The world of contemporary art has seen some bad days in the 1990s. It all started when an economic slump brought the art boom of the 1980s to a crashing halt in New York City, the epicenter of the global market. The severity of the resulting freefall is illustrated by…
When we tuned in last fall, there were two groups vying to open a new museum in Denver dedicated to contemporary art. One group included such well-known Denver artists as Dale Chisman, Mark Sink and Linde Schlumbohm. This group dubbed itself “CoMoCA,” which stands for the Colorado Museum of Contemporary…
For many years, the exhibition calendar in the art world featured a preordained hierarchy of shows. In the fall, galleries, museums and other venues presented their most important events. Then, special exhibits launched the winter holiday season. The spring and summer were traditionally the times when the art world would…
This has not been a great year for sculpture in Denver. First, the Solar Fountain by Larry Bell and Eric Orr that had graced the never-landscaped lawn of the Denver Performing Arts Complex was unceremoniously bulldozed off its foundation and tossed into dumpsters. (Would it have killed the Denver Center…
For some reason, all of the important small public art venues in the metro area are located on the northwest side. In Boulder, there’s the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, in Arvada the Arvada Center and in Golden the Foothills Art Center. Each of these municipal facilities has come to…
Since last year, New York-based conceptual guru Christo and his sidekick Jeanne-Claude have virtually taken up residence on the Front Range. First there was that show of drawings and collages at One/West in Fort Collins in the summer of 1995. Then, in 1996, Denver’s Robischon Gallery unveiled the new “Over…
This weekend Denver will be paralyzed by the Summit of the Eight, this year’s version of the Group of Seven conferences that have been held for years. These meetings bring together the leaders of the richest countries on earth–the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan–and serve mostly…
The current revival of 1920s and ’30s academic surrealism has grown into an international school of contemporary painting, and it has local legs that stretch back to the 1970s. Its adherents employ traditional painting genres such as landscapes, portraits and still lifes. But rather than work with a straight face,…
The fine arts almost never get sucked into mass culture’s real Internet–television. And when art does land in the TV spotlight, it usually suffers. Typically, there are three circumstances in which an event in the world of the visual arts will arouse the attention of the networks and CNN: the…
It’s quite unusual for Denver’s gallery-goers to be treated to more than one good photography show at a time. But this spring, interesting shows are popping up the way dandelions are sprouting on lawns. At Camera Obscura–where good things are always developing–the exhibition Willy Ronis provides a retrospective look at…
Since 1992, Nebula 9 has been Colorado’s best (and most popular) electronic-dance duo. But no more. At a time when the rest of the country finally seems to be catching up with the act’s style of music, the team of Jim Stout and Julian Bradley has split. Stout, however, is…
Commercial art galleries rarely coordinate their shows. The normal practice for galleries, even those next door to one another, is to schedule shows according to the vagaries of artists’ schedules and the idiosyncrasies of gallery directors. But viewers sometimes luck out, as they did this past winter when Robischon Gallery…
Sure, he’d hate it–and it’s hard to imagine that he could squeeze more schmoozing time into any given day. But imagine if Denver Art Museum director Lewis Sharp were the city’s omnipotent art czar. Oh, the disappointments we might have been spared. The $7 million-plus art collection at Denver International…
It was in the early 1980s that many of Denver’s alternative art spaces first came into being. Spark and then Pirate were founded, and within a few years, Edge and Core and other, more minor locales appeared. At first these spaces were little more than friends-only clubs. But soon their…
We may or may not have seen the last of the snow this year, but signs of renewal–such a part of the ritual of spring–are visible everywhere. Blossoming along with all of those tulips is the city’s local alternative-art scene, where a veritable nosegay of important events are helping ease…
Painters Jack Balas and Wes Hempel are fixtures on Denver’s art scene despite residing in what might be called the Outer Mongolia of the Front Range–the sleepy northern Colorado town of Berthoud. To a great extent, their in-town fame is the product of the enthusiastic support they’ve received from an…
It’s been anything goes in the art world since the 1980s, and the upside of that scattershot approach to culture is that there’s something for everyone in the local galleries. The current spring shows range from sophisticated contemporary expressions to solid traditional offerings–and nearly everything in between. At the cutting-edge…
Among the many mindless prejudices that enjoy wide acceptance in the art world, several stand out. One is the notion that physical and emotional struggles are good for artistic development–the concept of the “starving artist.” This persistent romantic myth takes a real toll on artists even today, despite the fact…
The lot of the contemporary Chinese artist can’t be an easy one. To begin with, there are the inevitable comparisons of their work with all of the other Chinese art of the last few thousand years–a pesky history that constitutes the oldest, and therefore the longest, continuous thread in the…
Texas artist Luis Jimenez is a familiar figure in the Denver art world. His works have been shown here over the last couple of decades, and in 1994 he was awarded a city commission for a monumental public sculpture, “Denver Mustang.” This piece, which has yet to be completed, will…
When ceramic artist Maynard Tischler arrived in Denver from back East in 1966 to interview for a job in the art department at the University of Denver, he came away with a mixed reaction. Though he liked the sunshine out west, he wasn’t so thrilled to learn that the university’s…
That an art collection even exists at the University of Colorado in Boulder became known to the general public only thirteen years ago. And the circumstances for the revelation couldn’t have been more embarrassing: a newspaper report that CU’s multi-million-dollar art collection had been allowed to “rot” through neglect and…
