sense, the exhibition’s title, What We Hold On To, refers not only to what we possess, but also to what we have been denied, the forces preventing us from holding on, and the ways letting go can offer a form of release.
Featuring the work of 20 artists from across the country, Between Here and There has the hefty task to not only bring the audience in, but to keep them engaged while guiding them through the diverse work of each artist. Member shows can risk a lack of cohesion compared to those curated around specific themes or queries. The D’art Gallery team avoids this risk and skillfully navigates the broad scope of aesthetics presented by their members through their thoughtful hanging of the show, and by delivering immediate thematic clues to viewers.
If you haven’t been to the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center in Pueblo, Colorado, its beautiful architecture and strong variety of arts programming year round make it worth a visit. The exhibition currently on display in the Center’s Helen Thatcher White Regional Gallery is by letterpress printer and book artist Gail Watson. Comprised of recent and past foil stamped, two-dimensional works from three separate series, Sense of Place | Topophilia, Boom, and Electrons and Labyrinths, it deals with space and place in general and specific ways.
While each artist exhibits a similar interest in abstraction, Camille McMurry, Julie Rothschild, and Sara Goldenberg White employ parallel means for achieving disparate ends. But the result is a visually engaging exhibition that yields more questions than answers. For where Fiber Arts lacks a cohesive narrative or conviction, the works and the context in which they are displayed raise a debate about the nature of art and where and when we expect to see it.
Mutations at fooLPRoof Contemporary Art Gallery, mounted and hung for the first time, is the work of George Rivera's subconscious—an accumulation of life channeled through ink blot paintings based on his experiences with the Uitoto Tribe in South America. Standing among the paintings are the cast iron sculptures of Christopher Meyer in the exhibition How Soon We Forget.
K Contemporary in downtown Denver is currently hosting Daisy Patton's exhibition Before These Witnesses and Ya La'Ford's The Spectrum of Blue. Together, they offer dignity to what is often lost and model critical-minded, liberatory approaches to the appreciation and recovery of details.
Art Gym’s current exhibition tackles the details of this emotional, material, and bodily labor in Women’s Work is Never Done, featuring the art of Carrie Shiffrin, Charis Fleshner, and Jasmine Dillavou. In the Leyden Jar Gallery, towards the back of Art Gym’s work space, Kathryn Oberdorfer’s solo exhibition To See Takes Time favors looser lines and an abstract expressionist approach to composition.
Behind the beautiful and storied Buell Theatre is a big, modest-looking brick wall where you’ll find an unassuming stage door. It’s easy to miss if you’re driving towards the Auraria Campus or downtown Denver, but it’s a vital portal through which all the theatre’s actors and crew enter, symbolic of the compelling behind-the-scenes efforts that make viewing theatrical performances there so magical. As such, it’s a fitting location for Catalysts, a recently installed community artwork by Jann Haworth that celebrates the individuals working behind the scenes in organizations that are so integral to Denver’s arts and culture.
Drawing on Elizabethan style, Jesse Mathes’s body jewelry in Territorial Defense at Foothills Gallery’s Astor House explores themes of authority, protection, and gender that transform jewelry into a form of visual communication. Mathes’s adornments become conceptual and sculptural interventions, extending the body to amplify physical presence and assert spatial dominance, while establishing a dynamic interplay between viewer and object.
Jaime Carrejo’s work is grounded in considerations of individuals’ relationships to community within broad—and possibly even metaphysical—contexts. In the studio, he explores his personal relationships with a body of research. In the classroom, he focuses on cultivating relationships among faculty members and students, giving them the space to probe the questions that will allow them to achieve their goals. Within the wider community of Denver, the United States, and the world, Carrejo’s community-oriented practice poses a new question of relationship: what might it mean to belong to a larger whole?
The artist Olive Moya has developed a visual language of “noodles”—a term she uses to describe the undulating, colorful strands that wiggle and twist in her artworks. Moya’s solo exhibition Where You Are, And Where I Really Am at Bell Projects makes the case for a playful, iterative approach to enacting and understanding identity.
The current exhibitions at William Havu Gallery showcase a captivating trio of artists—Homare Ikeda, Naomi Scheck, and Cheryl Ann Thomas—each exploring the in-between spaces that are formed through distinct yet harmonious mediums.
At the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Mesa Lab in Boulder, the exhibition Exploring Water Through Art unfolds like a long thank-you note. Whether solid, liquid, or gas, water is everywhere here: as blessing, as memory, and as contested resource.
Curated by Hamidah Glasgow and featuring the work of Mona Bozorgi, Odette England, Melissa Grace Kreider, Marcy Palmer, Danielle SeeWalker, and Shuyuan Zhou, Beyond Resilience draws from current events, politics, personal narratives, and cultural experiences to create a multivocal dialogue about the manifestations of patriarchy and what it might mean to seek a different way of coexisting and caring for one another.
Creative Capitol: The Art of Teaching Artistry attests to how teaching and making art are tactics of social transformation and how teaching artists are agents of this change. The Colorado State Capitol—the site at which officials formulate and enact the laws that govern our ordinary lives—is an apt location for the works, which make clear the link between arts education and the politics of everyday life.
