Get yourself out there! Here are shows that will make you smile and others where you might learn something or simply stare in awe:
Esteban Cabeza De Baca, “From Here to Eternity."
Esteban Cabeza de Baca, courtesy David B. Smith Gallery
David B. Smith Gallery, 1543 A Wazee Street
August 22 through September 28
Opening Reception: Thursday, August 22, 6 to 8 p.m.
The New York-based artist couple Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Heidi Howard team up at David B. Smith Gallery for Night & Day Dreams, a dual exhibition of individual and collaborative works channeling inner mysticism and human connections relating to the unspoiled natural world. Interspersed throughout their imagery lie fleeting personal references to the creep of colonialism and living with nonnormative personalities. Whether created in unison or apart, the works in this show integrate the flow between partners in lovely ways.
Saul Acevedo Gomez and Kate Stone, Living Rooms
Union Hall Gallery, Suite 144, The Coloradan, 1750 Wewatta Street
August 22 through October 19
Opening Reception: Thursday, August 22, 6 to 8 p.m.
At Union Hall, Saul Acevedo Gomez and Kate Stone also coalesce over a subject — in this case, personal spaces — but in completely different mediums. While Gomez’s surreal colored-pencil and mixed-media drawings of gallery rooms are hilariously subjective, often with personal notations or tear-off tabs left underneath the visual, Stone’s stop-motion animations show the architecture of rooms emerging from and sinking back into the walls, also imagined from a personal point of view.
People, Places and Plants
Space Gallery, 400 Santa Fe Drive
August 23 through September 21
Opening Reception: Friday, August 23, 6 to 9 p.m.
While his own exhibition, Here by Accident, continues at the Space Annex, former Denverite and visiting assemblage artist Hyland Mather has curated a group show by local and international friends and fellow travelers that opens this week at Space Gallery. Expect lots of street-art-based and graphic-design-forward work in the spirit of the old Andenken Gallery, lots of it highly collectible and beyond cool on anyone’s walls or shelves.
Zacharia Rieke and Dennis Lee Mitchell
William Havu Gallery, 1040 Cherokee Street
August 23 through October 5
Opening Reception: Friday, August 23, 5 to 8 p.m.
Artist Talk moderated by critic and scholar Michael Paglia: Saturday, August 24, noon
William Havu Gallery showcases New Mexican painter Zacharia Rieke, whose large, drippy, abstract acrylic canvases seem to emit incandescent light, and Virginia-based artist Dennis Lee Mitchell, who uses his wits and a blow torch to fashion graduated layers of smoke, some of it infused with color, into gorgeous miasmic drawings. A nice duo.
Brandi Kole and Rock CYFI Martinez, UnSettled
SeeSaw Gallery, 5 West Radcliff Avenue, Englewood
August 23 through October 20
Opening Reception: Friday, August 23, 6 to 9 p.m.
The fruits of SeeSaw Gallery’s first artist residencies, filled by mixed-media and fiber specialist Brandi Kole, and aerosol painter Rock CYFI Martinez, go on view this week with interesting outcomes. Kole blends free-motion embroidery executed under a sewing machine with acrylic paint to create portraits and and other subject matter, while Martinez brandishes the cans to produce murals and painted canvases alike.
Eric Davidson: The Triumph of Casper
Susan Dillon: Taking Up Space
Core Art Space, 6501 West Colfax Avenue
August 23 through September 8
Opening Reception: Friday, August 23, 5 to 10 p.m.
Have some fun with artists Eric Davidson and Susan Dillon at Core Art Space on Friday night. Davidson will unveil The Triumph of Casper, a lowbrow exhibition of skeletons dancing among candy treasures, inspired by the exaggerative Italian mannerists (think Sistine Chapel) but with a childlike sense of humor. Dillon shows off the fiber concoction Taking Up Space, a large, corner-enveloping assemblage of crafty pieces made of fabric, thread, yarn, bones and found objects meant to reference the role of women as emotional caretakers.
Susan Hazaleus with guest artists Judy Horowitz and Raven Rohrig, Epiphanies
Randy Cummings
Phil Rader, THINK!
Edge Gallery, 6501 West Colfax Avenue
August 23 through September 8
Opening Reception: Friday, August 23, 6 to 9 p.m.
A pile of member artists and guests are filling up Edge Gallery with three shows: Epiphanies, by Susan Hazaleus with guest artists Judy Horowitz and Raven Rohrig; an untitled body of work inspired by Gertrude’s Stein’s 1939 children’s book, The World Is Round, by Randy Cummings; and Phil Rader’s THINK!, an exhibition of works created in an attempt to leave behind what he sees as previous compositional ruts.
Rich Chamberlain, Reliquary
Tatyana Hope, Shadow Work
Next Gallery, 6501 West Colfax Avenue
August 23 through September 8
Opening Reception: Friday, August 23, 5 to 10 p.m.
At Next, member Rich Chamberlain shares Reliquary, a collection of collections — personal sacred relics — assembled from both found and made objects matched by the artist’s intuitional hunches. Fellow member Tatyana Hope’s Shadow Work employs another style of intuition to turn feelings into paintings.
31st Annual Summer Art Market
Art Students League of Denver, 200 Grant Street
Saturday, August 24, and Sunday, August 25, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
After thirty years, the Art Students League of Denver’s Summer Art Market is a Denver institution, full of shmoozing with and buying from local artists new and old, all offering great prices. This year’s two-day event, the 31st, boasts 175 vendors to browse (35 of them brand new to the market), and a tried-and-true format that includes live artist demos, kids’ art activities, and food and drink. Find maps, artist information and more here. Admission is $5 here, and free for kids twelve and under.
Joel Swanson, Orderings
Foothills Art Center at Astor House, 822 12th Street, Golden
Saturday, August 24, through November 3
Joel Swanson dissects how we interpret and perceive symbols, words and organizational visuals by instinct, messing with our minds and the order of things, from alphabets and numbers to all manner of ideogrammic sets, in a fanciful and intellectual game of wordplay. Swanson’s playful genre-crossing semiotic exercises continue in Orderings, his solo exhibition opening at the Foothill art Center’s new gallery inside Golden’s historic Astor House, but as technology branches out, so does he: Swanson works in digital tricks along with his old-school juxtapositions of language.
Art + Ag
Fleischer Family Farm, 2005 South Zephyr Court, Lakewood
Saturdays, August 24, September 21 and October 19, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
There’s nothing fancy about Art + Ag; basically the event intertwines a farmers’ market with a small-scale art festival, where a handful or so of local artists set up and sell their work alongside homegrown produce. Inspired by the Yard Art Contemporary events that Annie Decamp and Michael Dowling used to throw in the yards of various Denver homes, the show, formerly offered once a year for the last two years, will expand to selected Saturdays for the next three months, taking advantage of the harvest season. The first is on Saturday, August 24, with ten artists; it’s free and a great way to get your shopping for everything art and ag done at the same time.
Interested in having your event appear in this calendar? Send the details to [email protected].
