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
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
The Possibility of a Penis Still Makes People Blush
If you've been by the Highland Bridge in Denver in the last six months then you're already familiar with the artwork of John McEnroe. It is there in a cement alcove at the base of the bridge that the Denver artist's most well known and controversial sculpture stands erect: a towering mound of glow in the dark, red plastic pods. Titled National Velvet, the public piece has ellicited both ecstactic reviews and heavy breathing from a number of conservatives in the city who are bothered by the work's phallic connotations. This may seem shocking considering the rich history of monuments to the male reproductive organ, but one need only listen to this local radio broadcast to see how h...Read more
Is Richard Patterson a Big Baby About to Talk
The guilty giggle of a boy who in an instant squeezed an entire case of paint tubes onto his favorite action figure mingles with the distilled silence of a master painter at work for hours throughout Richard Patterson's paintings. The process for these brightly photorealistic, globs of colored brush strokes, begins with Patterson smothering a kiche figurine in paint, photographing it, and then rendering a painting from the image: a reproduction of a reproduction of a reproduction, each time utilizing a different medium to reinterpret the last. Patterson, an alumnus of Goldsmith college in London and member of the loosely affiliated group of beloved misfit artists, the YBA's (Young Brit...Read more
DAM Announces Untitled 23:
This just in! The Denver Art Museum + The Fabric Lab present Untitled #23: "STYLE" WARS. 12 local designers will go head to head in a fashiontastic combat whilst DJ's the Postman and Wigdan Giddy battle it out musically. This is the most postmodern version of an Old School fashion show I've ever heard of. I'm giddy with excitement. And a little nervous of course, since I'm a fashion whore for attention and I'm competing in it! More information to come......Read more