Nick Cave Gives Exactly What You Want
(Photo by Tyler Beard) Since I put my journalistic hat on the shelf over a year ago I was a bit surprised when I received an invitation to attend the media preview for Nick Cave’s exhibition Sojourn at the Denver Art Museum. Was this a clerical mistake? Inviting a journalistic apostate turned art dealer to a sacred press junkit seemed akin to letting a fox browse the hen house. Still, I felt the early private look at Cave’s work, which I’ve been following for a number of years, was worth any potential embarrassment when the media relations staff saw me and realized their blunder. Besides it wouldn’t be the first time I crashed a party.However, when I arrived ...Read more
Hit it Up: Current Must-See Shows
Great current and upcoming art happenings Current: Right now, you can check out Terminal Kings as it visits Denver. Watch street artists from LA as they do live art every day. Plus Gallery’s Frank T Martinez show is almost over, be sure to see it this week. This week and onwards: Be sure to check out this Friday’s opening at David B. Smith Gallery, featuring the work of Liz Miller. A sample of Liz Miller's installation work The Invented World, by Sandy Skoglund opens this Friday at Rule Gallery. You might know Sandy Skoglund by Fox Games, famously installed at the DAM. All the more reason not to...Read more
filed under: events
tags: Art Redline Sandy Skoglund Huma Bhabha Liz Miller Terminal Kings Street Art Denver
Top Ten Colorado Art Happenings of 2011
It’s almost 2012, and 2011 was an incredible year for art in Colorado. Here’s the list of the best art events of the year. 1. Clyfford Still Museum Opening This museum was a long time in the making. Like the Rothko Chapel in Houston or the Georgia O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe, this Museum will make Denver into an artist’s new home. 2. Huma Bhabha at the Aspen Art Museum This exhibition has barely happened, opening on Dec 22, but it ranks high for 2011. Usually Bhabha does sculpture, but her works on paper hold a mysterious quality. The works seem classically modernist, and they involve a lot more than you w...Read more
filed under: art
tags: Huma Bhabha Xi Zhang Robischon Gallery BMOCA MCA Denver Plus Gallery Henrique Oliveira Jessica Moon Bernstein Ricky Allman David B. Smith Gallery Hermann Nitsch Clyfford Still Clyfford Still Museum
Ricky Allman at David B. Smith Gallery
Probably the best sense of what this show is all about is the cover image on Ricky Allman’s website, which identifies just how big these paintings are. David B. Smith gallery never disappoints. I feel that geometries are overdone in art currently, but I do not gather the “This has been done before” feeling from Ricky Allman’s work. This transcending of trend occurs in the scale of Allman’s work, the controlled palette, and the maximal style. There is much to be learned and explored in these canvasses: Allman shows us that he can not only paint expertly, but that he can create worlds, feelings, and fine orchestrations of shine and shado...Read more
Clyfford Still Museum opens in Denver
Clyfford Still was born in North Dakota, on November 30th of 1904. Like another great American abstract expressionist, Jackson Pollack, he emerged from a remote corner of America, where the sky was as big as it could get. You can see his rural American heritage at work in his art: Clyfford Still’s spaces are huge, spare, and earth-colored with sudden touches of vibrancy. The museum itself is a work of art. The concrete walls are carefully raked into variegated, light-and-shadow-gathering surfaces. On the second floor, an incredible lacework of concrete lets just enough light through to the paintings. On a semi-bright, November day, the effect is marvelous. Even on a su...Read more
Bill Amundson at Plus Gallery
Despite the humor in most of his work, Amundson’s drawings develop integral questions about American commercial lifestyles, and, well, all of America itself. Often when looking at his work I think about what it means to be an American, and I don’t see much glamour or intelligence, just monolithic icons of consumerism. In Amundson’s work, members of the consumer class get burned the hardest, and in his work these folks seem even more mindless than usual. Commercial giants who suffer at the expense of Bill's jokes seem to be deserving subjects: Dollar stores, Wal-Mart, and cookie-cutter houses out of suburbia serve as the locus of a minimal absurdism, where there is n...Read more
Formalisms: Joel Swanson at Redline
The overwhelming monochrome of this show is made intimately fascinating by pieces that occur only on the extremes of the scale spectrum. One installation of circuiting twigs replicates up an entire wall (slightly disturbed by a fire alarm, as many large works are). The wall-colored shapes hardly seem to stand out but for their shadows, but there they are, big as the gallery. Another piece is tiny: a bud of a lightbulb sprouting from a tall podium. It is small but utterly magnetizing. The piece, a placard explains, is Lady Gaga’s twitter feed translated into morse code. The bulb flashes and flashes intermittently, and one wonders if it is set to loop on a set of previous tweets or...Read more
Salutations, Project Hello 2011!
On Saturday, June 25th Redline hosted this year's Project Hello. The event presented over 40 artists, designers, musicians, and poets. Redline buzzed with introductions and activity throughout the day. Rebecca Peebles' project guided visitors through the creation of a drawing that mapped the different kinds of visitors to the space. With the aid of colored china markers everyone was invited to color a rhombus representing themselves. As the day wore on, the paper became a colorful graphic representation of the event. People were able to work on the piece while also meeting the artist and one another. Many food vendors were present including Yours Truly Cupcake who had m...Read more
Denver Art Museum Gets Down and Dirty
This week marks the beginning of The Denver Art Museum's first ever campus wide exhibition based on one material, Marvelous Mud: Clay Around the World. Every department in the Museum is involved from Design to Photography. In Director Christoph Heinrich's words, “Don't think pots”. The entire Summer is dedicated to activities and demonstrations surrounding the main exhibition. Activities include the Museum's Mud Studio where young and old can get hands on with clay as well as weekend demonstrations throughout the Summer. This weekend artist Bob Smith was on hand to perform Raku firing, an intense process that yields beautiful glazes, on the plaza in front of the Hamilt...Read more
Tonight! Bordo Bello skateboard art auction
If you haven't heard of the Bordo Bello, then you're missing out on one of Denver's most exciting annual art events for a cause. Hosted by the design organization AIGA, this event invites dozens of Colorado's prominent illustrative artists and designers to transform a blank skate deck by drawing, painting, etching, carving, and often completely changing the board itself. (Last year one designer turned his skate deck into a functioning tape deck.) Tonight the boards will be auctioned off at Artwork Network and all of the proceeds will benefit AIGA's mentorship program, Youth Design Denver, and annual scholarship, Access Gallery, which offers exhibition opportunities and s...Read more