Art Road Trip: Colorado

By James D. Balestrieri

From the earliest petroglyphs at Dominguez Canyon, Mesa Verde and many other sites, to cutting-edge contemporary digital and installation art, Colorado has long been and continues to be a source of inspiration for artists from around the world. To the early European explorers and the artists who accompanied them, the Rocky Mountains must have risen from the Plains like great snow-backed beasts or old gods.

Albert Bierstadt was introduced to the majesty of the American West when he visited Colorado, while Charles Partridge Adams, for example, made his home there and found endless variety in the landscape. The beauty of Colorado demands to be celebrated in drawings, paintings and prints; in bronze, wood and clay.

Art abounds in Colorado. And while Denver has its share, communities throughout the rest of the state can boast streets of galleries, studio spaces and art walks. They are home to museums devoted to every aspect of the arts and countless artists who work in every medium. In fact, 30 communities in Colorado have recently been designated official state Creative Districts.

This makes it possible for collectors to discover new artists and new works wherever they roam and wherever the road takes them in Colorado.

Loveland’s vibrant arts scene includes a multitude of galleries and studios, and though the city’s artists work in every medium, there is something of an emphasis on sculpture. Art Castings of Colorado makes its home there, as do the Chapungu Sculpture Park, the McWhinney-Hahn Sculpture Park and the Benson Sculpture Garden—host to the yearly Sculpture in the Park juried art show and sale where three-dimensional artists get the chance to show off some of their latest creations. The annual Windows Alive program pays artists a stipend to paint the windows of storefronts in the Creative District. The colorful, sometimes whimsical creations are a must see.

Beyond the sculpture and window paintings, artists of all types have made the city home. Taking up a studio in the Warehouse Innovation Hub, which is located at 815 14th Street Southwest, is mixed media artist Amelia Furman. For Furman, the medium—or media, to be precise—and the way she handles it, is the message—or story, to be precise. Furman starts by choosing a variety of textual elements—handwritten in the manner of old-school letters and printed matter—and affixes these to the support. She then paints over this collaged panel allowing select parts of the story of the collage to be perceived—half-seen, half-read, half-understood—that hover and linger like bits of strange foliage blown against the back of a painting on glass. In GLORY, the night sky is actually a celestial map while the letter suggests a connection between the heavens and the heavenly. There is always more to see in Furman’s work—the flute-playing Native American against the map of the constellations and the extended bird’s wing at left. Furman’s paintings not only shimmer, but they also murmur with the thrum of nature.

Denver is home to four art districts that help make it a true art hub. Arts District on Santa Fe’s Preview Night—or Third Friday Collectors’ Night—often includes exhibition openings and receptions as well as artists’ appearances and talks. On First Fridays and Third Fridays, galleries are open from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. Denver’s newest arts district, Westwood, brings cutting-edge contemporary takes on the diverse cultures of Colorado where arts spaces such as D3Arts offer new explorations of identity and heritage. Museums—the Denver Art Museum, the Clyfford Still Museum, the Kirkland and History Colorado Center— anchor the Golden Triangle Arts District with new, world-class exhibitions. RiNO Art District has its own First Fridays and this year, from October 3 to 5, will host Denver Walls, “a woman- and immigrant-owned mural festival that is part of the globally renowned World Wide Walls.”

Several great Western art events take place in the city every year. The Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale happens in January and its Young Guns Reception in December. Over the course of more than three decades, the show has become a place for emerging and seasoned artists alike to exhibit new works. The Denver Art Museum’s Petrie Institute of Western American Art hosts its popular symposium in January. With a new topic each year and the opportunity to participate in-person or online, collectors and art patrons alike have the chance to dive in deeper and learn more about the history of the genre.

June 7 to 25, Abend Gallery, located at 1261 Delaware Street, will feature the work of French-born, Montreal-based artist Marina Dieul in the solo exhibition Bestiaire. “Known for her animals and figures paintings in trompe-l’oeil style, full of humor and poetry,” Dieul’s work recalls the Dutch and French style that “fools the eye” when the rules of perspective are pushed beyond their limits in order to create sometimes astonishing optical effects.

In MINI LAPIN, for example, Dieul paints what is, in effect, a portrait of a small rabbit, as if protruding from a hole in the canvas. Whiskers, paw, ears and face all spill out, shadowing the white mat. With the works in Bestiare, Dieul captures the individual personality of the animal, showing the insistent, surprising and humorous sides of creatures we may take for granted.

On exhibition at Visions West Contemporary, at 2605 Walnut Street, from July 12 to August 29, are the works of Danielle Winger. The artist’s expressive landscapes use repetition and variation in color and shapes to create natural rhythms that seek out the underlying congruences in form. Her work emphasizes the spiritual unity in the natural world and encourages us to join her in “searching” as she writes, “for that moment of sublimity, hoping to evoke in the viewer a subjective, emotional response to the natural world.”

Through this subtle alchemy, we may find ourselves in the unpeopled scenes she paints. Evoking the similarly spiritual landscapes of Charles E. Burchfield, paintings such as TAHOE, 2024 are meditations on meaning through the arrangement of forms. Snow mantles the pine boughs, a pink reflection of the sky snakes along the surface of the lake, and the mountains seem like folded draperies you might lift into peaks with your finger and thumb. The grandeur of the scene, far from being imposing, invites us.

Anthony Quinn was one of the most prolific and lauded film actors of the 20th century. He was of Mexican-American ancestry but the roles he played often required him to take on the mantle of other identities. A few examples: He played the title role in Zorba the Greek, played a Bedouin shaikh in Lawrence of Arabia, a Ukrainian pope in Shoes of the Fisherman, Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and many others.

He was also a fine painter, as the works in the exhibition ¿Qué soy?: Las historias que contamos / What Am I?: The Stories We Tell on view at Museo de las Americas from August 2 to September 22 can attest. As the press release states, “Through a selection of prints, paintings, sculptures and drawings, including self-portraits of film characters he portrayed, this show explores Quinn’s personal examination of his life’s stories.” Quinn’s painting has a high modernist feel, showing something of the influence of Braque and Picasso with an emphasis on creating a personal connection between art and viewer.

Inflected with the colors and geometries of Southwestern and Mexican ceramics, it’s the eyes in TRIBAL SERIES: BREATH OF A BUFFALO that unite the disparate facets of the painting with their open plaintiveness.

With two museums and more than 20 galleries, Downtown Colorado Springs is an arts destination. First Fridays, walking tours and a public market keep the area bustling with activity, while annual events such as Art on the Streets and ArtSpot transform the city itself into a feast for the eyes of strolling collectors. There is an excellent museum at Colorado Springs Fine Arts College as well as art studios, spaces and collectives throughout the city providing something for every art lover.

On view through July 6 in the Holaday and Seagraves Galleries at the college is Clarence Shivers: Experimenting With Form showcasing 30 works by this versatile artist. After a career in the military that began with the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of Black aviators who were highly decorated yet segregated from their white compatriots, Clarence Shivers (1923-2000) determined to make “Black experience and creativity” central to his work. Perhaps best known for his portraits, such as the quietly effective and utterly arresting watercolor UNTITLED, Shivers painted in oils, in genres ranging from representative to abstract. He also sculpted exquisite bronzes. As the website states, “One of Shivers’ most celebrated works is his statue dedicated to [the Tuskegee] pilots and their legacies, located at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.”

In the 1840s, John Ruskin, the British philosopher of art, observed that the sky “is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him… and it is just the part we least attend to.” Shannon Mello’s skyscapes, on exhibition July 5 to 26 at the Auric Gallery at 125 East Boulder Street, seem almost made to order to answer Ruskin’s inherent plea. She herself writes of noticing the sky while doing our daily things and says, “it’s in those moments, in my car, that I also see things that catch my eye, and often it’s in the clouds.” But there is always, as she continues, the “slight ‘noise’ of human-made inspirations underneath” her work. In LIGHT DRIFT, the eye toggles between the towering wisps cloud and the oncoming storm swirling across the sky and the marks of her brush sweeping across the picture plane. They are almost Turner-esque in their ambition. Ruskin would approve.

An old stagecoach and railroad stop, and a center for outdoor sports, the town of Salida as a Creative District bills its offerings as “Art With An Adventurous Side.” Making use of the town’s beautiful Victorian architecture, galleries stay open late on Salida’s First Fridays. Among other events, Salida’s annual Valley Visions Art Showcase—with some 70 artists participating—offers collectors an opportunity to view and purchase works from the area’s top painters, sculptors, photographers and artisans.

One artist who has set up in the town is Leslie Jorgensen with a space at 121 North F Street. In Jorgensen’s paintings, people—if they are there at all—are small. This is because she wants to share and convey the “immensity” of the mountains and wild places she depicts and to remind us that these places demand our “respect.” Jorgensen says that approach to painting changed when she began to explore and ski the backcountry. It became, as she puts it, “more colorful and expressive.”

She goes on, “I had become an active participant in the landscape.” The sense of adventure she feels in the backcountry makes her art all the more adventurous. It is as if the mountains are painting with her, alongside her, telling her in a painting like SECRET STASH to make the cliffsides red and gold and to outline them in heavy lines, in the manner of the fauves and neo-impressionists. It is as if they are telling her to focus on feel rather than verisimilitude, and to allow the intuition of nature to be her tutor. The skiers here, bent to the slow, step-over-step task of walking, do not notice. But Jorgensen does. And so do we.

In the later months of the summer, there are other events for collectors to take note of as they travel through the region. The long-running Intersect Aspen returns to Aspen Ice Garden in the famed ski town from July 30 to August 3. This gallery-focused fair takes place at the height of the art season in the area and is an intimate, curated experience of modern and contemporary works. Head to Estes Park for the juried Estes Valley Plein Air, when participating artists will paint on location within 50 miles of the city in places like the Rocky Mountain National Park from August 22 to 28. The gala opening day for the exhibition happens August 30 with the show running through September 29. Another paint out to look forward to is the Steamboat Art Museum’s signature Plein Air 2024, which will take place September 20 to 27.

This story appeared in the June/July 2024 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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